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William WordsworthShe Was a Phantom of Delight
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Background
Literary Context
William Wordsworth is counted among the greatest poets of the English Romantic movement. Some scholars even mark the beginning of the Romantic movement with the publication of Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Wordsworth, Coleridge (1772-1834), and William Blake (1757-1827) are referred to as the “first generation” of Romantics; their successors, Lord Byron (1788-1824), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), and John Keats (1795-1821) are the “second generation.” Felicia Hemans (1793-1834) was highly regarded among female Romantics, especially by Wordsworth, who mentioned her in a memorial verse published in 1835.
In Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth wrote in simple language about everyday people. He particularly emphasized the experience of the individual. This prioritization of emotion over reason as a means for discerning truth became a key element of Romanticism. John Keats, for example, would later declare his faith in “the holiness of the Heart’s affections” (Keats, John. “Letter to Benjamin Bailey.” November 24, 1817, Letters of John Keats, 1970, Oxford University Press, pp. 36-37). Because of their emphasis on subjectivity over objectivity, the Romantics favored lyric poetry (like “She Was a Phantom of Delight”) as a means to explore their personal thoughts and feelings.
In its focus on the light-filled being of Mary, “She Was a Phantom of Delight” also shows Wordsworth’s interest in higher modes of perception, an interest shared with other Romantics like William Blake and Percy Shelley. When Wordsworth was young, he experienced unusual, transcendental states of consciousness, especially when stimulated by solitude in nature. He attributed these experiences to the power of imagination, which could give direct access to the otherwise hidden sources of life. This Romantic belief in the creative power of imagination stood in contrast to broader eighteenth-century poetic theory, which regarded poetry as a product of the rational intellect.
Authorial Context
William Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy and her friend, Mary Hutchinson, met as young children. Mary was an orphan. Dorothy introduced her brother to Mary during the summer vacation of 1787, before William left to attend St. John’s College, Cambridge. The three young people took many walks together in the Lake District and further afield. Wordsworth was stricken by his new companion, as he later made clear in the first stanza of “She Was a Phantom of Delight” and, also, in Book VI of The Prelude. In the latter, he describes his walks that summer with Dorothy and includes the following description of Mary:
Another maid there was, who also breathed
A gladness o’er that season, then to me,
By her exulting outside look of youth
And placid under-countenance, first endeared;
(The Prelude, Book VI, Lines 224-27. 1805. Wikisource.)
Mary is mentioned again in the last book of the 1850 version The Prelude. The passage that clearly echoes “She Was a Phantom of Delight” in its vocabulary:
She came, no more a phantom to adorn
A moment, but an inmate of the heart,
And yet a spirit, there for me enshrined
To penetrate the lofty and the low;
(The Prelude, Book XIV, Lines 268-71. 1850. Wikisource.)
According to contemporary accounts, Mary was tall, but not beautiful by conventional standards. She made up for her plainness with other qualities. When writer and essayist Thomas de Quincey visited the Wordsworths in 1807, he noted that Mary displayed “all the practical power and fascination of beauty, through the more compensatory charms of sweetness all but angelic, or simplicity, the most entire, womanly self-respect, and purity of heart speaking through all her looks, acts and movements” (Barker, Juliet. Wordsworth: A Life. New York: Ecco, 2005, p. 21). Nor was de Quincey alone in his judgment; Wordsworth’s friend, the painter Sir George Beaumont, remarked on Mary’s “angelic kindness & goodness of heart […] it beams from her countenance & shines out in all her actions & expressions” (ibid., p. 262). It is notable that both de Quincey and Beaumont describe Mary in terms that echo Wordsworth’s celebration of her in “She Was a Phantom of Delight.”
William and Mary were married for forty-eight years. Mary outlived her husband by nine years, dying in January 1859 at the age of eighty-eight.
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