Kukathas is a freelance writer and editor. In this essay, she argues that Byron's poem is more complex than previous critics have allowed and that it is a poem not only about a beautiful woman but about the power of art to render worldly things immortal.

"She Walks in Beauty" is counted among the best known of Byron's lyrics, and is the most famous of the verses published in his 1815 volume, Hebrew Melodies . While critics have admired the poem for its gracefulness, lyricism, and masterful use of internal rhyme—William Dick, for example, writing in Byron and His Poetry, calls it a work of "peculiar sweetness and beauty"; in his essay "George Gordon, Lord Byron," Northrop Frye remarks on the work's "caressing rhythm"; and Thomas L. Ashton in Byron's Hebrew Melodies points out that it is the "most enjoyed" of all the verses in that early volume...