Thursday, October 18, 2012

What dictation does Byron use in the poem, "She Walks in Beauty"?

Lord Byron belongs to a group of poets called "Romantics." The Romantics wrote during the nineteenth century, focusing in their poetry on themes of nature and human emotion. (This was in reaction to the dominant focus of the Enlightenment, which was on logic and reason.) 


"She Walks in Beauty" is an example of a Romantic poem, including in its use of diction. In the poem, the speaker dwells on the beauty of an unnamed woman, and describes her almost entirely through relationships he draws between her appearance and the natural world. She is "like the night", in that everything that is most wonderful about "dark" and "bright" come together in her eyes. By this, he means that her eyes are "mellow" and "tender", like the night, instead of being "gaudy", like the day.


Similarly, the speaker draws relationships between the appearance of the woman and her virtues. Her "smiles", which are "soft" and "calm", are also "eloquent," for, just in their very form and "tint," they tell the speaker of "days in goodness spent": that is, of the woman's life of virtue. 

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