Imagine: You are a quiet, introspective man named Bob, and you have just arrived at a party. You knock on Bill Wordsworth’s front door and do your best to cordially thank him for inviting you before you pass through the entry into the fray. The room is packed with people and full of crowd noise—the din of voice, and music, and cell phones, you can’t stand it, yes; but also a cacophony of moves and gestures and half-glances made on the fly, the mouth-movements of speech punctuated with firework drizzles of laughter—the general ripple of action and reaction everywhere. You don’t understand why people do this, and you don’t like it. Yet Bill wants you at his parties for some reason, so you compromise by sitting on the sidelines. You quietly make your way to the den, avoiding anyone whom you might know. There is nothing in the den save for a snack tray and a sofa. Your plan is to be there sulking and eating potato chips, and you think to yourself, at least I am here, and by being here I am participating. It makes you somewhat less of a loner.

From the crowd, Wordsworth reappears and plunges down onto the sofa next to you. “Bobby! So wonderful to see you,” he says. You enter into conversation with him, and before long he chides you for merely observing the celebration. “Bobby, you must get up and have some fun,” Wordsworth says. “Quite confidentially, I do believe you need to get out more—that is why I invite you to these events after all. Join the party!”

You tell Wordsworth that you aren’t interested; you explain (in your best dour intellectual voice) that from your perspective perched on the outskirts of the party, all of the guests are making fools of themselves, that you have never taken part in festivities of this sort.

“You don’t say, Bobby,” Wordsworth responds, clearly intrigued. “You don’t say.”

“Let me tell you a story,” says Wordsworth, his voice barely heard above the din. From a shelf above your head Wordsworth produces a tiny volume, and with characteristic deftness pages through to one poem in particular. “Have you read,” Wordsworth shouts, “my tale of ‘Simon Lee, The Old Huntsman’?”

You are gripped by a growing dread that he is going to start reading to you during a party. You are about to answer “no” and “no thank you,” but you catch yourself. Wordsworth actually believes you have been reading the anthologies of his poetry that he has been sending you every three months or so, and so you deftly say that you are sure you have read this ‘Tale of Simon Huntsman Lee’ (or whatever) but cannot for the life of you remember the details.

“Ahh,” he replies. “Well, I won’t read the entirety of the poem line-by-line to you. Roughly, it’s the tale of Simon Lee, a servant who in his youth was renowned for his strength and hunting prowess, but who in old age is poor and without a master. Outwardly, his appearance and lifestyle suggest his total helplessness: from his ‘hunting feats,’ he is deprived of an eye and limbs, and he ‘is lean and he is sick, / His little body’s half awry’; I basically go outright and say that he and his wife ‘[a]re poorest of the poor.’”.

“Mmmm,” you say, “so you depict Simon Lee as the image of abject poverty and suffering, so that the reader will feel the proper reaction of pity for the protagonist. That’s interesting; perhaps your readers will be pushed to consider the larger plight of those who are poor?”

“Ahh, yes, Bobby, pity, a very honorable reaction for the reader to have,” responds Wordsworth, smiling wryly. “Very politically correct, very detached. I must say Bobby, your great strength in analyzing poetry seems to lie in telling me what my poetry should be saying.”

“But,” and he leans in, “it’s a trap! A fiction! See, I speak only of his appearances and his history; I say nothing of who he is or what emotional response from the reader he deserves–be it pity or whatever else.”

Wordsworth singles out a passage from the middle of the poem and just as you dreaded, starts reading it to you:

 

 

Now you are very confused, and vaguely annoyed; it is hard to hear him, you do not see how this is relevant, and you wonder vaguely if Wordsworth started haranguing party guests like this after Sam Coleridge published “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” last month.

“See, let me explain my meaning. What I try to say is that in the first half of the poem, the speaker provides merely one frame in the movie of Simon Lee’s life, with no substantial discussion of who he is as a person or how he handles his condition except for the most obvious. If there is a meaningful tale in there, then it must have come from the reader, who builds a narrative in which Simon Lee is suffering and is to be pitied. That narrative comes from one’s own preconceived notions.”

Well, that makes a little more sense to you. “Ahhh. ‘Such stores as silent thought could bring’… I supposed that’s poet-speak for ‘everything you could imagine based on silently thinking about the superficial image of Simon Lee that has been described to you.’ If all you have to work with is this snapshot of Simon Lee’s life, then any tale you ‘make’ of it can only come from your preconceived notions about people, poverty and age. And, conversely, if you are accustomed to projecting your own preconceived notions onto reality, then you will always have your own ‘tale’ to explain away every situation, whether that tale is right or wrong.”

“Bobby! Exactly!” Wordsworth seems jubilant that you are making connections, and deep inside you feel somewhat proud of yourself. “And we are merely human. We see only what our senses show us; we see only what we are allowed to see by others; we see only what we allow ourselves to see; our knowledge of life is incomplete, and we fear that uncertainty. It is easier to isolate ourselves from uncertain scenarios – like the true nature of Simon Lee’s life – and instead to fit a story over it based on the store of life-knowledge that we have already built up. These are the ‘stores that silent thought can bring’ as I mentioned before.”

“But,” you say, “what person would not ‘think’ to ‘make’ some tale of what is going around them? Isn’t our drive to learn from experience what makes humanity unique?”

“Yes.”

“But you make it sound bad, as if we shouldn’t use experience as a frame to interpret our senses. How can that be? I can’t simply walk into this room and peer into someone’s mind; in order to understand what people are doing I need to interpret what my senses perceive and craft a story around that. Otherwise I would, for example, be powerless to ‘make’ for my other friend a tale of tonight’s party.”

“Quite the contrary, Bobby. As I see it, actively cultivating experience in order to improve one’s understanding is perhaps one of the highest human endeavors. Consider this: at the end of ‘Simon Lee,’ the speaker endeavors to help Simon Lee sever a thick root that is too strong for the old man to handle on his own. Since the entire first half of the story is a description of Simon Lee’s impoverished lifestyle, this must not be the first time that the speaker has witnessed the man struggling. Yet in this turn of events, he chooses to help Simon Lee rather than letting him pass out of mind.”

“Interesting,” you say. “It’s as if the speaker passes by the same ‘door’ every day, but only this once has he chosen to ‘open’ it and see the real Simon Lee inside by stepping into the man’s shoes and doing his work.”

“Metaphorically speaking, yes. The speaker’s kindness brings Simon Lee to tears, so that ‘thanks and praises seemed to run / So fast out of his heart…’; in other words he is very grateful. The speaker expects hollow gratitude from most people (‘hearts unkind, kind deeds / With coldness still returning’). But within the old man, the speaker finds a kind heart full of gratitude, opposite to the coldness to which he is accustomed. So, see, the speaker does not ‘think’ about his prior experience to ‘make’ the tale of Simon Lee in his mind. Rather he ‘thinks’ up a way to help Simon Lee, and in the process he experiences Simon Lee, the man, as he really is, and from that experience the speaker ‘makes’ a real piece of Simon Lee’s tale.”

“Now I see!” you say.

“We all make ourselves feel pity when we hear of Simon Lee’s downfall, and of others like him. We all do, because it is in our nature to want to see the best in ourselves. In this poem I have set up a template on which the reader may attempt to prove to himself his own morality by taking pity on Simon Lee; then I rip the rug out from under the reader, showing him that his attempt at moral thought is really an ignorant illusion, which he creates to mask his own uncertainty.”

“The speaker verifies his morality by choosing to see Simon Lee for who he is and by choosing to act for the man’s benefit. Thus, if a man chooses to spend his life being amoral, then he may ‘think’ on whatever he wishes. But if a man claims to espouse some shred of morality and care for his fellow men, then the moral route is to ‘think’ on ways to ‘make’ real for oneself the life stories of others; in this way a person will see only truth, and will know how to be of service to others when they are in need.”

“Bill,” you say, somewhat in awe, “this conversation has been truly enlightening…”

“I’m glad to hear that, Bob.”

“…but I still have no idea what this has to do with my being a wallflower at this party.”

“Ahh. Well to conclude our discussion, I would say that being a wallflower at a party is sort of like being the man who feigns morality by pitying Simon Lee from a distance. Don’t come here to look on people’s lives from a distance; if you come to a party, join the celebration, because we’re all here to meet people and share the experience of life with no inhibitions. If you don’t believe in sharing the experience, stay home. But don’t straddle the fence, because then I think you would agree that your being here has no value.”

“And, metaphorically speaking,” Wordsworth added, “I suppose you could apply that to the rest of your life as well.”

Awed, you take your leave of Wordsworth. Now that your misplaced inhibitions are revealed, you shed them and smile. Then you join the party.