chapter 1
Inside and outside modernism
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Like many of theLyrical Ballads, Wordsworth’s ‘Simon Lee’ ends with a
sense of disappointment, just as it promises. After describing for nine
stanzas the hopeless situation of a poor and weak old huntsman increas-
ingly unable to support himself and his wife, the poem abruptly reins
itself in, and apologises for going nowhere:
My gentle reader, I perceive
How patiently you’ve waited,
And I’m afraid that you expect
Some tale will be related.
O reader! had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle reader! you would find
A tale in every thing.
What more I have to say is short,
I hope you’ll kindly take it;
It is no tale; but should you think,
Perhaps a tale you’ll make it.^1This moment of self-awareness is simultaneously a hope and a warning.
It expresses faith in the power of well-stocked minds to make a meaning
from the most unpromising materials. But then, why write this particular
poem, if the reader can find a tale wherever he or she looks? On the other
hand, if the poem ‘Simon Lee’ is necessary to making some sort of tale – for
moral sense-making, for the ‘salutary impression’ Wordsworth’s 1800
Preface promised this poem would offer – it is also a warning that whatever
tale we make of it will not be faithful to the poem’s own nature, for ‘it is no
tale’.^2 In effect, this is a poem about a problem with integrity, for to ensure
some sense of narrative and moral completion in the gentle reader’s mind,
the poem must remain its disappointing, lacking self. This little ethical
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