Nothing happens in "Darkness", and that is exactly the point. Sompsin gives us a single night in which someone sits on a cold floor, listens to rain, watches a clock, and waits for something to make sense. The central idea only arrives in the last two lines. The answers the speaker has been looking for turn out to be a frightened child, who is possibly a version of the speaker.
The opening image sets the tone: "Sitting in the cold ink like darkness". It is an odd, effective comparison. Ink is thick and it stains, so the darkness here is not an absence of light but a substance the speaker is sitting in. Ink is also what poems are written with, so the line may hint that the speaker's way of dealing with this feeling is to put it into words. That is an inference, but the poem's careful, repetitive shape supports it. The next line, "The sound of clouds crying can be heard outside", lets the weather do the weeping. Notice that the speaker does not cry. The tears are handed to the sky, and the passive "can be heard" keeps the speaker at a distance from their own feelings.
That distance runs through the whole poem. There is no "I" anywhere in it. The lines are built from present participles: "Staring", "Looking", "Hoping", "Residing", "Sitting". Because they have no subject and no finished action, time seems to stall. Even the verb "residing" matters. It is a formal word that suggests living somewhere, not just visiting, as if the "emptyness" (spelled this way in the text) has become an address. The small shifts are worth catching too. In the first stanza the speaker stares "into the void", but later it is "the closing void". The preposition changes from into to at, and the void is no longer something to peer into but something drawing in around the speaker. The floor is "cold" just as the ink was, so the chill follows the speaker from the air down to the ground.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The short, unpunctuated lines have the halting pace of someone who cannot get a whole thought out. The stanza about the clock is the most carefully handled: "Clock ticking past 11 / Silence fills the space / No words are said". The ticking is the only sound, yet the next line announces silence, so the silence seems to be made of the waiting itself. "No words are said" avoids saying who isn't speaking, which leaves the speaker's isolation vague. The clock gives the poem its single concrete detail, and the lateness of the hour makes the scene feel secret, as if the speaker is awake while everyone else is not.
Repetition gives the poem its structure. "Staring into the void" and "Looking for answers" appear early, then return in the final stanza prefaced by "Once again". That phrase tells us this is not the first night, and that the cycle of staring and searching has been going on for some time. The two "Hoping for" lines climb from "solace" to "freedom", from wanting comfort to wanting escape. The poem never says what the speaker wants freedom from, and that silence feels honest, since people often can't name what is weighing on them.
The ending turns everything. After a poem with no pronouns, the speaker suddenly sees "a boy". The shift to third person suggests the speaker is looking at themselves from outside, or at least that the poem is inviting us to think so. "Looking for answers" is followed by "Finding only a boy", and the word "only" is the saddest in the poem. It could mean the search has failed, but it could also mean the boy is the answer, the real and vulnerable thing underneath all the abstract words like "void" and "emptyness". Then comes the final line, "Scared and alone." It is the only line in the poem that ends with a full stop, so everything else drifts and this one closes.
The poem's significance lies in its restraint. Its vocabulary is plain and sometimes familiar, but it does not decorate the loneliness or resolve it. It trusts a simple structure, a late hour, and one carefully placed word, "boy", to make a reader feel the weight of a long night. For students, it shows how much a poem can do with very little, and how a change in perspective in the last line can rewrite everything before it.