A Phantom of Delight

This morning, I was cleaning out a cabinet and found The Muses’ Bower—an anthology from my school years in India. Frayed edges, fragile pages, but in surprisingly good shape after all these decades.

My name announcing ownership in careful cursive.

I flipped through wistfully and landed on a poem by Wordsworth.

She Was a Phantom of Delight.

At the bottom of the page, a stanza underlined by me:

A perfect Woman, nobly planned,

To warn, to comfort, and command;

And yet a Spirit still, and bright

With something of angelic light.

I must have been 13, maybe 14. And something about it had felt off-putting: Be poised. Be useful. Be good. Hold strength and softness in perfect balance. Lead gently. Shine quietly. Don’t be too much. Don’t be too little.

Such impossible paradox!

But in reading it today, what I saw was something entirely different.

I read it as the woman I am: the one who invites others into stillness and self-trust, who creates presence through small, handmade tokens, who guides without force, and loves without needing credit.

I live that paradox daily, honoring both strength and softness.

What felt like a burden to live up to back then has become a truth I now embody—but differently.

Wordsworth probably wasn’t trying to create a checklist for young women, but my teenage self read it that way because that’s what the world was asking of me then.

And now the same words reflect something else: not the woman I was expected to be but the woman I’ve chosen to become.