“THIS END OF THE WORLD WEATHER” - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 34

tion. If we look beyond the much-discussed scientific resonances of the monster's creation,
the lived experience of Mary Shelley's creature most closely embodies the degradation of
the homeless European poor during the Tambora period. The violent disgust of Frankenstein
and everyone else toward him likewise mirrors the utter want of sympathy shown by many
affluent Europeans toward the millions of Tambora's climate victims suffering hunger, dis-
ease, and the loss of their homes and livelihoods. As the indigent Creature himself puts it,
he suffered first “from the inclemency of the season” but “still more from the barbarity of
man.” 42
“THE BRIGHT SUN WAS EXTINGUISH'D”
In a letter written in the last days of July 1816, Lord Byron complained, as Mary's friends all
did, of “stupid mists—fogs—rains—and perpetual density.” 43 In that litany of poor weather,
however, one depressing day stood out, “a celebrated dark day, on which the fowls went to
roost at noon, and the candles lighted as at midnight.” 44 This must have been the same sun-
canceling cloud reported over Leige on July 5, 1816, as “an enormous mass in the form of a
mountain.” 45 Most likely it belonged to the Tamboran weather pattern that, reaching into the
stratosphere for a chunk of volcanic dust, dumped red snow on the southern Italian town of
Taranto in early May, terrifying the inhabitants. 46 Tambora's global dust veil, or a very dense
portion of it, had settled directly over western Europe.
From his balcony at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, Byron enjoyed a front-row view of
the day Tambora's ash cloud blocked the Alpine sun. As a memorial of that weird event, he
wrote a long apocalyptic poem he called “Darkness.” Though written from the shell of aris-
tocratic entitlement, Byron's rich, humanistic imagination allowed him to combine the literal
atmosphere of doom of that July day in 1816 with speculation on a social landscape trans-
formed by environmental collapse. “Darkness” accordingly stands as a classic meditation on
the human impacts of climate change. It begins portentously—
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came, and went—and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light (ll. 1-9)
Byron imagines the erosion of human sociability in a toxic, degraded landscape. Traumatized
victims of ecological catastrophe suffer a slew of social-emotional disorders, experienced in
overwhelming feelings of “dread” and “desolation,” injustice and resentment, and a violent
“selfishness.”
In Byron's “seven sorrows” poem from Tambora's aftermath, we see a thematic trajectory
that parallels Frankenstein : in the midst of meteorological tumult, human sympathy fails. The
“selfish prayer[s]” ofthepeopleleadtosocial breakdown, violence, andchaos. Inthevolcanic