“Darkness” vs “Blackened”



The first similarity between the poem “Darkness” by Lord Byron and the song “Blackened” by Metallica would be that they both discuss the end of the world in a futuristic tense like it has not happened yet. However in "Darkness" Byron describes his apocalyptic poem as a dream or even a vision of the future but in the song blackened they do not specify why they are predicting these terrible things. Also in both titles, the root words "dark" and "black" have extremely similar negative and depressing connotations and have similar denotations as well. The biggest difference between these two pieces would be that Lord Byron goes into much more detail in his poem about the events taking place leading up to the apocalypse, for example he describes how there is great famine and war and eventually all the humans are killed off from this except the last two. However in “Blackened” the band Metallica simply states that humanity is gone and it is “the true death of life” but does not go into any detail as to how any of this occurred.

Another similarity I found these two texts that is significant would be that both authors use extremes of nature such as ice and fire when they referencing the end of world, for example lord Byron says "and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air" and in the song Blackened it states "callous frigid chill, nothing left to kill". Along with this both authors include the death of the earth with lines such as “and the clouds perished” and “blistered earth”, along with the extinction of humanity to completely describe the end of the world and our universe. Both pieces focus on the extinction of humanity as a large part of the ending of the world saying things such as "men died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh" in “Darkness” and "in the exit of humanity" in “Blackened”. However like I stated in the previous paragraph, Lord Byron does into a lot more detail of how humanity becomes extinct.