'His Best Piece of Poetry'

“The eldest child of the family, born probably in 1596, had been given his father’s name of Benjamin. He died of the plague in 1603; perhaps in August or September of that year, when the mortality rates in London were at their height.”

At least 30,00 were to die from the bubonic plague that year in England, including a quarter of London’s population. Among them was seven-year-old Ben Jonson, the playwright’s namesake, his first-born son. His father was away from home at the time, at the estate of Sir Robert Cotton in Huntingtonshire. In the book quoted above, Ben Jonson: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2011), Ian Donaldson writes:

“Years later Jonson told William Drummond that he had had a premonition of the boy’s death, seeing one night ‘in a vision his eldest son, then a child and at London, appear unto him with the mark of a bloody cross on his forehead, as if it had been cutted with a sword.'”

Donaldson reports that a red cross had previously been regarded as a talisman against the plague but by Jonson’s day the symbolism had changed, and the mark was painted on the doors of houses whose inhabitants were dead or dying of the plague. Jonson was shaken by the dream, a disturbance that reveals, Donaldson says, “a dimension of his character that is not always evident in his own (typically more rational and more skeptical) creative work: a fascination with the coincidental, the inexplicable, the supernatural.” Out of his grief Jonson crafted one of the greatest poems in the language, “On My First Son”:

“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.”

A child is lent to his parents. Now the debt must be repaid. Donaldson hears an echo of the opening verses of Deuteronomy 15. The poem waivers between stoical acceptance and crushing emotion. A child’s death is unthinkable and impossible to ignore. I read the final four lines as an epitaph within Jonson’s epigram.

Another of his sons, Joseph, born in 1599, is presumed to have died young. The records are nonexistent. At the time, the names of children who died were often given to the couple’s subsequent offspring. Donaldson finds evidence that another Benjamin was born to Anne and Ben Jonson in February 1608. “The life of this boy, too, may have been brief, but the burial of ‘Benjamin Johnson [sic] sonne to Benjamin’ is recorded at [St. Anne’s, Blackfriars] on 18 November 1611.”