She walks in beauty

by George Gordon Byron

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to the tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
A dictionary entry
beauty /bjuti/
1.the quality of being beautiful or very good to look at:
He was impressed by her beauty and charm.
I admired the beauty of the landscape.
2 a beautiful woman:
She was a great beauty in her time
3 a quality that something has that gives you pleasure:
the beauty of her poetry
4 something that you think is very good or a good example of its type:
I love old cars, and that ones a beauty.
IDIOMS:
-the beauty of something: the advantage or good quality that something has
The beauty of working at home is that you dont have to travel to work.
-the beauties of something: the features of something that are beautiful to look at
the beauties of nature
night /nat/
1- the part of each 24-hour period when it is dark
It was a lovely starlit night.
a.
the time when most people are sleeping
I woke up in the middle of the night.

spend the night: He spent the night in prison.

b.
nights if someone works nights, or is on nights, they go to work at night
Phil is working nights this week.
Collocations: night
cold, cool, dark, frosty, moonlit, starlit, starry, stormy
2- the time between the end of the afternoon and the time when people go to bed
Most nights Jan helps the kids with their homework.
a.
an evening when a particular event takes place: The next quiz night is on Thursday 19
May.
b.
a particular evening on which a play or concert is performed: the opening night of Julius
Caesar, the last night of the prom
3-used for saying goodbye or good night when you leave someone at night: Night, then!
See you tomorrow!
4- a period of great sadness, failure etc: the dark night of the soul
IDIOMS:
-make a night of it: to stay out late into the night having fun
I know a jazz club we can go to, if you want to make a night of it.
-night after night: every night for a long period of time
She was exhausted from being woken night after night by the baby.
eye /a/
1 one of the two body parts in your face that you use for seeing:
Close your eyes and go to sleep.
a.
your ability to see things
These bacteria are invisible to our eyes.
2 used for talking about the expression on someones face
He spoke to her with slight amusement in his eyes.
3 used for saying that someone is looking at a person or thing
eye on: I fixed my eye on the clock.

4 the calm area at the centre of a storm

5 the hole at the top of a needle
6 one of the spots on a potato that new growth comes from
7 the part into which a hook fits to fasten clothing
IDIOMS:
all eyes are on-used for saying that everyone is paying attention to a particular person,
event, or situation
All eyes were on Carla as she completed her final dive.
Type of text: romantic poem, expressing how beautiful this woman is that
Lord Byron is looking at.
Coherence: message: contrast between two realities, mind and
heart, experience and innocence, the physical and the psychological
worlds.

Style: formal, poetic

Key words: "beauty,", "starry", "eyes"
Figurative speech:
- the opening simile -"She walks in beauty" , like the night, compares the lady's beauty
to the light of a starry,cloudlessnight
-"She walks in beauty, like the night....best of dark and bright", the
lady's beauty is compared to the perfect balance of opposites
-personification: "The night walks in beauty"
-antithesis: "the best of dark and bright meet in her..."- it is emphasized that the unique
feature of this woman is her ability to contain opposites within her;
.
-use of alliteration, the repeating of the first letter of a word to get an easy-reading
effect. -Line 2:....cloudless climes; starry skies.
-Line 6:....day denies
.-metonymy: in which heaven is substituted for God or for the upper atmosphere
-enjambment: links the end of line 1 with line 2.

2. Structure (grammar)
-the poem is well organised, because it has a clear structure and it follows a clear pattern,
and these things help on the correct understanding of it.
-the fact that we cannot find a big amount of rhetorical devices is explained because the
poem is simple in structure and language, it has a logical order and it is not necessary to
confuse it.
WORD FORMATION:
1. Derivation (affixation)
starry: root- star: grammatical category-noun
suffix-ry:grammatical function: it changes the category: adjective
cloudless: root-cloud: grammatical category- noun
suffix-less:grammatical function: it changes the category: adjective

3. Meaning
- the vocabulary that Byron uses is clear, simple and accessible to all kind of readers.
-the Semantic field is based on two branches: on the one hand the introduction of terms
referring to the phisical description of the lady: face, cheek, brow, aspect, smiles, eyes.
On the other hand they are in contrast with terms linked to a more internal description:
thought, grace, tender, peace, love, calm stressing again this bidimensional property of
the lady.
- the poem is easy to understand because its language is simple and it expresses what the
author want to express without using complicate sentences or expressions, to be
understand without difficulty; as the beauty is simple and it is understand without
difficulty, because we can see it at first glance.
-the poem is written in a simple way to be understood at first glance, too. The main words
of the poem, which have the main meaning, can be arranged into two groups. On one
hand, the words that refer to the woman: aspect, eyes, raven tress, face, thoughts, cheek,
brow, smile, tint, mind, heart and innocent. On the other hand, the words that refer to the
contrast dark/light: night, cloudless, clime, starry skies, dark, bright, tender light, shade,
ray, lightens and glow. In that sense, we can see that the vocabulary practically refers to
the same things, either to beauty or to the contrast between dark and light. So this contrast

is another way to talk about beauty because Byron compares it with the dark and light.
4. Textness
Other aspects I want to talk about are the rhetorical devices and figures of speech. I
think they are interesting in the sense we need to understand them to understand the
correct meaning of the poem. She walks in Beauty is a simple and easy poem, where
we cannot find a large quantity of rhetorical devices. I am going to emphasize the use of a
simile in the first two lines, where Byron compares the beauty with a cloudless and starry
night: She walks in beauty, like the night/ Of cloudless climes and starry skies (lines 12).
-