She walks in beauty, like the night / Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
Byron wrote the poem in June 1814 after seeing his cousin by marriage, Mrs Wilmot, at a London party in a black mourning dress. It was published the next year in Hebrew Melodies, a set of lyrics written to be set to music by Isaac Nathan.
Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, / ’Tis woman’s whole existence;
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll! / Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, / There is a rapture on the lonely shore, / There is society where none intrudes, / By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, / Awake for ever in a sweet unrest.