She Walks in Beauty

Study Guide

Literary Devices

Rhyme

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Literary Devices Rhyme

“She Walks in Beauty” consists of three six-line stanzas, each of which features the same ABABAB rhyme scheme. The perfect regularity of the poem’s rhyme scheme can be attributed, in large part, to the fact that it was meant to be set to music. Although not universally the case, song lyrics typically use regular rhyme to help guide the listener’s ear, providing landmarks that group lyrics into audible units. That’s precisely what Byron does in this poem. As if to preserve the musicality of the language, most rhymes in the poem are exact and masculine in form. So-called masculine rhyme refers to perfect rhymes that fall on the final stressed syllable of a line. All the end rhymes in the first two stanzas are masculine in form. However, Byron introduces other types of rhyme in the final stanza (lines 13–18):

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

First, note how the vowel sounds in the A rhymes in this sestet don’t match perfectly. This slight variation makes for what’s known as slant rhymes, which merely approximate the same sound. Second, note how two of the (unitalicized) B rhymes don’t end with a stressed syllable. Because the words “e-lo-quent” and “in-no-cent” both begin with a stressed syllable, they form a so-called feminine rhyme.