Simile

The speaker of “She Walks in Beauty” begins with a simile that helps frame the poem’s overall concern with beauty and harmony. Recall that a simile (SIH-muh-lee) is a figure of speech that explicitly compares two unlike things to each other using a word such as “like” or “as.” The speaker introduces the poem’s one and only simile in the opening lines: “She walks in beauty, like the night / Of cloudless climes and starry skies” (lines 1–2). Here, the speaker compares the beauty of an unnamed woman to a night sky that is cloudless and therefore full of stars. After introducing the simile in these first lines, the speaker goes on to develop it, exploring how beauty depends on harmony (lines 3–6):

     And all that’s best of dark and bright
     Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
     Thus mellowed to that tender light
     Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

Here, the speaker likens the harmony of “dark and bright” in the woman’s face to the similar harmony of shadow and light at play in a starry night sky. Just as the subtle shimmer of starlight “mellow[s]” the sheer blackness of night, so too does the gleam in the woman’s eyes slightly brighten her overall appearance. It is precisely this beautifully harmonious contrast that the speaker’s simile aims to describe.

Antithesis

Antithesis (an-TIH-thuh-siss) refers to an instance where a contrast is made using a parallel syntactic structure. By this definition, only one example of antithesis appears in the poem. At the beginning of the second stanza (lines 7–9), the speaker describes the perfect harmony of shadow and light that highlights the woman’s beauty. He says:

     One shade the more, one ray the less,
     Had half impaired the nameless grace
     Which waves in every raven tress.

The first line contains a technical example of antithesis, in which the speaker uses the same syntactical structure to express an opposition. To paraphrase, he’s saying that even a bit more shadow or a bit less light would disturb the woman’s beauty. The antithesis resides in the contrast between the more and the less. Although the poem has but one instance of syntactical antithesis, the entirety of “She Walks in Beauty” is organized around oppositions. Whereas the speaker develops the opposition between light and dark in the poem’s first half, in the second half he develops an opposition between exterior and interior. 

Sibilance

Byron lends a softness to his language through his frequent use of sibilance, which is a special case of consonance. Whereas consonance (KON-suh-nence) refers to the repetition of consonant sounds in adjacent or nearby words, sibilance (SIH-buh-lence) refers specifically to instances of sibilant consonants, also known as “sibilants.” This family of consonant sounds requires use of the tongue to force a stream of air toward the teeth, producing the kinds of sounds found at the beginning of words like “sap,” “zap,” “shape,” and “genre.” Sibilants have a much softer and more soothing sound quality than the sounds produced by the so-called plosive (PLOH-siv) consonants: B, D, G, K, P, and T. Byron uses sibilants with unusual frequency throughout “She Walks in Beauty,” giving the poetic language a softness that complements the speaker’s quiet meditations on beauty and virtue. The opening lines nicely demonstrate the quieting effect of Byron’s sibilance (lines 1–4):

     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.

Sibilants appear in every line and in various positions within individual words. In a particularly nice example, the second line features two word-pairs that exhibit opposing patterns of sibilance. Whereas the words “cloudless” and “climes” both end with sibilants, the words “starry” and “skies” both begin with them, creating a moment of sibilant alliteration.