Both "She Walks In Beauty" by Lord Byron and Douglas Dunn's "Reincarnation" are about romance.

“She Walks In Beauty”/ “Reincarnation”

Both “She Walks In Beauty” by Lord Byron and Douglas Dunn’s “Reincarnation” are about romance. Although this is true they have much to be contrasted. “She Walks In Beauty” is about a man who is truly besotted with a woman who, from my observations, he doesn’t even know. I think this from the fact that he doesn’t talk about anything except for her looks and he says that he doesn’t know her name:

Had half impair’d the nameless grace

The poet takes pleasures from the woman’s beauty and, unlike “Reincarnation” by Dunn, the poem mainly focuses on the woman’s sexual attraction. She is often compared to perfection:

Of cloudless climes and starry skies

This also shows just how infatuated he is with her. This is an immense scale to put her on as it compares her not only to a section of a country but to the enormity and perfection of the galaxy. This metaphor also refers to her mysterious nature because -the poem was written almost two hundred years ago, in the early nineteenth century- not much was known about the night skies as it is so far away nobody has ever been there. This also shows how little he knows about her. A sense of adulation also occurs throughout Lord Byron’s poem and it seems as though he cannot criticise her at all.

This is completely contrasted with the bond between himself and the woman in Dunn’s “Reincarnation”. We can say, almost certainly, that “Reincarnation” is autobiographical, as we know that Dunn’s wife died in 1984 from cancer. I think the sudden and premature death of his wife has been the inspiration for this poem that is so full of naked emotion and so full of true love, unlike the lust for the woman in the poem by Lord Byron, that you can almost feel his pain.

For now I know the shame of being late,

Too late.

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For now I know the shame of being late,

Too late.

This shows the sorrow he is feeling. It also hints at remorse, giving us the sense that he feels slightly guilty about the death, which was obviously not his fault. It could also be showing us that he feels he has unfinished business with her or maybe he feels that he didn’t have chance to say goodbye because he was so unprepared for it.

The diction chosen by Lord Byron is very sophisticated. The words he chooses to use, such as eloquent make his poem flow with a smooth and graceful rhythm. The rhymes in “She Walks In Beauty” are monosyllabic masculine rhymes, such as night, bright and light as in the first stanza; however, the rhymes in “Reincarnation” are much more disjointed creating and awkwardness which is reflective of the mood in the poem. The diction in “Reincarnation is much more colloquial making us able to relate to this poem much more easily than to the other. Dunn, in this poem, doesn’t think of different words to use to widen the vocabulary of the poem but he repeats words that he has already used:

I must mourn (line 6)

Her treasured stories mourn (line 18)

He also chooses to use words, which may be deemed inappropriate to the given situation. The word stuff (line 16) is one such word. Throughout this poem there are many half, or feminine, rhymes adding to the jerky and hard to read rhythm of the poem. This convulsive rhythm is complemented with enjambment, which is cut off midway through the next line, by sesura:

She waits for me at home

Tonight, in the house-shadows.

The kind of love we can feel from the words of Dunn’s poem is pure and it is obvious that he loved his wife very much, as he tells us that he will mourn forever over her:

And I must mourn

Until Equator crawls to Capricorn

Or murder in the sun melts down

The Arctic and Antarctica.

We also see a realization within Dunn’s attitude as he sees the life of everything, extremely important.

When bees collide

Against my study’s windowpane, I let them in.

“She Walks in Beauty” is a much more lustful poem and is fantastic in the true meaning of the word. Byron tries to get across the true beauty he sees in this wondrous being but it is as if he cannot find words that are strong enough to express his feelings:

So soft, so calm, yet so eloquent

Eloquent actually means fluent in speech so to use it to describe the way she looks makes it an extremely powerful and meaningful adjective, which, again, shows his total obsession with the woman, he is watching.

Both poems have religious overtones. In “She Walks In Beauty” she is called and angel and referred to looking down at the world:

Mind at peace with all below,

In “Reincarnations” the religious aspect is much more obvious as he referrer to her as his Lady Christ. This remark could almost be blasphemy as it is such a strong overtone. The subject of “Reincarnations” is also alluded to as omni-present as he calls her a watchful poltergeist.

Although in the poem “She Walks In Beauty” the subject is living there is a distance between her and the voice of the poem. The opposite is true for Dunn’s “Reincarnation.” Although the subject is not living there seems to be no distance between Dunn and his late wife although she is deceased.

The diction and style of “She Walks In Beauty” differs tremendously from the diction and style in “Reincarnation.” The themes of the two poems are both of romance, even though the type of love Byron feels is lust and not the true type of love Dunn still feels for his departed wife.