Darkness
Darkness - meaning Summary
Smothering Final Moments
The poem presents darkness as a physical, oppressive force that extinguishes light and life. It links diverse deaths—royal, accidental, medical—to show mortality’s universality and suddenness. Specific images (smoke, a shaft, a falling aeroplane, a surgeon’s needle) evoke both violent catastrophe and quiet, anticipated endings. The tone is compressed and bleak, emphasizing suffocation, finality, and the fragility of human ambitions against inexorable oblivion.
Read Complete AnalysesBlack cushion, smotherer of murdered princes, its weight deposing the last breath of light, cornering those who linger in the cul-de-sac of night, whether for hours or a lifetime, grasping what also is found by sailors, miners, passengers of death when the aeroplane falls down, or those linking eyes with the surgeon anticipating, as the needle slides in, the last heaving of sound heartbeat climbing its eventual slope, masks unpicked, a corkscrew of smoke in the sky, the shaft thundering, steel plates ripping like foil, the home gate opened, one feather adrift in the chamber of ambition.
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