lesson about the virtue of feeling let down is a preparation for the ending of
‘Simon Lee’, of course, where the speaker’s ‘mourning’ refuses to be
gratified by Simon Lee’s gratitude or to feel smug about being charitable.
But it is also a version of a much larger question about integrity which is at
the heart of Coleridge’s disappointed criticisms of this poem, criticisms
which set the agenda for the modernist revolution a century later: how does
the poem’s aesthetic unity relate to the personal integrity of its author?
These problems with integrity become evident in the poem’s last
stanza. Simon Lee is not strong enough to chop down an old tree, so
the speaker of the poem does it for him easily; the old man is grateful, the
bonds of human fellowship are renewed and tears are being shed in
reciprocal sympathy, yet in the last few words the speaker is unhappy:
The tears into his eyes were brought
And thanks and praises seemed to run
So fast out of his heart, I thought
They never would have done.- I’ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning;
Alas! the gratitude of men
Has oftner left me mourning.
What begins as a tale of sympathy ends in sorrow and indignation at
the sufferings of Simon Lee, the combination of age and circumstance
that has reduced him to penury, and the contrast between his intractable
difficulty and the ease with which the speaker helped him. The moral that
suggests itself here concerns the injustice of Simon Lee’s situation. His
gratitude leaves the speaker mourning because it is so out of proportion to
the effort it took; evidently Simon was not expecting help because he had
not often been given it, yet if his old age can be eased so simply, why has
this not happened more often, and what sort of society is it that leaves
him to struggle?
However, there is something else amiss in this last stanza. Hitherto, the
poem’s short ballad metre has ensured a very regular and strong three
beats in each stanza’s fourth and eighth line, with some flexibility about
the second and sixth lines. But in order to make the fourth line have the
innocent meaning, ‘I thought his tears would never finish’, a reader has to
add a slight extra stress on ‘have’ to match the natural double stress in the
phrase ‘have done with it’. For a reading stressed exactly with the beats
suggests something else, that his tears ‘ne ́ver wo ́uld have do ́ne’, that they
16 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism