She Walks in Beauty

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.