She Walks in Beauty

Literature between 1800-1900
17 May 2013

Lord Byron: She walks in Beauty

She walks in Beauty is a Lord Byron’s poem that I have chosen because of her lyrical form to describe an elegant a beauty woman that in my opinion is a woman that Lord Byron is in love with. It is a true declaration of love or a statement of admiration. It was written in 1814 and published in 1815 in “Hebrew Melodies”. Probably the poem was written upon Mrs. Wilmot, whom is Byron’s cousin, when he met her he wrote the poem based on her beauty that inspired the author. Lord Byron enjoyed a good education; he was celebrated in life for aristocratic excesses, including huge debts, numerous love affairs, rumors of a scandalous incestuous liaison with his half-sister, and self-imposed exile. Byron was an English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic Movement. Among Byron's best-known works are the lengthy narrative poems Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and She walks in beauty the poem the I’m going to analyze. It’s a poem made of three stanzas, it is an eighteen-line poem of three six-line stanzas. It follows a /ABABAB /, /CDCDCD/, / EFEFEF/ rhyme. The poem is written in iambic tetrameter, that is: Iambic refers to the pattern of stresses in the line, an iamb is an unstressed syllable, followed by a stressed syllable; and Tetrameter means that there are four unstressed syllables in the line (She walks in beau-ty, like the night
Of cloud-less climes and star-ry skies). The poem opens with a line that doesn't have punctuation (enjambment): it runs over to the next. Not only that but the next line has a different kind of meter. Poets use this mechanism together with enjambment to attract attention to certain words. For example in the fourth line, the word "meet" is emphasized/stressed. It is an important word in the poem because it is the premise of the entire poem. Opposites "meet" in this woman. Just as enjambment and a change in meter are joined as mechanisms in this poem, the unlikely pair of darkness and light meet in this woman. The main topic of this poem is the innocence and the idealized love. The speaker never says that he's in love with the woman he describes, but it is suspect that he has a strong sexual with her – after all, he goes on and on about how gorgeous she is. But in the final line of the poem seems to be an attempt to remove the reader's suspicions: he insists that her "love" at least, is "innocent" . He describes her personality almost as much as her exterior beauty, by the end.

Byron was a humanizer writer and in his earlier poems he imagines the female as a sublime figure, equal to perfection, beauty and goodness. Byron includes in this poem the contrast of the idea of bright and darkness, the female is viewed as the moon, complex and passive. In verse “One shade the more, one ray the less” is when we could find this idea, where he expresses the contrast of the light and the dark. It's important to note that the beautiful woman is a brunette (raven hair). This is curious because in Byron's days, conventional English beauty status were all pale and blonde. So for him to write a poem that not only praises the beauty of a woman with raven hair, but even goes so far as to say that real beauty requires a contrast of light and dark, or day and night, was pretty startling. The author talks in this poem too about the moment before know someone, that is, the moment before having sexual relations with her, he adds too that if he “knows” her in this aspect he would change his idea of her and she will lose her innocence and her purity. He knows her but he doesn’t want to know her at most because he would lose the interest on her. In verse “Meet in her aspect and her eyes/ Thus mellowed to the tender light/ Which heaven to gaudy day denies” the author talks about the eloquent physicist who spread the purity of the women. The conclusion of this analysis is that the vision of the lady that Byron gives us is a mixture of several elements, full of contradictions that takes us to a more realistic and complete vision of the conception of a lady that the author has. It is not a simple vision where everything is positive and lovely, it is more a contrast between two realities, the physical and the psychological worlds.