St Simon Stylites - Analysis

Introduction

Alfred Lord Tennyson's "St Simon Stylites" presents a weary ascetic on a pillar pleading for salvation. The tone moves between fervent humility, proud catalogue of suffering, anxious doubt, and a final ecstatic hope. The poem repeatedly balances bodily detail of torment with spiritual longing, producing a voice that is at once pitiable, defiant, and devout.

Relevant background

The poem takes its figure from the historical 5th-century ascetic Simeon Stylites, who lived atop pillars to pursue extreme penance. Tennyson’s Victorian audience would have read such asceticism through Christian moral frameworks and contemporary concerns about sainthood, public religion, and the role of bodily suffering in spiritual life.

Main themes

Penance and bodily suffering: The speaker lists physical torments—"hungers and in thirsts, fevers and cold," "both my thighs are rotted with the dew"—so that suffering itself becomes the metric of sanctity. The body is both battlefield and proof of spiritual striving.

Hope, doubt, and the desire for assurance: Repetition of petitions—"Have mercy, Lord, and take away my sin"—and the anxious question "If thou wilt not save my soul, / Who may be saved?" show a constant oscillation between confident expectation and fearful uncertainty about salvation.

Public spectacle and private humility: The poem contrasts crowds who "kneel to me" and bring offerings with the saint's insistence that he is "a sinner viler than you all." Tennyson explores how visible holiness becomes both a temptation to pride and a source of authentic intercession for others.

Recurring images and symbols

The pillar and the elements: The pillar symbolizes isolation, penitential discipline, and a vertiginous closeness to heaven; weather—"rain, wind, frost, heat"—externalizes trial and divine testing. These images make the saint’s spiritual claim legible through material hardship.

Relics, crown, and sacrament: Objects of institutional religion (shrine, crown, sacrament) appear at the close as proofs desired and feared—evidence of sanctity and means of final reconciliation. The crown’s apparent disappearance and reappearance dramatize the poem’s central uncertainty about reward.

Voice, irony, and ambiguity

The first-person voice mixes sincere exhortation ("Mortify your flesh, like me") with moments of self-awareness and irony—mocking the crowd’s worship and repeatedly insisting on personal sinfulness. This ambivalence complicates easy readings of the speaker as purely heroic or purely deluded, leaving open whether sanctity is conferred by God, perceived by others, or constructed through suffering.

Conclusion

Tennyson's poem probes the costs and ambiguities of extreme devotion: bodily endurance, the yearning for divine affirmation, and the fraught relationship between public acclaim and inward humility. By dramatizing the saint’s plea and oscillating emotions, the poem raises enduring questions about how worthiness is measured and who can pronounce salvation final.