‘The crowd was famish'd by degrees…’
(After Byron’s ‘Darkness’ 1816)
He wrote a world too cold for life
in that year without a summer,
rendered dark by a far volcanic burp,
spreading ash into the clouds,
although none then knew the reason.
The sun never showed itself,
modest as his widow in black,
but stripped of her cloak of beauty.
Weird weather lashed the lake
and stranger creatures emerged;
drinking blood, or created from electricity
and the raw discards of the dead,
a revenant of pure science,
enlivened by that other Shelley.
And now we sit in a smelted world,
and see the crowds famish’d by degrees;
the crops of dust, the skies pelting ice,
or obstinately dry. Look on your works,
the land must say, as some drown in
sudden lakes of rich excess.
The whole world rendered monstrous
by our restless experimentation.
Ah George, would that it were
one volcano, one more brief
year without a summer, as we ask
who made this colossal wreck?
and hold cracked mirrors to ourselves.
P.S. Cottier
Poet’s note: ‘colossal wreck’ is from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’. The title quotation is from Byron’s ‘Darkness’. The full poem can be read here.
I finished this one very early today, and thought it would make for a cheery start at this blog.
