The closest we get to sensing her individual personality is when her thoughts are mentioned – and even then, the thoughts are only (Byron assumes) of how pure and beautiful she is.īut what exactly does Byron mean by ‘beauty’ in this poem? Is he just praising the woman’s outward aesthetic appearance? Perhaps. ![]() Nor does he let the woman speak: she is a mute object of admiration. She might pick her toenails or only change her underwear once a month for all we know, because Byron doesn’t fill us in on the little details. We get none of the realistic disavowals of traditional beauty that Shakespeare offers in his famous Sonnet 130, but instead a full-on endorsement of her aesthetic qualities. The woman is everything we might expect a conventional love poet to praise: beautiful, pure, serene. ‘She Walks in Beauty’ is a deft but ultimately rather conventional poem in praise of a woman’s beauty. She has dark hair, but a (presumably) lighter skin tone and soft eyes. Indeed, the key aspect of ‘She Walks in Beauty’ is the contrast between light and dark throughout, and the way in which the woman’s beauty finds a way of reconciling these two apparent opposites. The mood is of praise for the woman’s natural beauty, and the ways in which her prettiness is in harmony with the natural world of the starry sky and the night time. This is a quintessential romantic poem (a male poet praising a woman’s beauty) but also a Romantic poem, belonging to the movement in literature and art known as Romanticism. ![]() It’s as if these qualities not only go hand in hand with beauty, but help to inspire it (one thinks of Roald Dahl’s famous passage about goodness and beauty here). Goodness and beauty often dwell together according to the poets, and this woman is no different: she is calm and innocent. The woman’s cheek and brow are now singled out for praise: soft and calm and yet also ‘eloquent’, as if the woman’s beauty is so strong that it can almost be said to ‘speak’. The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
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