An Interpretation of She Walks in Beauty, a Poem by George Gordon Byron

"She Walks in Beauty" is a pure and delightful poem created by George Gordon, Lord Byron in 1814. This poem idealizes that beauty can be physical and internal without contributing towards a romantic perspective. Lord Byron narrates this poem and describes his cousin's wife, Mrs. Wilmot, as one would describe a beautiful Eve of nature. Imagery, figurative language, and poetic structure all flourish through this poem and create an aesthetic point of view.

Imagery is proficient in the first stanza and expressed with the contrast of "best of dark and bright meet in aspect of her eyes.

" Her dark brown eyes contrasted and sparkled when light reflected off irises of melted chocolate. These qualities in her eyes create the hypnotizing pattern where light and darkness reverberates in each stanza. Vibrant, curling, and lavish are feelings Lord Byron endowed upon the reader when he describes "waves in every raven tress...softly lightens o'er her face." Whereas her beautiful black hair is a compelling feature to her physical traits, it merely pales in comparison to her alluring and flawless visage.

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Light and darkness is again emphasized with "One ray the more, one shade the less."

The first section of stanza three intimately appeals to the sense of endearment with, "On that cheek and o'er that brow, so soft so calm yet eloquent." The contrast between "soft and calm" and "eloquent" is most likely used to show that while her face was tender and mellowed, it was no such beauty to be overlooked but "eloquent" and something to be viewed with awe and wonder.

Wilmot's beauty was descriptive yet brief pertaining to her upper body characteristics. Inner beauty, which is as crucial to character development and as appealing as natural beauty, has yet to be revealed.

Inner beauty consists of the combination of a bit of outward beauty and the figurative language implying her character. Her attitude is in a permanent state of happiness as, "The smiles that win, the tints that glow," reflect that anybody who meets her is attracted to her aura of goodness and beauty by her face emanating an alluring luminescence. "Where thoughts serenely sweet express, how pure, how dear their dwelling place” reveals alliteration and onomatopoeia with the "S" sound that slips off the tongue like how the snakes of sin slip by her harmlessly.

The simile of "like the night" and the qualifier "of cloudless climes and starry skies" proclaim the night it to not only be mysteriously opaque, but filled with stars unobstructed from clouds of impurities. "A heart whose love is innocent," is a metaphor meaning that the woman possesses unblemished love. Figurative language is like the bricks to the poem whereas the poetic structure is the mortar that keeps the poem in order.

The poetic structure in "She Walks in Beauty" plays a key role as Lord Byron expounds his theme of this poem by his Romantic style configuration and emphasis on repetition of lines. The Romantic style of this poem was in a simple and natural iambic pentameter like "cloudless climes and starry skies." Each line of the poem is connected with the line below it so that every two lines is one sentence. At the beginning of the first stanza and at the end of each stanza afterwards, the lines "She walks in beauty—like the night, of cloudless climes and starry skies,' clinch the idea and comparison of how Wilmot's beauty was of a natural perspective rather that a lustful one.

These lines also imply that during the daytime she is as beautiful as the skies at night with her physical and inner beauty. Looking at the poem in its original format, the spacing between the lines and how precise the wording is creates the imagery of being airy and simple with the delicate idea of beauty. The two lines in the beginning and end of the first stanza and from then on at the end of the third and fourth stanza emphasize how important the perfect mixtures of her inner and outer beauty compliment each other.

While my interpretation of this poem is a collaboration of research and opinions, Critics' show different ideas about this poem. Garry Gamber revealed the figurative word "oxymoron" in the poem by saying,"Moreover the author uses an oxymoron in the second line of the third stanza, where there is an opposite characteristic to the previous ones: 'So soft, so calm, yet eloquent'." Also Garry Gamber identified that the continuation of one line to another is identified as an "enjambed" line and that is common for Romanticists to do as well.

In an excerpt from Exploring Poetry, the poem was analyzed from a structural point of view where metrical substitution tells us that her face and eyes combine all that is best of dark and bright. Exploring Poetry also said, "The focus of the vision is upon the details of the lady's face and eyes which reflect the mellowed and tender light." Exploring Poetry also detailed the origination of the poem and how it was originally printed in the Hebrew Melodies book published in 1815.

Socorro Lawas believes that this "tender light" emanates not from the physical light but eyes and here essence. Socorro also interprets Byron's hyperbolic description of the lady as a form of conceit, a far-fetched comparison. According to Lawas, Byron sums up her beauty as a completion of a perfect paradigm "of all that's best of dark and bright” that “met in her aspect and her eyes". Byron uses three symbols - woman, star, and night – to provide the erotic paradigm. Lawas also accuses the Lord Byron as disguising the poem as playful, but the underlying tone exposed Byron as being a hedonist and an idealist. Lawas uses paradigm to stress the importance of the pattern in the poem and how it drives the thesis into the combination of hidden and outward beauty.

To conclude, Exploring Poetry only heightened my idea of the poetic structure in She Walks in Beauty and pointed out what the focus was on for the outer beauty. Other facts from Exploring Poetry about the poem and author gave me a better perspective on Lord Byron's life and his writing style. With Socorro Lawas, she had much of my ideas involving how Mrs. Wilmot's "tints that glow," is the highlight of her face and the hint of her inner beauty. I disagree however, concerning how that this poem had the underlying tone and proof that the author was a hedonist and sexually directed the poem to Mrs. Wilmot.

Garry Gamber identified more accurate definitions of what Lord Byron was doing with the poem and he provided a great critical analysis of each line which was parallel to my own thinking. Based on the evidence from the critics and my own analysis, I conclude that with the imagery, figurative language, and poetic structure; Lord Byron exaggerated a simple woman into an extraordinary being who defied any flaws of sin and proved that unified inner and outer beauty exists without the biased view of a romantic perspective.