The loveliness of woman — what people do not celebrate it? “Arise, my fair one, and come away,” says the Bridegroom in that most glorious of love songs. “O my dove, in the clefts of the rock,” he says, with longing, “let me see thy countenance and hear thy voice, for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is lovely.” “My love is like a red red rose, that’s newly sprung in June,” says that good-hearted scapegrace Bobby Burns. And Lord Byron, inspired by the beauty of a young woman whom he was not courting, the wife of his cousin, says, immortally, “She walks in beauty, like the night.”
We haven’t featured any of the works of Lord Byron here, who was, without doubt, the English poet with the greatest reach throughout Europe during his lifetime. He earned this fame for works of romantic passion pitted against all conventionalities, social, literary, and religious, but I think his true genius lay in satire and in frank analysis of the limitations of human nature. In this way he was actually closer to the neo-classical Alexander Pope than to my favorite of the Romantics, the wise and sane and deeply human William Wordsworth. We can argue about his judgment, but his talent was immense, and in the end he died a hero’s death on Easter Sunday, 1824, fighting for Greek independence in their struggle against the Ottoman Empire, and succumbing to cholera. The Greeks revere him as a national hero, and there’s a big marble statue in Athens carved as a memorial to his courage and sacrifice. Greece is presented as a beautiful woman, bestowing a crown of laurel on Byron’s brow.
In this poem, Byron dwells upon the sweet loveliness of a young woman, Mrs. Anne Wilmot, when at a large gathering he saw her dressed in mourning. Anne was kind and gentle, and Byron was so struck by her, and also by her beauty in the midst of sorrow, that he wrote our Poem of the Week the next day and gave it to her. Now, the night he compares her to isn’t supposed to suggest anything sinister; there’s nothing of the femme fatale. Why, many feminine names refer to the quiet peacefulness of the night: Leila, for instance, from languages like Hebrew and Arabic. It’s not any old night that Byron has in mind, and certainly not a night of storms. It’s the night “of cloudless climes and starry skies,” such a night as you might see in the Mediterranean lands, a night sky powdered with stars, glittering over the sea. Nor is he thinking only of the picturesque. In the beauty of this woman — and remember, she was in mourning — the beauty of night and day meet and kiss. If there were one shade more, or one ray of light the less, the “nameless grace” we see in her would be impaired. Why is it a nameless grace? That’s easy to answer, and not easy to describe. The grace of the young Mrs. Wilmot, calmly cheerful in the midst of sorrow, a woman of raven tresses and light in her eyes and her cheeks, has no name. We can but try to capture it in words touched by the music of poetry.
The third stanza raises the poem to the level of the moral, without being moralistic in the slightest. Anne Wilmot is beautiful because she is good. How can that secret of beauty have evaded us in our time? And her goodness is a feminine sort, expressed by a “mind at peace with all below, / A heart whose love is innocent.” Where such a woman goes, people are more at ease, and a light shines on them, and they find themselves less hasty, more forbearing, less ready to cut and stab, more likely to speak the gentle word that turns anger away. Such beauty is a great gift indeed, and Byron’s poem expresses it with a simplicity worthy of the subject.
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 mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
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,
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