"Darkness" has an overarching sense of hopelessness. It was impossible for me to read it for symbolic meaning on my first couple of readings; I was too involved in the images themselves. The cannibalism left a knot in my stomach, and I think it's genius how Byron moves from grandiose language on the global scale to such small details as a specific dog guarding the corpse of a specific master. It is vague and very specific at the same time.
Byron's "Darkness" seems too dreamlike to be real yet too real to be just a dream. The reader can't help but feel that Byron has received a glimpse into the future. The last few words "She was the Universe", also remind me of Kali, a Hindu goddess sometimes associated with darkness and destruction. Reading those few lines I could have sworn I was reading an Eastern text.
It's interesting that you bring up the Hindu goddess, Kali. The poem was mostly sparked by an eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. The debris hurled into the atmosphere as a result of the conflagration caused the summer of 1816 (the same time Byron wrote "Darkness") to be the coldest on record and the sun to "disappear" for a few days.
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