She Walks in Beauty by Lord Byron

Form and structure

• 3 Stanzas of 6 lines, 6 is number of love.

• ABABAB rhyme scheme, balance, perfection.

• Enjambment, stresses his passion for her, breathlessness.

• Written in Iambic tetrameter with use of anapaest to give poem musicality, almost like a love song to her.

Context

Lord Byron was a Romantic Poet, characterised by

1. a recognition of the influence of the senses and of personal emotion

2. that the heart (emotion) is considered more powerful than the head (logic/reason)

3. an understanding of the deep power of the natural world

Byron is believed to have been inspired to write the poem after seeing a woman with very good looks at a fashionable London party. His poem is, therefore, a very personal one which responded to a personal situation.

Motifs

Dark and Light
The first ten lines of the poem concern the opposition of dark and light, and how, through their harmonious balance, this opposition yields beauty. In the poem’s opening stanza, the speaker develops a comparison between a woman’s beauty and that of a cloudless night sky. Just as the twinkling of starlight subtly illuminates the otherwise dark sky, so too does the gleam in the woman’s eye slightly brighten her overall appearance. The speaker continues to develop this thought about the harmony of light and dark after the transition from the first stanza to the second (lines 7–10):

     One shade the more, one ray the less,
     Had half impaired the nameless grace
     Which waves in every raven tress,
     Or softly lightens o’er her face.

Here, the speaker asserts that even a little change in the dark/light balance would threaten the woman’s delicate beauty.

Exterior versus Interior

Whereas the first half of the poem concerns an opposition between dark and light, the second half concerns an opposition between the physical exterior and the mental interior. Put more specifically, the speaker speculates on the relationship between the woman’s physical beauty and her virtuous character. This speculation begins in the final two lines of the middle stanza (lines 11–12):

     Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
     How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

In these difficult lines, the speaker makes a speculative leap. He describes how the beauty of the place where the woman expresses her thoughts (i.e., her face, her brow) indicates the purity of the place where the thoughts themselves dwell (i.e., her mind). In other words, after observing the beauty of the woman’s physical exterior, the speaker makes an inference about the virtue of her psychological interior. The speaker goes on to develop this thought more fully in the poem’s third and final stanza. There, he explains how “the smiles that win” (line 15) on the woman’s cheeks and “the tints that glow” (line 15) on her brow can be interpreted as signs of virtue. He claims that these signs “tell of days in goodness spent” (line 16) and make manifest “a heart whose love is innocent” (line 18).

Tone

Quietly contemplative and reverent
Frequent use of sibilant consonant sounds like S and SH in 1st stanza

Rhyme

Regular ABABAB shows perfection and balance
Use of both masculine and feminine rhymes showing emphasis on her “in-nocence”, and “el-oquence”. Feminine rhymes give altered rhythm to highlight words.