Darkness, as polar to brightness, is understood to be an absence of visible light. It is also the appearance of black in a color space.
Humans are unable to distinguish color when either light or darkness predominate (W. Wundt, Outlines of Psychology, 1907). In the absence of light, perception is achromatic and ultimately, black.
The emotional response to darkness has metaphorical connotations in many cultures.
Famous quotes containing the word darkness:
“Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness
and the darkness thicketed with shapes of terror
and the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuing
and the night cold and the night long and the river
to cross and the jack-muh-lanterns beckoning beckoning
and blackness ahead”
—Robert Earl Hayden (1913–1980)
“Your mind was wrought in cosmic solitude,
Through which careered an undulous pageantry
Of fiends and suns, darkness and boiling sea,
All held in ordered sway by beauty’s mood.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“Lest darkness fall and time fall
In a long night when learned arteries
Mounting the ice and sum of barbarous time
Shall yield, without essence, perfect accident.
We are the eyelids of defeated caves.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)