Lord Byron (GEORGE GORDON), “She Walks in Beauty”

She walks in beauty, like the night
그녀가 아름다움 속을 거닐네. 마치
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
구름 없는 날씨와 별이 빛나는 밤과 같이
c와 s음의 반복
And all that’s best of dark and bright
그리고 빛과 어둠의 최상의 것이
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
그녀의 외모와 눈 속에서 만나
Thus mellowed to that tender light
하늘이 화려한 한낮에는 볼 수 없는
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
부드러운 빛으로 무르익었네.

1연 외모에 대한 아름다움

One shade the more, one ray the less,
그늘이 조금 더 하거나 빛이 조금만 덜 해도
Had half impaired the nameless grace
그 형언할 수 없는 우아함이 반쯤은 경감되었을 거예요
Which waves in every raven tress,
그 우아함은 이 검고 윤기나는 머릿결에서 물결치거나
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
그녀의 얼굴 위로 부드럽게 비춰지고 있어요
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
그녀의 고요하고 달콤한 생각들이 머무는 곳이
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
얼마나 순수하고 사랑스러운지를 알려주고 있지요

2연 : 아름다움이 깃들어진 정신

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
그녀의 뺨과 이마 위로
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
그렇게 부드럽고 고요하지만, 또렷하게 드러나는
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
미소는 빛나는 색조를 얻고
But(And) tell of days in goodness spent,
그녀가 보냈던 선한 날들,
A mind at peace with all below,
하늘아래 모든 것들과 평화를 이루고 있는 마음과
A heart whose love is innocent!
순수한 사랑이 깃든 가슴을 말해주고 있어요

Beauty and Harmony

● “She Walks in Beauty” is a poem that praises a woman’s beauty. More specifically, it presents that beauty as a kind of harmony that is as perfect as it is rare. Beauty is perfection achieved through harmony. And as the poem progresses, it makes clear that this harmony is delicate and fragile.

The poem begins by establishing a sense of the speaker’s wonder at the woman’s majestic beauty. The poem quickly reveals what it believes to be the source of such beauty: the woman’s physical appearance brings together “all that’s best of dark and bright.” This suggests that beauty is a harmony between distinct elements—darkness and light. Beauty takes the “best” of these elements and places them in a delicate balance.

● The poem then expands on this marriage of light and dark in stanza 2. Beauty is presented as almost beyond language, a “nameless grace.” The complex and intensely beautiful interplay between light (“ray[s]”) and dark (“shade”) is made possible only by the shape and contours of the woman’s physical appearance. This reinforces the idea that beauty is a kind of perfection achieved through harmony.

● Part of the power of beauty is in its rarity. As lines 5 and 6 make clear, the woman’s harmonious beauty is not an everyday occurrence—this interplay of light and dark is the exclusive preserve of “heaven,” not the “gaudy day[s]” of life on earth. Beauty, then, has an air of the divine or supernatural that contributes to this sense of rarity.

● Furthermore, beauty is so fragile. In the second stanza, the speaker outlines how even one shade—or one ray—out of place in the interplay of light and dark on the woman’s hair would upset her beauty; indeed, it would be “half impaired.”

● It’s also worth noting that the common literary associations of darkness tend to be mystery and fear. Contrastingly, light is often linked to purity, beauty, and love. The beauty in “She Walks in Beauty” depends on both light and dark, bringing them together in harmony. Accordingly, the woman’s beauty is all the more powerful and uncommon. “She Walks in Beauty” is a poem that cherishes physical beauty and perfection. In the figure of the woman, it sees an unparalleled example of perfect beauty and seeks to explain it, even though it may prove impossible to characterize its “nameless grace,” as a type of rare harmony that brings together light and dark.
천상의 것은 아닌데 균형이 맞지 않으면 아름다움이 손상 -> 최적의 조화, 쉽게 망가질 수 있음. 위태로운 아름다움

Inner Beauty vs. Outer Beauty

● “She walks in Beauty” also explores the relationship between inner beauty and outer beauty. It portrays these concepts as closely interconnected. The woman’s outer appearance is read as a sign of her inner serenity, peacefulness, and innocence.
자연 속에서의 조화, 여성과의 조화, 정신의 조화

● The poem develops a sense of physical beauty before introducing the idea that this type of beauty is linked to a person’s interior state. Lines 1-10 help the reader grasp just how rare and powerful this woman’s beauty is, which is further presented as a delicate—near impossible—balance between light and dark.

● The poem then shifts, however, and begins to discuss the relationship between this outer loveliness and the woman’s inner self. The woman’s face is portrayed as the site on which her thoughts are “expressed.” These thoughts, in turn, are characterized as “serenely sweet”; the poem maps the harmoniousness of the woman’s beauty onto her presumed inner state. The expression of her thoughts on her face serves to reinforce the purity and “dearness” (preciousness) of their “dwelling-place.” This could be interpreted as the thoughts reinforcing the woman’s outer beauty, or perhaps they speak of a kind of beauty that incorporates both physical appearance and personality/character.

● The third stanza picks up on the development of lines 11 and 12, focusing on the relationship between inner and outer beauty. The speaker lists the woman’s fine features—her “cheek,” “brow,” “smiles,” and “tints” (skin)—and suggests that they express an inner goodness. In other words, her good looks are the sign of good virtues: the speaker believes that woman spends her days in “goodness,” has a peaceful mind, and a loving, innocent heart.

● Outer beauty becomes a symbol of inner beauty. This inner beauty enhances the outer beauty because, if the outer beauty is linked to the woman’s facial expressions, these expressions are the result of inner emotions. Her outer beauty and inner “goodness” reinforce each other.

● Of course, it’s up to the reader to decide how much this idea convinces them. The poem spends most of its time focusing on physical beauty, and the reader learns little about the woman other than what the speaker tells them. Regardless, outer beauty is a reflection of inner beauty—and indeed, both are in harmony with one another.

Alliteration

● “She Walks in Beauty” makes frequent use of alliteration that is meant to reflect beauty on a linguistic level by creating beautiful sound to match her beauty.

● The first example of alliteration is in line 2: “cloudless climes and starry skies.” The alliteration forms two obvious pairs—the hard /c/ sound and the /s/ sound. As the poem intends to establish beauty as a kind of perfection achieved through harmony (in this case, between light and dark), the sounds—two /c/ sounds in a row followed by two /s/ sounds in a row—create a sense of balance and symmetry.

● The next key example is between lines 4 and 5, with “Meet” and “mellowed.” “Meet” is a stressed syllable, which opens the line with a trochee: “Meet in her aspect and her eyes”. This stress makes “Meet” sound particularly prominent, allowing for the alliteration between this and “mellowed” to ring out. “Mellowed” shows what happens when the “best of dark and bright / Meet” in her appearance. Cause is linked with effect through sound.

● Line 9 has alliteration through the phrase “Which waves.” These techniques function as ornamentation, making the stanza sound “prettier” in order to reflect the woman’s beauty.

Form

● It is comprised of three six-line stanzas (sestets), all of which are iambic tetrameter.
6/6/6

● Each sestet serves a slightly different purpose in developing the poem’s discussion of beauty. The first is simply to establish the beauty as the poem’s subject: the idea that beauty is a form of perfection achieved through harmony, particularly in this case through the “meeting” of darkness and light. The rarity of this harmony is also established through the mention of heaven—this is not an everyday, “gaudy” beauty.

● The second stanza portrays this beauty as delicate and fragile. Even a slight change to the light—one shade more or one ray less—would greatly diminish this beauty. Line 11 marks a shift in the poem in which the discussion moves beyond physical appearance and starts to consider inner beauty too.

● The third stanza embraces this idea, depicting the individual features of the woman’s face and building a composite picture of inner goodness, peace, and love. In other words, the woman’s physical attractiveness is read as signal of an equally beautiful interior state. The poem builds to its rhetorical height, denoted by the final and onl exclamation mark.
내적 순수

Meter

● “She Walks in Beauty” has a regular metrical scheme throughout: iambic tetrameter.
여성의 아름다움, 겉과 속의 아름다움, 조화를 이루기 위해 쓴 안정적인 느낌

● Regularity in terms of meter, stanza shape, and rhyme denotes a sense of order, harmony, and symmetry befitting the type of rare beauty the poem attempts to describe.

● It is worth remembering that iambs are often associated with walking. Their steady groups of two syllables mimic the alternating combination of left foot and right foot—indeed, extending the analogy further, people themselves have one stronger and one weaker foot (just as the iamb has a stronger and weaker syllable). The way this steady rhythm evokes the woman’s walk is evident from the beginning:

She walks in beau-ty, like the night

Of cloud-less climes and star-ry skies;

● There is only one deviation from this metrical regularity throughout the whole poem. This happens in line 4, when the line uses a trochee in the first foot. This places sudden and dramatic stress on the verb “Meet,” which helps creates the sense of “dark and bright” being forced together:

Meet in her as-pect and her eyes;

Rhyme Scheme

● The rhyme scheme is highly regular, with each six-line stanza following a pattern of:

ABABAB

Apart from the slight slant rhyme of “brow,” “glow,” and “below,” in the third stanza, these are all strong, perfect rhymes.

● The neatness of the rhyme scheme is intended to create a sense of harmony and symmetry. Given that one of the poem’s main ideas is that beauty is a kind of perfection achieved through harmony, it makes sense that the rhymes would ring out so clearly and cleanly.

● Furthermore, the fact that each stanza uses only two different rhyme sounds helps to mirror the poem’s central antithesis between light and dark. Each stanza is a kind of fusion between these two different rhyme sounds, just as the woman’s beauty brings together the “best of dark and bright.”

Literary Context

● Lord Byron—George Gordon Byron—is one of English literature’s most infamous figures. He was part of the British Romantic poets(the second generation along with Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats). This poem was published in his collection Hebrew Melodies (1815), which was originally intended to be set to music (which is reflected in the simplicity of the poem’s meter).
낭만주의 1세대 뒤 -> sonnet의 붐

● Though Byron is now considered one of the English language’s foremost poets, his early forays into the literary world were not very successful.

● Byron does have a number of aspects in common with the usual associations of Romanticism. These include political engagement, extensive travel, and a taste for freedom.

● After publishing his long poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron became a celebrity on a scale that was practically unknown at the time. That poem saw the genesis of the “Byronic hero,” a well-educated, cunning, and charming man who has a disdain for authority. Many readers saw Byron himself as the archetype for this hero.
하룻밤 자고 일어났더니 유명인이 됨

Historical Context

● Byron lived during an age of considerable upheaval. He was born on the cusp of the French Revolution, when French citizens overthrew the country’s absolute monarchy and showed the rest of Europe how formidable the people, when banded together, could be. The French Revolution, initially at least, was well-received in some quarters in Britain; William Wordsworth, another Romantic poet, praised it in his Prelude.
프랑스 혁명, 영국의 지지-

● Not long before the French Revolution, America had also rebelled against its colonial British rulers.

● The late 18th and early 19th century also marked the First Industrial Revolution in England, a time of widespread societal change spurred by new technologies and manufacturing processes.

● Byron also strongly admired Greek culture and Byron supported the Greeks in their attempts to win independence from the Ottoman Empire. He spent much of his personal fortune on improving the conditions of Greek ships and soldiers. The Greek side had a number of internal conflicts, with Byron sometimes acting as mediator. It was in Greece that he died in 1824 at the age of 36 from fever.

blazon -> 사랑하는 여인을 칭송하는 시의 형식