William Butler Yeats She Walks In Beauty

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She Walks In Beauty Laced with endless compliments and adoration, Lord Byron’s poem “She Walks in Beauty” tells the story of a man admiring a woman’s beauty. While the speaker does not claim that he is in love with the nameless woman, it is evident that he is attracted to her – based on the detail in which he describes her physical beauty. The “cloudless…starry skies” and “tender light” accompanied by the undulating iambic tetrameter sets the perfect, romantic mood for the speaker to express his infatuation (2, 5). The meter indicates the innocence of his attraction and a parallel to the subject of his attraction.
Familiar with the patterns of Byron’s time, this poem is a complete outlier. The central attraction in those times were
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The ABBA CDDC rhyme scheme along with the iambic pentameter gives the poem musical and jovial quality. In the three quatrains, the speaker of the poem tells his beloved to take the time to remember her youth and the people who loved her – especially him. His unconditional love of her “pilgrim soul” and “the sorrow of [her] changing face” never wavered as she grew older, but she never got a chance to experience what could have been true love (7-8). In the first stanza, Yeats utilized very peaceful terms like “full of sleep”, “nodding by the fire”, and “dream” to set a tone of calmness and tranquility (1-3). He also mentions eyes that had lost their light in reference to the fact that he believes that his love would lose her physical and spiritual beauty, making her a harsh shell of who she once was. Yates is imploring his love to open her heart to him while she is still young before she entraps herself in her own personal hell. If she continues to seek love in superficial places, she will end up old, miserable and alone – and Yates wants to bask in their love but only if she accepts him. If she waits too long, she will be stuck in an earthly hell, alone, while Yates will be in heaven, still in love with her, but unable to reach for that love one last time. People have lost out on opportunities at true love because they are blinded by what they want to hear and see. With future insight like Yates’, maybe one of those opportunities can be fulfilled, leaving less heartache and flippant

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