Downer of a Poem in the World Winter Following a Volcano

Not to be outdone [by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein], Lord Byron generated his own tale of gloom: the poem 'Darkness', which begins with these glum lines:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went — and came, and brought not day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation.

Byron goes on to depict ships rotting at sea, famine preying upon entrails, and dogs turning upon and eating their masters. Suffice it to say, 'Darkness' is a downer. But it accurately reflects the gloom that enveloped much of the world in 1816 — perhaps because of political unrest following the Napoleonic wars, but also in part because of the obscure volcano [Tambora] that had erupted in Indonesia.

Alexandra Witze & Jeff Kanipe, Island on Fire: The Extraordinary Story of a Forgotten Volcano That Changed the World (New York: Island Books, 2015), ch. 3, p. 79, Kindle loc 906

Not until the early twentieth century did scientists finally link the year without a summer to Tambora.

Id., p. 80, loc 928