Elementary Writing

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!

The Famous Love Poems: Story Behind the Lyrics:

Written just several months before he met and married his first wife, Anna Milbanke, and published in Hebrew Melodies in 1815, the poem of praise “She Walks in Beauty” was inspired by the poet’s first sight of his young cousin by marriage, Anne Wilmot, who was wearing a black spangled mourning dress. Lord Byron was struck by his cousin’s dark hair and fair face, the mingling of various lights and shades.

According to his friend, James W. Webster, “When we returned to his rooms in Albany (after the party), he said little, but desired Fletcher to give him a tumbler of brandy, which he drank at once to Mrs. Wilmot’s health, then retired to rest, and was, I heard afterwards, in a sad state all night. The next day he wrote those charming lines upon her—She walks in Beauty like the Night…”

Of course it’s obvious that this poem is somewhat of a love poem, expressing how beautiful this woman is that Lord Byron is looking at. Whether it is a true declaration of love or a statement of admiration (of his cousin’s beauty) is left to the reader.

The real power of these, among the most memorable and most quoted lines in romantic poetry, lies in its powerful description not only of a woman’s physical beauty, but also of her interior strengths. The poet is obviously after something much larger than mere physical description.

Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And oft’ is his gold complexion dimm’d;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s
changing course untrimm’d:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;

Nor shall Death brag thou
wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The Famous Love Poems: Story Behind the Lyrics:

This is the eighteenth of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets. Its also probably the most famous love poem in the world, and certainly one of the best-known sonnets contained in the English literary canon. One of the things that makes it so popular are the conspiracy theories if someone can call them that. Allot of people believe that this poem is written to a man – not a woman!?

There are many theories about the identity of the 1609 Quarto’s enigmatic dedicatee, Mr. W.H. Some scholars have pointed out that the order in which the sonnets are placed may have been the decision of publishers and not of Shakespeare. This introduces the possibility that Sonnet 18 was originally intended for a woman.

Actually, the first 126 sonnets are written to a youth, a boy, probably about 19, and perhaps specifically, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. His initials, W.H., appear in Thorpe’s dedication, and the first volume of Shakespeare’s plays, published by two of his fellow actors, Herminge and Condell, after Shakespeare’s death, was dedicated to William Herbert.

Whatever the truth is, Shakespeare used a conventional form of poetry to praise poetry and his beloved. A poem can stir all of the senses, and the subject matter of a poem can range from being funny to being sad. He boasted that both would be preserved nearly eternally. Five hundred years later, no one refutes his boast.

I still recall the wondrous moment
When you appeared before my eyes,
Just like a fleeting apparition,
Just like pure beauty’s distillation.

When I languished
in the throes of hopeless grief
Amid the troubles of life’s vanity,
Your sweet voice lingered on in me,
Your dear face came to me in dreams.

Years passed. The raging, gusty storms
Dispersed my former reveries,
And I forgot your tender voice,
Your features so divine.

In exile, in confinement’s gloom,
My uneventful days wore on,
Bereft of awe and inspiration
Bereft of tears, of life, of love.

My soul awakened once again:
And once again you came to me,
Just like a fleeting apparition
Just like pure beauty’s distillation.

My heart again resounds in rapture,
Within it once again arise
Feelings of awe and inspiration,
Of life itself, of tears, and love.

The Famous Love Poems: Story Behind the Lyrics:

Ana Petrovna Kern’s immortality was ensured when, on 19 July 1825, Pushkin handed her a copy of his famous lyrics.

20 year old Pushkin first met Anna, a Russian socialite and memoirist, in Olenin’s (president of the art academy) residence. Then they met again 6 years later during her stay with relatives in Trigorskoe, a manor adjacent to Mikhailovskoe, where the great poet was living in exile.

“Lately, our land has been visited by a beauty, who sings the Venetian Night heavenly, in the manner of the gondolier’s cantillation”, Pushkin wrote to his friend Pyotr Pletnev.

The poem starts with the lines “Ya pomnyu chudnoe mgnovenie…”, and Nabokov famously ridiculed attempts at the English translation of these magic lines. Aleksandr Blok marvellously metamorphosed Pushkin’s poem into his own “O podvigakh, o doblestyakh, o slave…”, while Mikhail Glinka put the poem to music and dedicated it to Kern’s daughter Catherine.

Although Pushkin’s biographers tend to idealise their relationship, it is known that he referred to her later as the “whore of Babylon” and wrote to one of his friends that “with God’s help I screwed her the other day”.

In 1826, Kern divorced her aged husband. Ten years later, she married her 16-year-old cousin, Alexander Markov-Vinogradsky. Her last years were spent in such an abject penury that she was constrained to sell out Pushkin’s letters to her.

She died in Moscow and, according to an urban legend, her funeral train passed Pushkin Square just in time when the famous statue of Pushkin was being erected there. This was their last meeting, so to speak.