Enduring Darkness: Romantic Visions of Apocalypse

By Tess Somervell

In the second of our Romantic Climates blog posts, Dr Catherine Redford (Oxford) discusses depictions of apocalyptic climate change in Romantic writing.


In the Christian tradition, it is said that the end of the world will be marked by a terrifying and all-encompassing darkness. Across the gospels, Christ advises his followers of the signs of the end days, warning that the sun will darken, the moon will fail to give light, and the stars will fall from heaven. These prophecies are echoed in Revelation, the final book of the Bible, in which the opening of the sixth seal on doomsday prompts a great earthquake and leads to the sun becoming ‘black as sackcloth’ (Revelation 6. 12).

The eighteenth century saw a particular fascination with this eschatological tradition. Numerous poems were written at this time that depict the fire and brimstone of Christian apocalypse, with bones rising from graves into a fiery world in which the wicked are judged. A number of these texts explicitly draw on the terror of darkness at the end of time: in his On the General Conflagration, and Everlasting Judgment (1710), John Pomfret describes how the sun is ‘to substantial Darkness turn’d’ during the ‘black Days of Universal …read more

Source:: http://romanticcatastrophe.leeds.ac.uk/enduring-darkness/