St Simon Stylites - Analysis

A prayer that keeps turning into a demand

Tennyson’s Simeon speaks as if he is collapsing in humility, but the poem steadily reveals a harsher truth: his desperate pursuit of holiness has curdled into spiritual pride, so that even his prayers begin to sound like claims he thinks Heaven owes him. He opens with a roar of self-disgust—he is basest of mankind, a body made one slough and crust of sin—yet almost in the same breath he announces he will keep grasp[ing] the hope of sainthood and batter[ing] the gates of heaven. The voice is both penitential and combative. What looks like contrition is also a kind of siege.

The pillar as proof, performance, and bargaining chip

The physical extremity of Simeon’s life is presented like evidence laid out before a judge. He lists hungers and...thirsts, ulcerous throes, and a whole weather-system of torment—rain, wind, frost, hail, sleet, snow—all endured on this tall pillar, a sign betwixt the meadow and the cloud. That line makes the pillar more than a place of prayer: it is a public monument, visible to the fields below and the sky above, halfway between human life and divine altitude. His logic becomes transactional. He has borne these things, so he expects the white robe and the palm, the traditional emblems of sanctity, as a wage: the meed of saints.

Self-loathing that keeps feeding self-importance

One of the poem’s most unsettling tensions is that Simeon’s hatred of himself doesn’t lead to softness; it hardens into rivalry. He insists he has reduced his body to a hated object—this home / Of sin, my flesh, which I despise—and he even claims he would have chosen something More slowly-painful if he could. Yet this very self-contempt becomes a way to rank himself above others. When he asks, Show me the man who has suffered more, his “humility” turns into a contest he is determined to win. Even his claim that martyrdom is simpler—others die one death, while he lives a life of death—is not only anguish; it’s a bid for singularity.

The mind frays: visions, lethargy, and devils that sound like his own thoughts

The poem doesn’t present Simeon as calmly deluded; it shows a mind under prolonged pressure, swinging between ecstasy and fog. Early on he remembers an angel who stand and watch me while he sang, but later he admits to blind lethargies in which Heaven, and Earth, and Time are choked. The “evil ones” who come and whisper thou hast suffer’d long feel less like external demons than the voice of his own craving for recognition, feeding him exaggerations until he can’t trust his memory. In that sense, the poem quietly suggests that extreme asceticism doesn’t purify desire; it can distort it, giving it hallucinated forms.

The sharpest turn: from penitent to celebrity

The biggest shift arrives when other people enter the poem in force—the crowd at the column’s base. Simeon complains that ordinary men live under comfortable roofs, with wives and wholesome food, while he bows one thousand and two hundred times, soaked by drenching dews and ground by a grazing iron collar. Then the crowd’s worship flips him into a new register: Ha! ha! he exclaims, half-mocking, half-pleased. He claims they are wrong to kneel—Good people, you do ill—but he immediately begins to audition his power: Speak! is there any of you halt. When they shout St. Simeon Stylites, he converts their praise into theology: God reaps a harvest in me. The pillar becomes a stage, and sainthood becomes publicity that “proves” salvation.

Blame, inheritance, and the refusal of responsibility

His most revealing moment of evasion is also one of his most ordinary lines: A sinful man, conceived and born in sin. Instead of using that doctrine to plead for mercy, he uses it to dodge accountability: ’Tis their own doing; this is none of mine. The contradiction is stark. He can catalogue his pains in obsessive detail, but he cannot name his sin in concrete terms; “sin” stays a crushing abstraction, lead-like tons flattening his spirit, while responsibility keeps slipping away. The poem makes this feel like the core tragedy: Simeon can punish the body endlessly, but he cannot bear the smaller, quieter humiliation of admitting his own agency.

The crown vision: holiness as self-coronation

The closing movement intensifies the poem’s ambiguity: is Simeon receiving grace, or manufacturing it in his last delirium? He addresses the crowd with grand, self-mythologizing repetition—I, Simeon...I, Simeon—and even claims that Pontius and Iscariot look like fair seraphs beside him, a shocking piece of rhetorical excess that makes his “humility” almost impossible to believe. Then comes the vision: a crown flashes, disappears, returns; he cries What! deny it now? and then insists ’tis fitted on. Paradise arrives as scent—spikenard, frankincense—a sensual reward for a life spent waging war on the senses. Yet even here he hedges: let me not be fool’d. The poem leaves him suspended between revelation and self-deception, still bargaining, still needing an audience, asking for a priest to climb a ladder and bring the blessed sacrament as if Heaven must certify what he has already declared.

A question the poem refuses to soothe

If Simeon’s whole project is to take away my sin, why does every proof he offers involve his suffering, his reputation, his miracles, his being an example—everything except an actual change of heart? The poem keeps pressing the unsettling possibility that the pillar is not simply a site of devotion but a machine that turns pain into ego, until even the last prayer—lead them to thy light—sounds like a final attempt to control the story of his life.