By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Poetry isn’t all sweetness and light, of course. In fact, much of it is concerned with the darker aspects of the natural world, whether it’s the mystery or solemnity of night-time darkness or some other, more abstract or metaphorical kind of darkness (‘O dark dark dark’, as T. S. Eliot put it in Four Quartets). Here, we offer ten of the best poems about darkness of various kinds.