I decided to chose the poem "She Walks in Beauty" by Lord Bryon because I really enjoyed how he compared a woman to objects that occur in nature. The stanza I chose states:
"She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies"
The author describes how beautiful the woman is by talking about her eyes and her tender skin. He also discusses opposites such as dark and light to provide contrast. When I sketched my idea of how I was going to first represent this, I wanted to put the woman in the center because of how fondly the author makes her seem. With the dark and light aspect I wanted to put both the starry night and a sunrise and convey how they can exist in duality. I used a blank sheet of white paper and a pencil. I added raven trees because he includes them later in the poem. 
For the background I wanted to achieve a comparison of light and dark existing together so I decided to start with a starry background layer and a sunrise picture on top of it. To get the stars to appear on the sunrise layer, I turned the opacity down. I also used a layer mask on the sunrise layer and the brush tool to be able to get rid of certain areas from the original photo.
I decided to turn the opacity up a bit on the sunrise layer, because I felt like it was too light and made it almost seem unnoticeable. I downloaded a star brush and used it with different opacities above the trees because I felt like It would help blend the trees with the background more and add to the "starry skies" idea that Lord Byron discusses in his poem.
For the women in the photo I wanted her to be dressed in dark black to correspond with the dark night in the background. I used a combination of the pen tool and the quick selection tool. First, I used the quick selection tool to cut out the larger areas and for cutting out the detailed areas like the face, I used the pen tool. After tracing with the pen tool, I made a selection and used the delete key to get rid of what I didn't need. I wanted the stars to show through onto her so I also used a layer mask and the brush tool to achieve that.
Lastly, I decided to add some shadows to places like her head and the bottom of the dress. In order to do this, I added a new layer and used a black brush at 34% opacity. It didn't turn out exactly as I drew it in the first photo (sketch) but as I was creating the visual I decided on other ideas.
I decided to add a few birds near the tree. I did this process by place linking the image and quick selecting the unwanted background of the birds. To make more I copied them by doing ctrl+j and to change the colors of some from black to white I used the divide filter and turned the opacity down on all birds to lessen the darkness of them. I made them black and white to help portray the dark and bright aspect Byron discusses in his writing.
On the sunrise layer I clicked on the adjustments button and on hue/saturation. I turned the saturation to -17 to lighten the sunrise. I think this draws less attention to the background and more to the woman in the piece. The main idea in "She Walks in Beauty" by Lord Bryon is the woman's beauty and I want to showcase that in my work.
After taking away some saturation from the sunrise, I wanted to do something with the negative space towards the top. I found a photo of a crescent moon and after adding a new layer, I place linked the photo onto that layer. I used the pen tool to cut out what I wanted, made a selection, and used the delete key. Then I turned down the opacity of the layer to 88% to make it a bit lighter. I think this adds a nice touch to the background and the "starry night" aspect from the poem.
Here is the final piece. I wanted to clean up the white edges around her. To do this, I went back to the layer mask on the layer that she's on and used the brush tool.
