Poetic Views of the Natural World

Paper Summary:

This paper cites examples from the poetry of Lord Byron, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Elizabeth Bishop to illustrate the male/female dichotomies of meaning in relationship to the natural world that have been a part of the female poet's experience throughout Western culture.

From the Paper:

"The idea of women as nature is perhaps most obviously expressed in George Gordon, Lord Byron's poem: "She Walks in Beauty like the Night." This poem is an extended simile, or comparison between the women of the title and the night of the natural world. "She walks in beauty like the night/Of cloudless climes and starry skies;" begins the verse. The woman of Byron's lyric is like the night because her beauty is muted, not gaudy. Her loveliness is, "Thus mellow'd to that tender light" of the moon, rather than the sun because she is a brunette. Her temperament is reflected in her appearance, just as her appearance becomes synonymous with nature over the course of the poem. Byron's poem, although lyrical in its tone, and beautiful in its easy ebb and flow of words also is highly conventional in its rendition of female, dark beauty, noting the subject's raven tresses, for example, like the darkness of the night. Her hair cascades in "waves," like dark water, the poet notes, again equating the natural world's beauties with mute, feminine beauty."

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