ABSTRACT
Published 1842. Written 1833 (dated, Heath MS), by 27 Nov. (Letters i 98; Mem. i 130). It is unlikely to have been written in Oct., the month when T. heard of Hallam’s death. But W. H. Thompson wrote to J. W. Blakesley, 11 Nov. 1833, on Hallam’s death. and said of T.: ‘He seemed less overcome than one would have expected: though, when he first arrived, he was very low — He left among us some magnificent poems and fragments of poems. Among the rest a monologue or soliloquy of one Simeon Stylites: or as he calls himself Simeon of the Pillar: a poem which we hold to be a wonderful disclosure of that mixture of self-loathing self-complacence and self-sacrifice which caused our forefathers to do penance when alive and to be canonized when dead. It is to be feared however that the men of this generation will hold it to be somewhat too unwholesome; the description of his sufferings being too minute for any but those whom the knowledge of the Art holds above the subject’ (P. Allen, The Cambridge Apostles, 1978, pp. 162–3). The important MSS are: H.Nbk 13:19, an early much-corrected draft of ll. 1–68, with stubs that include ll. 108–10 (A); revised as H.Nbk 13:13 (B); T.Nbk 22; and Heath MS. Simeon was the first and most famous of the pillar-hermits (Stylites, from Greek στυ̑λοβ, pillar). H. T. gives as the sources William Hone’s Every-Day Book (1825), which supplied almost all the details (under ‘January 5’), and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 37. FitzGerald says that ‘this is one of the Poems A. T would read with grotesque Grimness, especially at such passages as “Coughs, Aches, Stitches, etc.” [ll. 13–16], laughing aloud at times’. H. T. describes St Telemachus (III 224) as its ‘pendant’. Cp. St Agnes’ Eve (I 605), and St Lawrence (I 324). J. H. Buckley (p. 26) suggests that it was influenced by contempt for Charles Simeon, a notoriously exclamatory and influential preacher at Cambridge. Culler (p. 24) quotes Cambridge contemporaries on ‘a great saint called Simeon’, and on ‘many other humorous and harmless little sarcasms of a like kind’. Culler also (p. 257) notes that T. ‘apparently did not know much about the figure who purports to be the original of his poem. W. E. H. Lecky wrote, “He once confessed to me that when he wrote his Simeon Stylites he did not know that the story was a Syrian one, and had accordingly given it a Northern colouring which he now perceived to be wrong”’ (Mat. iii 324). R. Pattison suggests that ‘the whole monologue is loosely based on Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Prologue’ (Tennyson and Tradition, 1979,p. 79). In his review of 1842 in the Church of England Quarterly Review (Oct. 1842), Leigh Hunt called it ‘a powerfully graphic, and in some respects appalling satire on the pseudo-aspirations of egotistical asceticism and superstition…. We do not recollect to have met with a more startling picture of the sordid and the aspiring — the selfish and the self-sacrificing — the wretched, weak body and mind and resolute soul — the abject, the dominant, the stupid, the imaginative — and, alas, the misgiving … all mixed up in the poor phantom-like person of the almost incredible Saint of the Pillar — the almost solitary Christian counterpart of the Yogees of the Hindoos, who let birds build in their hair, and the nails of their fingers grow through the palms of their hands. We say Christian, out of Christian charity; for though real Christianity is a quintessence of good sense, both in its human and angelical aspirations, as the flower of it in due time will make manifest, yet these and other dark absurdities have, no doubt, lurked about its roots, and for a time, with equal absurdity, been confounded with the flower.’ On T. and the art of the penultimate, see W. E. Fredeman, University of Toronto Quarterly xxxviii (1968) 69–83.
