So we're featuring creepy, spooky poems these last few weeks before Halloween because I'm a dork like that. Last week was Elinor Wylie's "Full Moon" which appeared as text because I couldn't find a spoken word performance that I liked. This week's has been spoken and sung for a couple of hundred years so I'm sure I'll find something.
"Darkness" by Lord Byron is one of his most pessimistic pieces and for a guy who generally thought his fellow humans were up to no good that's saying something. It was written in the same summer as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, 1816 or "the year without a summer," and was also inspired by a dream. This one is really not for the faint of heart.
I can't find an attribution for the reader but I love his voice. You can find the full text for this piece here.
That is a really edgy poem for 1816. "Holy things / For an unholy usage". Wow.
ReplyDeleteHe was deinitely a poet ahead of his time and incredibly snarky. Have you ever read "The Vision of Judgement," his slap at George III and Robert Southey? The text and his introduction are here.
ReplyDeletehttp://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/vision.html