18 pages • 36 minutes read

She Walks in Beauty

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1814

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context: Romanticism

Byron’s poem occurs within the context of Romanticism—a 19th-century English literary movement emphasizing the mysterious, ineffable aspect of human life and nature. Aside from Byron, canonized Romantic poets include John Keats and Byron's friend Percy Bysshe Shelley. The Romantics opposed The Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason, which dominated the late 1700s. When the 1800s came around, Romantics wanted to replace reason with wonder and show how intangible and undefinable people and nature are. As with “She Walks in Beauty,” Romantic lyrics veered toward abstract language and abstained from specifics. A person doesn’t need to know precise facts but nonconcrete concepts. As John Keats puts it in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819), “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (Lines 49-50).

The emphasis on unspecific language leaves much unsaid in Romantic poems like “She Walks in Beauty.” Byron’s speaker never defines beauty, innocence, or goodness. It remains an intangible, elusive idea. Although the woman moves with beauty, it seems like beauty acts on her and gives her a captivating exterior and a morally uncompromised interiority. Thus, the woman is passive.

Get access to this full Study Guide and much more!

8,800+ In-Depth Study Guides
4,700+ Quick-Read Plot Summaries
Downloadable PDFs

In the context of the Romantics, such passivity isn’t automatically sexist, though one can make the case for this. Romantic poets sought to portray humans, regardless of gender, not as masters. Humans instead were in control of their fate but subject to countless, often nameless influences. If the woman in Byron’s lyrics lacks a name, and if the speaker perpetuates her “nameless grace” (Line 8), it’s not necessarily because she’s a woman but because, in the Romantic spirit, she’s a human with a fate determined by bigger, partly unfathomable factors.

Authorial Context

The authorial context highlights why it’s important to not automatically link beauty to romantic love or physical desire. In his footnote to “She Walks in Beauty” in Byron’s Poetry (11), Frank D. McConnell says that Lady Wilmot Horton inspired the poem. Horton was Byron’s younger cousin, and Byron saw her at a party in a somber outfit, and the mixture of her beauty and funereal clothes propelled him to write a poem about her after the party was over.

The biographical details help explain why the tone is both light and dark. They can also restrict interpretations of the poem and make it about a man extolling the beauty of a family member—in this case, a girl. With this context, the poem is not sexual or about love but a testament to Horton’s striking appearance.

Get access to this full Study Guide and much more!

8,800+ In-Depth Study Guides
4,700+ Quick-Read Plot Summaries
Downloadable PDFs

Considering Byron’s notorious personality and life story, it’s not impossible to say that Byron wouldn’t have some kind of physical attraction to her or romantic feelings for his cousin. After all, Byron had an affair with his half-sister. Then again, nothing the speaker says suggests sexual desire. More so, the authorial context doesn’t have a monopoly on other interpretations. Scholars like McConnell trace the poem to a specific moment, but that doesn’t mean that readers have to limit their understanding of the poem to that particular set of biographical details.

Byron’s presentation of the young cousin links to his ideas about women in general. Edna O’Brien says, “Byron’s evaluations of women tended to be severe. They hated anything stripped of its tinsel and sentiment” (Byron in Love, 185). In the context of Byron’s thoughts, the presentation of the woman in “She Walks in Beauty” is problematic because it reduces her to a decorative symbol (“tinsel”) that Byron, via his speaker, can infuse with his fetishistic feelings (“sentiment”).