This poem is pumpkin spice latte level in terms of being a basic bitch favorite. Put it up there with the Sonnets from the Portuguese and some Pablo Neruda and you’ve got yourself a trifecta of about 99% of what’s on Pinterest poetry boards covered.
It is on the quals list, I expect, because it is famous and popular, and it is popular because it is beautiful, but popularity and beauty don’t really mean that it has a great deal of poetic merit in terms of conveying meaning, evoking feeling, or provoking thought, which is what the best poetry does/should do. That said, I always tell my students that poetry of any kind falls on a spectrum between literature and music, and this poem has inspired a lot of music and art, so while my taste and training run closer to the literature end, this poem falls away from that and lands more on the music/art end. It’s very short, so I’ll post it here:
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 mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired 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,
A heart whose love is innocent!
In terms of form and genre, it’s an 18-line poem in 3 stanzas of six lines each, it’s a lyric poem, and it’s in iambic tetrameter (so, four iambs per line, iambs being two-syllable “feet” of unstressed-stressed syllables – see the scan of the first line below).
x / x / x / x /
She walks in beauty, like the night
The story behind this poem is that Lord Byron met his cousin by marriage at a ball, and she was in mourning dress, wearing a black sparkly dress, and he wrote this the next day.
The Comprehensive Reader 