. She Walks in Beauty An Appreciation “She Walks in Beauty” by Lord Byron is a beautiful romantic poem. It describes the beauty of a woman, whomthe poet must have known very intimately. He is all praise for her inner and outer beauty. The excellent words he chooses to describe the physical and moral features of his beautiful lady make the poem melodious and it invokes in the reader the image of some beautiful figure he cherishes secretly. This paper gives a brief personal appreciation of the poem.

The first line of the poem, “She walks in beauty, like the night” (Byron), like the title, catches the attention of the reader. An insatiable urge to know the full details of her beauty grips the reader. However, the comparison of her beauty to the night immediately casts doubts, because the conventional attitude in literature has been to compare beauty to something which is bright. This confusion is immediately lifted with words like “cloudless” and “stars”. The third and fourth lines of the poem, “And all thats best of dark and bright/ Meet in her aspect and her eyes” (Byron), give an excellent description of her superb beauty. Darkness helps the stars to project their glow to their best. Similarly, the dark dress the lady wears promotes the glow of her face. There is a heavenly grace, says the poet, in the glow of her face.

The poet now tries to convey the personality of the lady which her external beauty reflects. “One shade the more, one ray the less” (Byron) would have made her beauty slightly imperfect. The word “grace” now replaces the word “beauty”, because the poet moves from describing the outer features to express her inner qualities. The poet says that “the nameless grace/ Which waves in every raven tress” only shows “how dear their dwelling-place” is (Byron). Her thoughts are “pure”, and they are “serenely and “sweetly” expressed through her face. Thus, the poet has succeeded in turning the attention of the readers from their initial impression. They now realize that the lady not only walks with her physical beauty, but also carries with her a graceful soul.

In the last stanza, the poet devotes three lines to repeat the greatness of her physical beauty by using the word “glow”, in stead of ““beauty”, and then spends the last three lines to explain her moral nature. On “that cheek, and oer that brow/ So soft, so calm, yet eloquent” (Byron) sit the smiles and glow. They speak about her human nature, of her “days in goodness spent”. She has “A mind at peace with all below” (Byron). The apt choice of words makes the poem colorful and meaningful. For example, the word “meet’ in the fourth line of the poem gives the required stress to the central idea, emphasizing that all that is best, “dark and bright/ meet” in her. The punctuation is also important. The first line of the poem ends without a pause, and the beauty of the lady is carried over to the second line to establish its likeness to the “starry skies”. The rhyming, ab ab, in the first stanza is replaced with each line in the second ending with the “s” sound. The last stanza has rhyming in the first four lines as in the first stanza, and the last couplet uses repetition in order to achieve the emphasis of “A mind at peace with all below”. The poem now ends with more stress on her moral side.

The description of a beautiful woman with a graceful heart, who lives a life of serene qualities and always loves peace, is the essence of the poem. A look at Byron’s biography can throw light on the lady who inspired the poet to pen down one of the most beautiful romantic poems in English literature. The poem, like the title “She Walks in Beauty”, moves beautifully and gracefully throughout. All aspects of a lady come for scrutiny in the poem.

Reference

Byron, Lord. “She Walks in Beauty”. 4 March 2009.

http://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/Classic%20Poems/Byron/she_walks_in_beauty.