Like many of the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth's ‘Simon Lee’ ends with a sense of disappointment, just as it promises. After describing for nine stanzas the hopeless situation of a poor and weak old huntsman increasingly unable to support himself and his wife, the poem abruptly reins itself in, and apologises for going nowhere:

This moment of self-awareness is simultaneously a hope and a warning. It expresses faith in the power of well-stocked minds to make a meaning from the most unpromising materials. But then, why write this particular poem, if the reader can find a tale wherever he or she looks? On the other hand, if the poem ‘Simon Lee’ is necessary to making some sort of tale – for moral sense-making, for the ‘salutary impression’ Wordsworth's 1800 Preface promised this poem would offer – it is also a warning that whatever tale we make of it will not be faithful to the poem's own nature, for ‘it is no tale’.