She Walks in Beauty: Themes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

Beauty as An Expression of Balance

In the first half of “She Walks in Beauty,” the speaker contemplates how beauty is not a matter of purity or simplicity, but rather arises from a balance between opposing elements. This thought about beauty as an expression of harmony emerges clearly in the opening stanza (lines 1–6), where the speaker compares a woman’s face to the unique beauty of a starlit night sky:

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 that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

The speaker implies that what makes the cloudless night so beautiful is not the twinkling of the stars on their own. Instead, the beauty resides in the way the “tender light” of the stars barely offsets—or “mellow[s]“—the darkness of the sky. Shadow and light therefore coexist in harmony, with neither blotting the other out. It is precisely the delicate nature of this harmony that yields beauty, and the speaker sees a similar balance at play in the woman’s face. Specifically, he describes the features of her face (i.e., her “aspect”) and her eyes as embodying a harmony that unites “all that’s best of dark and bright.” This harmony is also extremely fragile: “one shade the more” or “one ray the less” (line 7) and the balance would be lost. Beauty is thus a matter of delicate balance.

The Link Between Beauty and Virtue

Beauty had a philosophical significance for many artists and philosophers in the early nineteenth century. Byron’s contemporary, John Keats, immortalized this sense of significance in his 1819 poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which famously closes with the equation: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” In “She Walks in Beauty,” Byron makes a related but slightly different equivalence, this time between beauty and virtue. The speaker of the poem invokes this link between beauty and virtue in the second half of the poem. There, he entertains the thought that the woman’s external appearance has a positive correlation with her internal essence. This thought occupies him in the third stanza (lines 13–18) especially:

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!

In these lines, the speaker reads the surface of the woman’s face for signs of a hidden depth. Specifically, he notes how “the smiles that win” on her cheek, as well as “the tints that glow” on her brow, are both meaningful signs of goodness, peace, and innocence. Thus, he equates external expressions of beauty (i.e., winning smiles, glowing brow) with a series of characteristics that reflect the woman’s virtuous character.

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