Alliteration In Lord Byron's She Walks In Beauty

Lord Byron’s poem “She Walks in Beauty” was written in praise of a beautiful woman. Many people when they see the title of the poem think it’s a love poem, however, the poem itself never mentions the word “love”. Instead, this poem was written for his female cousin whom he saw in mourning, wearing a black dress. This poem is unique in a ways that the poet put implicit meaning into every word. To write such a vivid poem for Lord Byron’s loved ones, Lord Byron used imagery, alliteration, assonance, and personification. To show the Byron’s admiration of his cousin’s beauty, imagery is a significant poetic device widely used in the poem. Byron begins the poem by illustrating a starry night and says that the woman is “like the night” (Line 1). The image Byron is trying to show us is his ideal evening: a dark sky filled with bright stars. In this case, the night is compared to the woman because Byron says that the woman’s beauty and tenderness are like the “tender light” of the stars (Line 5). Comparing the woman’s tender light also reveals the fact that the woman is quiet and gentle. The reason why the woman is compared to the night is that the brightness of the stars at night relieves the darkness of the night. Furthermore, dark night is closely related to death. Since Byron met the woman in mourning, Byron decided to compare the darkness to the woman, but he added the brightness to the poem because a simple word darkness just couldn’t fully describe the beauty of the woman.