Today’s Poem: On My First Son

Ben Jonson’s farewell to joy

English School, Elder Brother of the 1st Duke of Devonshire, Lying Dead, c. 1638 (Wikimedia Commons)

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On My First Son

by Ben Jonson

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy.
Seven years tho’ wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon ’scap’d world's and flesh’s rage,
And if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say, “Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.”
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.
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Last June, as longtime readers will recall, we brought you Ben Jonson (1572–1637), whose lifespan overlapped with that of Shakespeare (1564–1616), Donne (1573–1631), and Herbert (1593–1633). Jonson overlapped, too, with the Cavalier poets — Robert Herrick (1591–1674), for example, and Sir John Suckling (1609–1641) — who adopted him as a literary godfather.

Jonson’s “To Celia” is precisely the kind of bauble that those later poets sought to create themselves, an effervescent gesture toward the brevity of all beautiful things. But Today’s Poem, written after the death of Jonson’s seven-year-old son from the plague in 1603, provides an antithesis to the idea that the proper response to the fleeing-away of time is to try to seize it.

These six heroic couplets, elegizing a beloved child, point instead to the necessity, however impossible in practice, of detachment. The form itself, with its tightly recurring rhymes and the compact argument each couplet advances, suggests the intensity of the father’s identification with the child: two people, yet in the father’s imagination no boundary exists between himself and the child who has been almost a part of his own body, the “child of my right hand.” (“Benjamin,” the biblical name shared by father and son, comes from the Hebrew Binyāmīn, meaning “son of the right hand.”)

George Vertu’s c. 1730 engraving of Ben Jonson (Wikimedia Commons)

Couplet by couplet, the speaker — a nakedly autobiographical persona, as the poem makes clear — accuses himself of too great a conflation of the child with his own identity. His opening farewell, itself a collapse of an ending into a beginning, merges the child, the separate person, with his own joy in fatherhood. For him the two have been one; now both lie dead.

“My sin was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy.” The problem, as he sees it, is not that he has loved his child too much, but that he has invested all his expectation of happiness in that child’s life. Investment and borrowing, in fact, become a trope in the second couplet, in which the loss of the child is rendered as a foreclosure on a mortgage. The child, the asset that stands as its own collateral, has not been given outright but “lent,” and is now repossessed, “on the just day,” by fate.

“O, could I lose all father now!” In the opening line of the third couplet, the speaker desires, in his mourning, to renounce his fatherhood. But the phrasing, compact as it is, unfolds in meaning. He does not say, “O, if I could cease to be a father,” thus to avoid the pain of loss. Instead, he would uncouple himself from the very word, father, the entire concept of fatherhood, which promises joy but delivers grief instead — so profound that by comparison, the child’s state in death is enviable, preserving him as it does from every “misery.”

Although this poem consists of twelve lines, not the sonnet’s fourteen, a turn occurs in line 9, signaled by the substitution of a trochee for the expected iamb as the line’s first foot. In this turn, lament becomes a laying to rest. The poet lets go, in the possessive construction of line 10, his finest work of art, his namesake, and his own better self: “Here doth lie / Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.”

The poem concludes on a couplet of renunciation, with a vow never again to “like too much,” with any expectation or hope, that which he loves. If the things we treasure run through our fingers, then the only possible response is not to cling to them, but to open our hands and let them go.

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