The Disruption Of Mt. Tambora

In the poem “Darkness” by Lord Byron, he begins his poem by saying “I had a dream, which was not all a dream” immediately leaving the reader to suspect that the rest of what they were about to read was his interpretation of a true story or event (line 1). The eruption of Mt. Tambora caused Byron to picture the breakdown of mankind and nature in the face of the end of the world and how they discarded their beliefs in the face of the mortality.

It was June of 1816, the stormy and cold weather sent Byron (who was in Sweden at the time with Mary and Percy Shelly) “inside a lakeside villa to warm” up (Broad). In this moody atmosphere the writers were all inspired, the freakish weather inspired Byron to write the poem “Darkness”. The real event that caused this gloomy weather that inspired Byron was the eruption from the previous year. It was the eruption of Mt. Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa on April 5,1815. It had “ejected a cloud of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere (and) plunged the world into a rapid temporary climate change event” (Munger). This volcano “erupted for four months, the largest eruption in recorded history”, but it did not just affect the people living near the volcano by taking their lives, but it affected the

The chaos caused by the food shortage, strange sunless days, and the reaction of the people enduring these changes were also influential to Byron as well as the prediction a scientist that lived in Italy gave saying that the sun would go out on July 18th, a little while before Byron wrote the poem. Because of his prediction that was seen as more of a “prophecy” there were riots, people committing suicide from the fear associated with the turning weather, and the prediction that seemed to be coming true, destroying people’s hope and causing a lot of religious