Comparing Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” to Lord Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty.”

The beauty of women has been valued for such a long time. Writers tried to describe women’s beauty in their poems and novels, painters drew beautiful women in their paintings, many plays were based on how a man falls in love with a beautiful woman. For my final paper, I would like to compare and contrast a poem from 17th century written by Lord Byron and today’s modern song by Christina Aguilera “Beautiful.” I chose these two totally different poem and a modern song mostly based on the subject area. I feel that both represents a woman’s beauty each in their own ways.

In “She walks in beauty,” written in 1814, George Gordon, famously known as Lord Byron, describes the beauty of a woman who just walked by him. The poem starts with, “She walks in beauty, like the night,” which simply explains that this woman was wearing something black that indicates she was mourning someone. The second line shows the reader where this beautiful woman exists in, ” Of cloudless climes and starry skies.” The poem continues with the poet’s showing the difference between the dark and light shades in the next two lines, “And all that’s best of dark and bright, Meet in her aspect and her eyes:”, which again repeats poet’s contrast from the beginning of the poem.

The next paragraph of the poem starts with telling the reader that despite the shade of the light, the woman is still beautiful. In other words, Lord Byron tries to tell us that nothing can ruin this woman’s beauty. “One shade the more, one ray the less, Had half impaired the nameless grace.” The poem continues to describe the beautiful woman, comparing her beauty to nature and other things.

By using the light shades description in his poem, it seems like Lord Byron was trying to show this woman’s beauty in kind of in between lights. In other words, the poet, shows her not in very light place nor in the dark place. It looks like she is in kind of between, which shows all her beauty in full.

From my personal view, I find this poem to be very beautiful and heartwarming. As I was reading it, I felt like, this poem was taken from poet’s personal life.

A modern song I chose is “Beautiful”, a song Christina Aguilera sings. In this song, a singer sings not about someone’s beauty, but mostly rather of her own. The song starts with describing how “Every day is so wonderful,” but then it instantly changes its direction to how ” suddenly it’s hard to breathe.” Then the singer continues to sing how she feels insecure herself “from all the pain.” It look like she “feel so ashamed.”

The second paragraph of the “Beautiful” lyrics starts as she sings about her own beauty. “I am beautiful no matter what they say,” Aguilera sings. “Words can’t bring me down.” She continues with “I am beautiful in every single way, Yes, words can’t bring me down, oh now, So don’t you bring me down today.” Although, as Christina sings this song out loud, all the words used to make so much sense to me. Nevertheless, after reading this lyrics, I felt like the song does not make that so such sense anymore to me. I felt like the words don’t rhyme with each other at all compare to Lord Byron’s “She walks in beauty.” In Byron’s poem, the last word of the line was rhyming exactly with the word of the next other line.

Next, the singer sings about someone’s friends and after just jumps right into describing someone else’s beauty, “‘Cause you are beautiful no matter what they say, Words can’t bring you down, oh no. You are beautiful in every single way, Yes, words can’t bring you down, oh no, So don’t you bring me down today.”

On one hand, there is this poem from 17th century and on the other hand, there is a modern song from today’s teenagers’ iPod. In my own view, the lyrics from today’s modern song does not tell a story to me. While Lord Byron’s poem was describing the woman’s beauty in the light of shade, and how he felt when she walked by, Aguilera’s song did not describe the beauty in full unlike the poem. The song lyrics simply says, “I am beautiful,” and that’s all, not a single word of comparing the beauty to anything at all. Nevertheless, despite all the words repeating all the time over and over again, it is still good to listen to Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful.’