Darkling
on Fantastic Voyage (Nigeria), 15/Jun/2011 14:16, 34 days ago
Probably my favourite moment in Milton comes at the opening to Book 3 of Paradise Lost, where the poet witters on about his blindess, setting himself into the pantheon of blind poets– and, more potently, to “the wakeful bird [who] sings darkling and, in shadiest covert hid, tunes her nocturnal note.”Interesting that he feminises the singer here, but more wonderful to my ears as a teenager and now is the word‘darkling’, which I just find utterly delightful.I think it must have charmed Keats, too, because he spins it round again and (typically for him) makes himself passive in the production of song: towards the end of hearing his nightingale he tells us“darkling I listen”.(It crops up elsewhere: Milton probably took it from Shakespeare where it has the unhappy connotations the blind man needed; Hardy probably from Milton though maybe via Keats; Arnold uses it gorgeously, probably from Lear; Byron uses it inelegantly.There must be others, but those are the nearest, in space and in time.)It has a sense to me of smallness, of quietness, of coiled potential.It feels aged and playful, creative and solitary.If we’re permitted to have favourite words, this is mine.And it’s this word that I’m trying to think myself into during the nights here.NEPA, that mischievous mistress, is currently providing power to all the houses in our vicinity really rather well most nights.Apart from ours.The inverse of the Biblical image of a light shining in darkness which inspired Milton, like a cursed tree in a fairy tale, randomly selected for blight while those around it are blemished, our compound sits darkling, shuddering with generators and frustration.Inside, in bed, I lie upon the mattress, sweating.And try to think of all of this as darkling-ness.