Jingles and cliche ́s such as ‘poorest of the poor’ and, earlier, ‘sole
survivor’ betray a certain ready-to-hand terminology that sits uncomfort-
ably with a poem about charity. Similarly, the jollity of the double rhymes
such as stronger/longer, weighty/eighty, merry/cherry, Ivor/survivor and
so on feels too comically well resolved for the distress they disclose. The
poem’s form is mismatched to its content, like someone singing the lyrics
of ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ to the tune of ‘I’m the King of the
Swingers’. So when the final stanza closes with a sudden off-rhyme of
‘mourning’ and ‘returning’, those preceding double rhymes ensure the
change is palpable. It suggests that the speaker has realised that Simon
Lee’s gratitude is out of proportion, that both have been playing their part
in a bad, eighteenth-century sentimental poem where charity is rewarded
with floods of tears and mutual gratification. There are, in effect, two tales
which might be made here, one that believes in charity and wonders about
justice, and one that is radically suspicious of the self-interest behind
charity, making sympathy with the poor an expressive opportunity for
rich self-congratulation. When the pathos of the poem topples over into
bathos, it exposes the whole economy of this kind of sentimentalism.
Hence the disappointment felt at the end of the poem would be an
immunisation against the vanity of charity, which is parasitically dependent
upon the social structures of human unkindness which have left Simon
Lee poor.^3 Unintentionally, the speaker has participated in injustice at the
same time as relieving its effects.
Yet self-suspicion also has its implications, for it is not certain that
making the poem a cautionary tale about the vanity of charity would be
less selfish or patronising than making it one about kindness. Mourning
one’s own complicity could be a peculiarly enjoyable moment of gritti-
ness, the self-isolating comfort of knowing oneself one’s own sharpest
critic. And Simon Lee really was helped: if his thanks and praise are just
false consciousness, then to mourn the way that the poor have been
indoctrinated into gratitude instead of being angry at systemic injustice
has the effect of robbing him of any right to his own emotions, which
would patronise him still further. Simon Lee is grateful for a kind act
whatever the speaker’s underlying motives, unless the reader isreally
suspicious about those tears. Worrying about one’s own kindness would
perpetuate the self-absorption the poem was to expose, and regretting an
act of charity in itself simply maintains the status quo. The poem’s
disappointment, in fact, might be prompted not only by injustice and
selfishness, but the necessary failure of any transparent justification of
motivations and acts, because its speaker is always too involved.
18 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism