Light and darkness - a poem review

13-12-09
Light or Darkness

The world’s light shines, shine as it will,
The world will love its darkness still.
I doubt through when the world’s in hell,
It will not love its darkness half so well

By Richard Crashaw (1613-1649)

This poem reveals an interesting human phenomenon: while light representing brightness of the world and human, truth and everything that reflects good side of our world, darkness is symbols of viciousness, human’s dark side or confusion and mysteries.

The poem caught my imagination -

Darkness can mean many things:

On the positive side, curiosity is the most important motive for human to pursue anything that is mysterious and still unknown, like Black holes. So we love the darkness.

Human being faces challenge and need to solve problems. That is why we like to study darkness, through which, we will show our strength and power to conquer the world.

On the negative side, because of human’s curiosity, people tend to like reading dark sides of celebrities, to see their embarrassments rather than their glory and beauty.

Because human’s greediness, some people prefer to chase whatever they want at the risk of other’s interest and life.

The worst thing is global worming is going to suck the whole planet into BLACK HOLES and but until now the world seems not yet to realize the hell is approaching.

The poem indicates that while world’s light will continue to shine, it is ionic that human seems love darkness more than light – we are drawn to darkness, can’t help ourselves but be fascinated by it.

Crashaw sets a hypothesis at the end of the poem. What if one day the whole world is plunged into hell, would we still like darkness? I think he would laugh at generation one after another being addict to vicious darkness.