darksome

comparative more darksome · superlative most darksome

1. literarypoeticCharacterized by darkness; gloomy, obscure.

   That sometimes from the savage den, / And sometimes from the darksome shade, / And sometimes staring up at once / In green and sunny glade.

   1799, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Love

   3 more examples

   His fiery eies are fixt vpon the earth. / As if he now deuiſ’d some Stratageme: / Or meant to pierce Auernus darkſome vauts. / To pull the triple headed dog from hell.

   c. 1587–1588 (date written), [Christopher Marlowe], Tamburlaine the Great. […] The First Part […], 2nd edition, part 1, London: […] [R. Robinson for] Richard Iones, […], published 1592, →OCLC; reprinted as Tamburlaine the Great (A Scolar Press Facsimile), Menston, Yorkshire; London: Scolar Press, 1973, →ISBN, Act I, scene ii

   I did not like re-entering Thornfield. To pass its threshold was to return to stagnation: to cross the silent hall, to ascend the darksome staircase, to seek my own lonely little room, and then to meet tranquil Mrs. Fairfax, and spend the long winter evening with her and her only, was to quell wholly the faint excitement wakened by my walk,—to slip again over my faculties the viewless fetters of an uniform and too still existence; of an existence whose very privileges of security and ease I was becoming incapable of appreciating.

   1847 October 16, Currer Bell [pseudonym; Charlotte Brontë], chapter XII, in Jane Eyre. […], volume I, London: Smith, Elder, and Co., […], →OCLC, pages 221–222

   They […] ate the messes compounded for them in a darksome cupboard, known as the kitchen, by old Nanon the cook, purblind, stone-deaf, and all but imbecile, and popularly supposed to be the venerable mother of Madame Magnotte.

   1868, [Mary Elizabeth Braddon], “Lenoble of Beaubocage”, in Charlotte’s Inheritance […], volume I, London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler […], →OCLC, book I (De Profundis), page 2

   Synonyms: cheerless, shaded