In any discussion of elegies for a lost child, Ben Jonson’s frequently comes up. You may know the one I’m talking about:
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy.
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
Oh, could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon ’scaped world’s and flesh’s rage,
And if no other misery, yet age!
Rest in soft peace, and, asked, 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.
I’ve always had a problem with this poem. I kind of hate it, to be honest. Jonson’s grief for his son is utterly self-centered. Consider:
Couplet 1: The kid died because Ben Jonson had such high hopes for him.
Couplet 2: Ben Jonson gave the kid up, the kid being metaphorically an item loaned to Ben Jonson.
Couplets 3 and 4: Ben Jonson reflects on how the kid is better off than poor Ben Jonson (“man”), who has to deal with “world’s and flesh’s rage, / And if no other misery, then age!”
Couplet 5: The climactic apogee of self-centeredness, in which the kid is paid the highest compliment Ben Jonson can give: Post-mortem metaphorical apotheosis into the best poem by Ben Jonson. Which is obviously high praise, because that first son is by implication declared better, even, than that fine elegy, “On his First Son.” Ben Jonson actually imagines his son’s soul, on being asked in Dantean fashion who he was in life, saying something like, “Me? I’m Ben Jonson’s best poem!” Actually the exact words are even worse: Here doth lie Ben Jonson, his best piece of poetry. Did I insert the comma in the wrong place? Or the right one? The poor kid isn’t just Ben Jonson’s Son in perpetuity, with no existence or personality distinct from Ben Jonson. The kid IS Ben Jonson, undifferentiated, subordinate, the nameless creation of a named Creator. Pause after Ben Jonson, and the line implies that Ben Jonson is Ben Jonson’s best piece of poetry. You wonder why this poem sickens me. By the way, the more I think about this, “thou child of my right hand” is looking very, very suspect (Couplet 1, line 1). Maybe the kid is the trope all along in this poem, and Jonson is really mourning an ambitious, discarded poem.
Couplet 6: Ben Jonson shares the lesson Ben Jonson learned from the kid’s death. Or the poem’s failure. (“Don’t be too fond of your own work.”)
It may be inevitable that a grieving father turns his gaze inward—to his own misery, his own loss, his own devastation/education/transformation by grief. This turn is what stresses the elegy; it will fracture a weaker one. This turn is where supremacy of technique can be undermined by inferiority of soul. Jonson is a small man even when he grieves—especially when he grieves. He is so self-centered he can’t even keep the dead son the subject of his elegy.
A far greater, truer, deeper elegy for a lost son is to be found in the 15th century Welsh poet, Lewis Glyn Cothi (floruit 1460-1500). Cothi is a better elegist than Jonson here because he is, to put it bluntly, a better man. A more selfless father. He has a heart more capable of love. (Let this silence all those Nabokovians out there who think great writing depends more on fineness of phrase than greatness of soul.) Compare Cothi’s poem, “The Death of Sion y Glyn (His Son),” and you will see a poem that is, though written at least a century before Jonson’s 1603 poem, utterly contemporary.
It is so true a poem that even when the poet does turn his gaze from the dead son to his own sense of loss, giving a litany that repeats the word “my,” we sense none of that insufferable Jonsonian self-regard. The boy remains the focus. I perceive something heartbreakingly complex in a man calling his own dead child “my childhood.”
The translation is Anthony Conran’s, from The Penguin Book of Welsh Verse. Listen.
A sweet apple and a bird
The lad loved, and white pebbles;
A bow cut from a thorn-twig,
A frail enough sword of wood.
He feared a pipe, a scarecrow,
Begged his mother for a ball.
He’d sing through all the gamut,
Singing Oo-oh for a nut.
He’d cajole and coax me, then
Pretend he’d gone all sullen:
A dice restored our friendship—
He loved that!—or a wood chip.
O that the sweet innocent could
Like Lazarus be rescued!
St. Beuno once changed seven
From heaven to life again:
Misery’s my heart’s dictate,
That Sion’s soul did not make eight.
O Mary, it hurts my bosom,
He lies down, he’s in his tomb.
Sion’s death is a sharp despond,
In each breast like a stabwound.
My son, child of my fireside,
My one intent till I died,
My wise bard, my dream nightlong,
My breast, my own heart, my song.
My candle he was, my trinket,
My sweet soul, my one deceit;
My Iseult’s gem, my kissing,
My chick that I’d teach to sing,
My strength, and alas ’tis hard,
My skylark, my fine wizard,
My arrow, my bow, my mood,
My suppliant, my childhood.