were improper for any socially respectable situation. With this hint at the
respectability of the audience addressed (‘my gentle reader’), and the inner
sense of social propriety in the speaker, the rhythm suggests another
source of disquiet that has been there all along, namely the inseparable
presence of self-congratulation alongside the act of charity or the call for
justice. So eager is the narrator to emphasise the sufferings of the poor
that his stage-whispered asides have frequently dipped his subject into
undignified bathos:
He says he is three score and ten,
But others say he’s eighty.
For still, the more he works, the more
His poor old ancles swell.Simon Lee is poor and old, but ‘poor old’ does not distinguish itself
sufficiently from the patronisingly familiar: it might be Simon Lee’s own
words (‘as he to you will tell’), but whether the distance between the
speaker and Simon Lee can be so lightly leaped over is begging the poem’s
whole question. The repeated deixis of ‘he’ shows the speaker’s determin-
ation to keep pointing Simon Lee and his infirmities out:
His hunting feats have him bereft
Of his right eye, as you may see...
He has no son, he has no child
His wife, an aged woman...
And he is lean and he is sick,
His little body’s half awry...And as the reader becomes more aware of the respectability of the speaker’s
mental audience, such crusading on behalf of the dispossessed starts to sound
more like a means of demonstrating how much the speaker cares, which
would explain the curiously anguished bounciness of verses like this:
Beside their moss-grown hut of clay,
Not twenty paces from the door,
A scrap of land they have, but they
Are poorest of the poor.
This scrap of land he from the heath
Enclosed when he was stronger;
But what avails the land to them,
Which they can till no longer?Inside and outside modernism 17