Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective perpetually dark or gloomy
  • adjective figuratively mentally dark; ignorant

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Cimmerian.

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Examples

  • Her "cimmerian light" work had her walking through a landscape of shade and light contained in bowls, in shimmering cloth and on a glistening wire sculpture that rose 20 feet high.

    U-Md. faculty attempt to bring high-concept dance down to earth 2011

  • This might get some raised eyebrows (not the "People's Eyebrow," Darius), but since we're on the subject of wrestlers and Conan, I've always wanted to see Triple H in the role of the cimmerian.

    We Have a New Conan! Reis O'Brien 2010

  • For all this they had emerged from that cimmerian darkness in which they had lived so long, and the dawn of better things, of more stable government, of some elementary recognition of the rights of those governed, was beginning to show above the murky horizon.

    Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean E. Hamilton Currey

  • "Very good, sir," answered the old chief as he lifted his podgy legs over the coaming of the hatchway, prior to burying himself in the cimmerian darkness of the opening, wherein Mr Fosset and his men had already vanished.

    The Ghost Ship A Mystery of the Sea Henry [Illustrator] Austin

  • The Frenchwoman, by virtue of centuries of activity, in the world and in the field, has become an expert in the art of knowing her man; she has not worked by his side, under the burn of the noon sun, or in the cimmerian darkness of the shop-rear, counting the pennies, for nothing.

    In and out of Three Normady Inns Anna Bowman Dodd

  • With cimmerian blackness on all sides of them, and a chaotic tunnel ahead, they were happy.

    The Country Beyond James Oliver Curwood 1903

  • There was a flight of steps ending in cimmerian darkness.

    The Sisters-In-Law Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton 1902

  • 'It appeared to us,' he says, 'so grey, so cimmerian and so dead that we shuddered at it as at a ghost.

    An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant Edward Caldwell Moore 1900

  • Is thy beacon in very truth a star; shining eternal in our cimmerian sky, a guide infallible to life's worn voyager; or a wandering fire such as the foolish follow, -- a lying flame that leads the trusting traveler to his loss?

    The Complete Works of Brann the Iconoclast, Volume 1. 1898

  • "Who's there below?" repeated the captain, endeavouring to pierce the cimmerian darkness by waving the lighted lantern about and holding it as far down the hatchway as his arm could reach.

    The Wreck of the Nancy Bell Cast Away on Kerguelen Land 1887

Comments

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  • Blurb on the back of A Wave by John Ashbery says:

    "The charm of Ashbery's urbane style—so various, so beautiful, so new—persists throughout A Wave, and will induce the rereadings the poem demands. It is a style that resists, in its glowing reflectiveness, the approaching darkness of the cimmerian moment."

    —Helen Vendler, The New York Review of Books

    April 6, 2012

  • John Ashbery uses the word "cimmerian" in his 22 page-long Poem called A WAVE, which is printed in his book, also titled A WAVE, published by Viking Press (New York) in 1984. It can be found on page 81. I will quote only a part of the 10-line-long sentence in which it appears:

    "...So always there is a small remnant

    Whose lives are congruent with their souls

    And who ever afterward know no mystery in it,

    the CIMMERIAN moment in which all lives, all destinies

    And incompleted destinies were swamped

    As though by a giant wave that picks itself up

    Out of a calm sea and retreats again into nowhere

    Once its damage is done."

    April 8, 2012

  • A "mythical" people also named Cimmerians are described in Book 11, 14 of Homer's Odyssey as living beyond the Oceanus, in a land of fog and darkness, at the edge of the world and the entrance of Hades. Most likely they were unrelated to the Cimmerians of the Black Sea.

    Wikipedia

    March 6, 2015