32 Ben Jonson’s poetry

Dr. Bisweswar Chakraborty

In this we shall discuss about Ben Jonson and his poetry:

Ben Jonson (originally Benjamin Jonson c. 11 June 1572 – 6 August 1637) was an enormously talented English playwright, poet, and literary critic of the seventeenth century, whose artistic ability exercised a stable impact upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours. He is best known for the satirical plays Every Man in His Humour (1598), Volpone, or The Foxe (1605), The Alchemist (1610), and Bartholomew Fayre: A Comedy (1614), and for his lyric poetry; he is generally regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I.

Jonson was a classically educated, well-informed, and cultivated man of the English Renaissance with an taste for controversy (personal and political, artistic and intellectual)

whose cultural influence was of unequalled breadth upon the playwrights and the poets of the Jacobean era (1603–1625) and of the Caroline era (1625–1642).

Poetry

Jonson’s poetry, like his drama, is informed by his classical learning. Some of his better-known poems are close translations of Greek or Roman models; all display the careful attention to form and style that often came naturally to those trained in classics in the humanist manner. Jonson largely avoided the debates about rhyme and meter that had consumed Elizabethan classicists such as Thomas Campion and Gabriel Harvey. Accepting both rhyme and stress, Jonson used them to mimic the classical qualities of simplicity, restraint, and precision.

“Epigrams” (published in the 1616 folio) is an entry in a genre that was popular among late-Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences, although Jonson was perhaps the only poet of his time to work in its full classical range. The epigrams explore various attitudes, most from the satiric stock of the day: complaints against women, courtiers, and spies abound. The condemnatory poems are short and anonymous; Jonson’s epigrams of praise, including a famous poem to Camden and lines to Lucy Harington, are longer and are mostly addressed to specific individuals. Although it is included among the epigrams, “On My First Sonne” is neither satirical nor very short; the poem, intensely personal and deeply felt, typifies a genre that would come to be called “lyric poetry.” It is possible that the spelling of ‘son’ as ‘Sonne’ is meant to allude to the sonnet form, with which it shares some features. A few other so-called epigrams share this quality. Jonson’s poems of “The Forest” also appeared in the first folio. Most of the fifteen poems are addressed to Jonson’s aristocratic supporters, but the most famous are his country-house poem “To Penshurst” and the poem “To Celia” (“Come, my Celia, let us prove”) that appears also in Volpone.

Underwood, published in the expanded folio of 1640, is a larger and more heterogeneous group of poems. It contains A Celebration of Charis, Jonson’s most extended effort at love poetry; various religious pieces; encomiastic poems including the poem to Shakespeare and a sonnet on Mary Wroth; the Execration against Vulcan and others. The 1640 volume also contains three elegies which have often been ascribed to Donne (one of them appeared in Donne’s posthumous collected poems).

During most of the 17th century Jonson was a towering literary figure, and his influence was enormous for he has been described as ‘One of the most vigorous minds that ever added to the strength of English literature’.

The best of Jonson’s lyrics have remained current since his time; periodically, they experience a brief vogue, as after the publication of Peter Whalley’s edition of 1756. Jonson’s poetry continues to interest scholars for the light which it sheds on English literary history, such as politics, systems of patronage, and intellectual attitudes. For the general reader, Jonson’s reputation rests on a few lyrics that, though brief, are surpassed for grace and precision by very few Renaissance poems: “On My First Sonne”; “To Celia”; “To Penshurst”; and the epitaph on boy player Solomon Pavy.

“In his merry humour,” Drummond records of Ben Jonson, “he was wont to name himself The Poet.” Jonson was not the greatest of Elizabethan, or even of Jacobean, poets, and he knew it. He admired Donne the first poet in the world in some things, and his approval of Shakespeare is the most just and generous that we expect from any writer of the time But, as even those who started by abominating his bravado came to understand, Jonson is The Poet, the standard and axis for the measurement of his fellows. He is so standard that, apart from the marvellous lyrics and plays, we do not easily distinguish his greatness; but the magnitude is in almost every line he inscribed. The average line of Jonson, read, gone through, memorized, and breathed with, will evaluate higher and carry better than the more striking lines of easier poets. For him poetry was the analysis of life, and appreciation could be no easy thing for author or for reader:

For though the Poet’s matter Nature be,

His Art doth give the fashion; and that he,

Who casts to write a living line, must sweat,

…………………and strike the second heat

Upon the Muses’anvil.

The reader of the Epigrams, Forest, and Under-wood may be at first repelled by the products of this sweating Titan, who hammered his verses into their definite and glowing felicity; but let him try the quality of the metal and workmanship, and most other men’s poetry is likely to appear trivial. Even when Jonson is writing adulation to the fashionables of the court, he writes with his whole opinionated mind and with proud affirmation of the stateliness of thought; as thus to the Countess of Rutland:

Beauty, I know, is good, and blood is more;

Riches thought most: but, Madame, think what store

The world hath seen which all these had in trust,

And now lie lost in their forgotten dust.

It is the Muse alone can raise to heaven,

And at her strong arm’s end hold up, and even,

The souls she loves;

Or thus to the Earl of Dorset:

Yet we must more than move still, or go on:

We must accomplish. ’Tis the last key-stone

That makes the arch. The rest that there were put

Are nothing till that comes to bind and shut.

Then stands it a triumphal mark! Then men

Observe the strength, the height, the why, and when,

It was erected; and still walking under

Meet some new matter to look up and wonder!

Or we can note how Jonson can make his rationale resonate in this discussion of two ways of love, and note how delicately the almost over-sweetness of the melody is restricted by the run-on verses and intermittently in exact rimes:

The thing they here call love is blind desire,

Arm’d with bow, shafts, and fire;

Inconstant like the sea, of whence ’tis born,

Rough, swelling, like a storm:

With whom sails, rides on a surge of fear,

And boils, as if he were

In a continual tempest. Now true love

No such effects doth prove;

That is an essence far more gentle, fine,

Pure, perfect, nay divine;

It is a golden chain let down from heaven,

Whose links are bright and even,

That falls like sleep on lovers and combines

The soft and sweetest minds.

In equal knots. This bears no brands nor darts

To murther different hearts,

But in a calm and godlike unity

Preserves community;

Or in this loveliest of description of truth:

Truth is the trial of itself

And needs no other touch;

And purer than the purest gold,

Refine it neér so much.

It is the life and light of love,

That sun that ever shineth,

And spirit of that special grace,

That faith and love defineth.

There is an Augustan refinement in many of Jonson’s smaller poems which none of his contemporaries could equal; for instance, in his verse letters to Donne and Drayton, and to the “one that asked to be sealed of the Tribe of Ben,” in the 101st Epigram, inviting a friend to supper; and particularly in the second and third poems of The Forest, which show how much etiquette had improved in the century since Barclay’s Satires.

No one in his period could more caringly articulate true sadness. The epitaph “on my first daughter” (Epigram xxii) is a gracious thing and the lines on his dead son (Epigram xlv) are nobler still:

Farewell, thou child of my right hand and joy!

………………………………………………………………

Rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say here doth lie

Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.

It was Jonson who wrote the wonderful stanzas on the dead boy actor, Salathiel (or Solomon) Pavy (Epigram cxx), which perhaps no other writer of the time could or would have written, and the epitaph on the girl,

“Elizabeth, L.H.”, which has the lines,

Underneath this stone doth lie

As much beauty as could die.

This, probably, even more than the now better-known lyrist of the song books, was the Jonson whom his juniors accepted as their unapproachable leader. He had a sting, of course, but in his nondramatic works engaged it less often and less efficiently than is supposed. He did not consider himself as a love poet. He had endeavoured, he says in the first poem of The Forest, but the god of love fled him,

and again

Into my rimes could ne’er be got

By any part. Then wonder not

That, since, my numbers are so cold,

When Love is fled and I grow old.

He admits his “mountain belly” and his “rocky face” and a weight but two pounds less than that attributed in later times to the corpulent Prince Regent. But love songs were demanded by the Jacobeans, in their plays and in the masques which Jonson’s art received as passing trifles and made enduring

The unwidely elephant,

To make them mirth, used all his might, and wreathed

His lithe proboscis.

Out of materials no less varied than his learning he fabricated songs which are as purely Elizabethan and as living today as anything their age fashioned. One of the earliest is the stately hymn to Queen Elizabeth in Cynthia’s Revels (1600), perhaps the most classically perfect lyric in English: “Queen and huntress, chaste and fair.” Into the climactic scene of Volpone he introduced one of his fabulous edition of Catullus,

Come, my Celia, let us prove,

While we can the sports of love;

Time wheill not be ours for ever.

……………………………………

Suns that set may rise again;

But if once we lose this light,

’Tis with us perpetual night.

He bewitched some passages of Greek prose into the rhythm of “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” and put into a lover’s mouth in The Devil Is an Ass (1616) a stanza which his “tribe” seem to have taken (and well they might) as their exacting form of lyric brilliance,

Have you seen but a bright lily grow,

Before rude hands have touch’d it?

Have you mark’d but the fall of the snow,

Before the soilhath smutch’d it?

The lyrical opulence of Jonson’s masques is huge. In these one-night spectacles, which Bacon called “but toys,” he created gems of song now rarely exposed. They range from the Skeltonic and coarse ditties of The Gypsies Metaorphosed to the organ notes with which descending Pallas lectures to the court in the year when Overbury’s murderer’s were being brought to trial:

Look, look, rejoice and wonder

That you, offending mortals, are

(For all your crimes) so much the care

Of him that bears the thunder.

Jove can endure no longer,

Your great ones should your less invade;

Or that you weak, though bad, be made

A prey unto the stranger.

Jonson was the model for the Restoration singers, and has been well described as the real father of the Augustan Age; but his influence was larger than this, for he was master also in his odes of an involved and magnetic music which hardly resurface in English poetry before the nineteenth century. If one seeks a “source” for the stanza and disposition of Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode, one will narrowly find it, tracing back, till one comes to such a stanza as this in Jonson:

It is not growing like a tree

In bulk doth make man better be,

Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,

To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere.

A lily of a day

Is fairer far in May:

Although it fall and die that night,

It was the plant and flower of light.

In small proportions we just beauties see,

And in short measures life may perfect be.

Ben Jonson was not the greatest poet of his time, no doubt; but under the impact of his immense mind and art critics have, in every succeeding age, found this hard to believe.

Jonson has been called ‘the first poet laureate’. If Jonson’s reputation as a playwright has traditionally been linked to Shakespeare, his reputation as a poet has, since the early 20th century, been linked to that of John Donne. In this comparison, Jonson represents the cavalier strain of poetry, emphasising grace and clarity of expression; Donne, by contrast, epitomised the metaphysical school of poetry, with its reliance on strained, baroque metaphors and often vague phrasing. Since the critics who made this comparison (Herbert Grierson for example), were to varying extents rediscovering Donne, this comparison often worked to the detriment of Jonson’s reputation.

In his time Jonson was at least as influential as Donne. In 1623, historian Edmund Bolton named him the best and most polished English poet. That this judgment was widely shared is indicated by the admitted influence he had on younger poets. The grounds for describing Jonson as the “father” of cavalier poets are clear: many of the cavalier poets described themselves as his “sons” or his “tribe”. For some of this tribe, the connection was as much social as poetic; Herrick described meetings at “the Sun, the Dog, the Triple Tunne”. All of them, including those like Herrick whose accomplishments in verse are generally regarded as superior to Jonson’s, took inspiration from Jonson’s revival of classical forms and themes, his subtle melodies, and his disciplined use of wit. In these respects Jonson may be regarded as among the most important figures in the prehistory of English neoclassicism.

In sum, if we analyse his works together, we discern some common features. He was the most scholarly and the most convinced of his generation. Until Milton he was, with his unparalleled knowledge of Greek and still greater knowledge of Latin, foremost among them. He was modestly inclined to French or Italian literature, being little-acquainted with those languages, and he had not Spenser’s empathy with the Middle Ages. His traditions were fundamentally Latin. The Latin muse appealed to his robust genius, with its desire for liveliness and penchant for moralizing. It definitely was not through him alone, but it was chiefly through his means, that neo-classicism was launched into English poetry in the seventeenth century. To quote Legouis: “He makes us feel that we are in the road to Dryden.”

It is, however, his second characteristic that his personality is not stifled by his Latin insignia. On the contrary, it illustrates itself very candidly. Ben Jonson was a glorious egoist, very stalwartly individualized, with rigid ideas which he emphasized conceitedly. His pride, his disdain for ignorance and fraudulence, his keenness for guilelessness and constancy, his straightforwardness, the masculine fondness for which he was competent – all these are evident in his verses.

Of course, he was without certain gifts – naturalness and fancy. His style slants towards the intangible and lacks imagery. His metres are diverse, but his rhythm is not elastic. There are many rigid structures in his verses, and Dryden described his translations ‘jaw-breaking’.

“But”, asserts Legouis, “he contributed to the poetry of his country some qualities in which it was then defective: he aimed at putting much meaning into the metrical line and his composition tended to be consecutive and regular. He subordinated fire and dash to logic. He taught soundness, reflection, self-control.”

Ben Jonson’s Poems

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 thou’wert lent to me, and I thee pay,

Exacted by thy f-ate, 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

For whose sake, -henceforth, all his vows be such,

As what he loves -may never like too much.

In response to his son’s untimely death, Jonson composed this short poem “On My First Son.”Nobody is entirely sure when he wrote the poem, but it must have been shortly after his son’s death and burial. The poem laments the death of Jonson’s son and expresses what appear to be Jonson’s feelings of profound sadness. (A poem that commemorates a dead person and laments their death is called an elegy, and there are many famous elegies in English.)

Even though Jonson wrote the poem shortly after his son’s death, he didn’t publish it until 1616, when he issued a collection of his works. In that collection, he sorted his poems into smaller groups.

“On My First Son” appears in a group of poems called Epigrams. (Epigrams are generally short and memorable little poems, usually only a few lines long.) Although it’s not a very long poem, it deals in great depth with the poet’s tremendous grief and loss. In just a few lines, Jonson packs a powerful punch.

The speaker of “On My First Son” imagines family as a kind of financial arrangement. God or Heaven lends the speaker his son for a time (in this case, just seven years). After that time has expired, the speaker has to pay back the child, so to speak. While it is kind of weird to think of family in this way, the speaker is at least able to offer some explanation for his son’s death.

• Line 3: The speaker says his son was “lent” to him for seven years. “Lent” is here

a metaphor to describe the son’s short life on earth. The speaker also says he has to “pay” back his son. The use of the verb “pay” carries forward the metaphor by likening the son’s death to repaying a loan.

• Line 4: The son’s death is “exacted” from the speaker. “Exacted” is another metaphor to describe how God or Heaven takes the son back from the speaker.

The speaker is writing about the death of his first-born child so, naturally, he’s upset. But he doesn’t just talk about his feelings with respect to his child. This guy feels all the feelings, and he goes on to claim that the world is full of things that cause “misery,” pain, and sadness. In fact, in the end he thinks that sometimes death can be a good thing, since one gets to escape from all that nasty, sorrowful stuff (aging, disappointment, etc.).

• Line 5: The speaker wishes to abandon all thoughts of fatherhood because the very thought of being a father now makes him sad.
• Line 6: The speaker suggests that one shouldn’t “lament,” or feel sadness about, death.
• Lines 7: Why not? It’s because death allows us an escape from the pains of the world and of the flesh—things that might cause pain and sadness. He calls this “flesh’s rage,” which is a personification of inanimate body parts, giving them human emotion.
• Line 8: Death also allows us to escape from old age, which the speaker considers a “misery.”
• Lines 11-12: The speaker, for his own sake, wishes to never like “too much” the things he loves. He implies that this leads to punishments of the kind he has just suffered.

Come, my Celia

Come, my Celia, let us prove

While we may, the sports of love;

Time will not be ours forever;

He at length our good will sever.

Spend not then his gifts in vain.

Suns that set may rise again;

But if once we lose this light,

‘Tis with us perpetual night.

Why should we defer our joys?

Fame and rumor are but toys.

Cannot we delude the eyes

Of Or his easier ears beguile,

So removed by our wile?

‘Tis no sin love’s fruit to steal;

But the sweet theft to reveal.

To be taken, to be seen,

These have crimes accounted been.

Ben Jonson’s poem beginning “Come, my Celia, let us prove” originally appeared as a song in Jonson’s famous 1605 comedy titled Volpone. In the play, the lecherous Volpone uses the song to try to persuade the virtuous Celia to have sex with him. Jonson’s poem alludes to a much-earlier poem by the Roman poet Catullus – a poem usually referred to as “Ode 5.” This ode begins with the following line: “Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus” (“Let us live, my Lesbia, and love”). Jonson’s poem, then, strongly alludes to Catullus’s earlier work.

Volpone’s “song,” however, is much less obsessed with mere kissing that Catullus’s is. Gathering as many kisses as possible from Lesbia seems to be the main purpose of Catullus’s speaker; he seems to think or speak of little else. Volpone, however, seems much less concerned with kisses (which he never even mentions) than with what he suggestively calls “the sports of love”:

Come my Celia, let us prove,

While we may, the sports of love. 

In the play, this song is embedded in a scene in which Volpone clearly hopes to enjoy far more than simple kisses from Celia, and in fact at one point in the scene Volpone seems about to rape Celia (before she is suddenly rescued from that fate). In contrast to Jonson’s poem, then, Catullus’s seems almost mild, and indeed the hundreds and thousands of kisses sought my Catullus’s speaker seem so exaggerated in number that it is hard to take the speaker seriously.

Volpone, in contrast, must be taken very seriously indeed; he is not nearly as laughable as Catullus’s speaker; instead, he is genuinely threatening and predatory. Thus, by alluding to Catullus’s poem, Jonson’s poem allows us to see how Volpone both does and does not resemble Catullus’s speaker.

Yet Jonson’s poem may also allude to other texts than Catullus’s poem and to other ideas than the ideas contained in Catullus’s ode. Jonson’s poem seems highly ironic, for instance, if it is read in light of the teachings of the Christian Bible. This is especially true when Volpone claims, in line 15, that “’Tis no sin love’s fruit to steal.” Here the word “sin” immediately reminds us of Christian religious standards (in a way that a more neutral word, such as “crime,” would not have done). In addition, this line also reminds us of the original sin of Adam and Eve, who stole fruit they were forbidden to taste.

In general, Jonson’s poem alludes to many different standard Christian doctrines, only to repudiate them. Thus, Volpone claims that “Time will not be ours for ever” (3) – a direct contradiction of Christian teachings. Likewise, he urges Celia, “Spend not then *time’s+ gifts in vain” (5), when that is precisely what he is trying to seduce her to do. Similarly, at one point he claims that

. . . if once we lose this light

‘Tis, with us, perpetual night. (7-8)

These lines, ironically, may inadvertently remind Christian readers of the “perpetual night” of life in hell if the spiritual “light” of Christ is lost.

In short, Jonson’s poem seems to allude both to Catullus’s text (and similar seduction poems, both classical and later) and to standard Christian ideas of the time. In all cases (it is possible to argue), the allusions make Volpone’s poem appear even more ironic, even less savoury, than it already seems.

Reference 

• Brooke, Tucker & Shaaber, M. A. [Ed. by A.C.Baugh], Literary History of England, Vol: II, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1967.
• Bush, Douglas, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600–1660, Oxford History of English Literature, Clarendon Press. Oxford, 1945.
• Donaldson, Ian. Ben Jonson: A Life.: Oxford University Press. Oxford, 2011.
• Eliot, T.S. “Ben Jonson.” The Sacred Wood, Methuen, London, 1920.
• Legouis & Cazamian, History of English Literature, Macmillan, New Delhi, 1997. (Indian Editon, Reprint)
• MacLean, Hugh, (ed.) Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets: Norton Press, New York, 1974.