She was a Phantom of delight
When first she gleamed upon my sight;
A lovely Apparition, sent
To be a moment’s ornament;
Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair;
Like Twilight’s, too, her dusky hair;
But all things else about her drawn
From May-time and the cheerful Dawn;
A dancing Shape, an Image gay,
To haunt, to startle, and way-lay.
So begins this poem, in which the great Romantic poem William Wordsworth (1770-1850) offers an altogether more laudatory description of a beautiful woman’s appearance than Shakespeare did in his above sonnet, couched in Romantic (and romantic) terms: ‘A Spirit, yet a Woman too!’
Sometimes known by its first line, ‘She was a phantom of delight’, this is a poem William Wordsworth (1770-1850) wrote in 1804 about his wife, Mary Hutchinson.
The poem is a classic example of uxorious poetry – poetry written about the love for a wife. ‘Perfect Woman’ is a romantic poem (written in praise of the poet’s wife) but also a Romantic poem, with a capital ‘R’: the poem is written by one of the leading first-generation poets of English Romanticism.
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