1—
"On My First Son"

"On My First Son" is an interesting poem. Its first line contains a satisfying diversion: the riddle of child of my right hand . That is an odd epithet. Why child of my right hand? Owners of a Geneva Bible—which, among those of Jonson's contemporaries who had had any schooling, was effectively everybody—were acquainted with the pleasures of knowing the etymological roots of given names, and could puzzle out the epithet as a translation of "Benjamin"—which the Geneva "table of the interpretations of the proper names" glosses as "sonne of the right hand."^[3] Editors and

[3] This is the Geneva entry in full: "Benjamin, sonne of the right hand who was first called Benoni the sonne of sorow." The naming of the newborn Benoni by Rachel and his renaming by Jacob are in Genesis 35:18; this is the Geneva version: "Then as she was about to yelde up the goste (for she dyed) she called his name Ben-oni, but his father called him Beniamin." Geneva's list of etymologies appears to have been well known in Jonson's time (perhaps because it provided something nonreligious to read on Sundays), and Jonson's first readers might have heard the sad irony by which the son of Jonson's right hand had become the son of sorrow.

Herford and Simpson note that in addition to its literal meaning, "the Hebrew Benjamin" meant "fortunate" or "dextrous" (11–9). And Don W. Der, talking about Jonson's first readers, says that "'child of the right hand' would cause them to remember that the Latin dexter, which literally means 'on the right side' or 'right,' figuratively means 'dextrous,' 'skillful,' or 'lucky'" (Explicator, 44 [1986]: 17).

classroom teachers now get to decode this bit of what Jonson elsewhere scornfully calls "herald's wit."^[4] The pleasure of decoding it and explaining the arch etymological pedantry by which, in line 10, the child is the senior Ben Jonson's best piece off poetry may account for the poem's current popularity as an object of classroom analysis. (Over the years that I talked about "On My First Daughter" in Freshman English at Berkeley, I had regularly to contend with helpful teaching assistants who ran off copies of "On My First Son" for the students or attempted otherwise to help out by getting us off colorless little "On My First Daughter" and onto its more demanding and critically rewarding brother.)^[5]

[4] See line 12 of "To the Memory of . . .Lady Jane, Eldest Daughter to Cuthbert, Lord Ogle: and Countess of Shrewsbury" (H&S, 8:394). These are lines 1–3, 7–12 (since the "original" orthography of this particular poem is particularly and inconsequentially cumbersome and since I quote the poem only incidentally, I have casually modernized both spelling and punctuation):

I could begin with that grave form,  Here lies,
And pray thee, reader, bring thy weeping eyes
To see who it is....
But every table in this church can say
A list of epithets and praise this way.
No stone in any wall here, but can tell
Such things of every body, and as well.
Nay, they will venture one's descent to hit,
And Christian name too, with a herald's wit.

[5] The teaching assistants spoke for the literary establishment. The fullest treatment of "On My First Daughter" is an essay by Ann Lauinger called "'It makes the father, lesse, to rue': Resistance to Consolation in Jonson's 'On my first Daughter'" (Studies in Philology, 86 [1989]: 219–34)—an essay with which at several points I disagree profoundly and which I nonetheless recommend to everyone interested in the two epitaphs. Lauinger, whose modest ambition in the essay is to say that "while not necessarily greater" than "On My First Son," "On My First Daughter" is "at least more interesting than it is usually considered" (219), begins her essay by saying this: "For any reader of Jonson's Epigrammes, comparisons between the two epitaphs "On my first Daughter" (Ep. XXII) and "On my First Sonne" (Ep. XLV) are probably inevitable. That "On my First Sonne" is the greater poem is a judgment from which few readers would dissent...."

Lauinger says "few readers would dissent," but the consensus she reports is not of readers but of twentieth-century professionals, academic critics whose product is explication and whose preferences tend to be for poems that can be shown to need analysis in order to function fully. I think it says a lot about the two poems that in the seventeenth century—when the two epitaphs were new and were read rather than studied—the poem extensively alluded to and imitated was "On My First Daughter," not "On My First Son."

In his notes to a strenuously interpretive essay called "To Write Sorrow in Jonson's 'On My First Son'" (John Donne Journal, 9 [1990]: 149–55), Lauren Silberman gives a valuable, succinct account of previous commentary on "On My First Son."

There is similar, though less elaborate, cerebral fun in the ostentatiously artful financial metaphor (lent, pay, exacted, just day ) in the second couplet. And, although the commentators I know of have let it slip by them ungarnished, the poem's diverting display of wit is even more extravagant in line 5, where O could I lose all father now awkwardly stretches idiomatic English to come up with all father, which context glosses as "all fatherly emotions" and which is the price Jonson pays for a play on "the mother," the old medical term for "hysteria."^[6]

Nonetheless, there is a great deal to be said in favor of "On My First Son," which, however debilitating its showy effects may ultimately be, also has capacities comparable to those that make "On My First Daughter" great. Those capacities largely derive from effects that are hardly more than gnats to the con-

[6] Jonson's fondness for playing on the medical sense of "mother" was all but inexhaustible. See his plays on "Fits o'th' Mother" in line 40 of "An Epigram on The Court Pucell" (H&S 8:223) and "Sicke o' the uncle" in Epicoene, I.1.143, to which Herford and Simpson (10:8) compare Robert Burton's "the sonne and heir is commonly sicke of the father."

sciousness of a reader—effects whose energy and life span are comparable to those of a quark (and whose existences are as hard to demonstrate as the existences of quarks)—effects like the ones described in the next five paragraphs.

In line 4, by thy fate is delicately and insignificantly ambiguous. The phrase permits the mind to apprehend the same information in two different ways at once. The word by at once personifies Fate as a creditor by whom the debt is exacted and establishes a concurrent construction that sustains the financial-legal metaphor in quite another way and makes the same general point as its alter ego: "according to the terms of thy fate."

In line 5, the 1616 text gives loose where we would print lose . Renaissance texts make no systematic orthographic distinction between the two related words, but there is no reason to believe that Renaissance readers spent any more time deciding which sense "lose" or "loose" signaled than we do when we see "the bow" and decide whether it refers to an archer's implement (pronounced to rhyme with "toe") or the front end of a ship (pronounced to rhyme with "plough"), or than we do when we see "to bow" in the stock phrases "to bow one's neck" and "to bow one's head." Context tells us. And context surely told any Renaissance reader which word loose signaled in the Folio's O, could I loose all father, now . But—if it is understood that I am not proposing the presence of active, substantively informative ambiguity of the sort close readers are wont to propose—I do suggest that, in the fraction of a second during which seventeenth-century minds were open to either identity, the ideas of letting loose and of looseness entered their consciousnesses where the two ideas complemented both the hysteria of the exclamation about losing all father (the speaker lets loose his fatherly emotions in a paradoxically passionate wish to lose them) and the new looseness in the relationship between the couplet form and the speaker's sentences.

I would argue similarly about the word Will in line 6 (in why/Will man lament, which means "why does mankind persist in lamenting" and nothing else), and about the word yet in line 8

(in And, if no other misery, yet age, where the function of yet is almost purely emphatic and its nearest synonym is "nevertheless"). Both words appear here in sentences that preclude the time-related senses they commonly have, but they appear here in the general context of a poem held together by the constancy of its various appeals to a reader's sense of time—and in close proximity to now, soon, and age in the poem's central four lines.

Similarly, the verb To have in line 7 turns out to be a mere auxiliary to 'scaped, but appears in context of the topic of possession and loss and in a line where, until the construction is defined by 'scaped, the phrase To have so soon can fleetingly say "So early to have possessed."

And in line 8, the sense to be taken from the phrase no other misery is dictated by context, but a potential sense inadmissible in the syntax of line 8 is urgently pertinent to the substance of the sentence in which it appears: "no further misery."

I want now to go through the poem and talk about the interactions of its flashy, self-congratulatory effects and little ones like those I have just described.

My harsh comments on the glitter of "On My First Son" are, I believe, warranted, but they are insufficient and are to that extent unjust. My accounts of the cold, trivializing conceits imply that the lines are merely cold and trivial, but they are not. The first two couplets are saved from brittleness by things like the prose-simple artlessness of line 2 and the humane clumsiness of the phrase and joy, which—as an unexpected and anticlimactic appendage to a perfect nugget of etymological wit in a neat, complete octosyllabic line—feels as if it is there only because what it says is true—is there only because the child was his father's joy.^[7]

[7] That sense of artless simplicity is, I think, pure—even though child of my . . .joy offers its readers' minds a potential aftertaste of "product of my sexual pleasure" and of "child of my beloved wife." Note, too, that—though loved boy (the syllables that stretch line 2 to match the decasyllable and joy made of line I) can feel to readers like metric filler particularized by the poet's need to rhyme joy —the expansion of line I itself is a very different matter. That expansion feels artless because and joy, the substantive and rhythmic afterthought at the end of line 1, is the first indication we get that the line will not be an octosyllable and occurs before we know what rhyme sound the poet will commit himself to.

Moreover, and surprisingly, I think the assertions in the first two couplets feel like more than vehicles for displays of craftsmanship—feel true—because each is sustained by an extra witty fillip over and above the relatively brazen wit of the etymology of "Benjamin" and the earnestly sustained financial metaphor of lines 3 and 4. (One of the most curious things about wit is the metamorphosis that an extra twist can bring about in the essence of the experience of perceiving and responding to a conceit or to a joke. When a speaker shows us a surprising connection between two objects or contexts, we are likely to dismiss the union as a toy; but, when we perceive two independent points of accidental or contrived junction between two disparate things, their improbable union comes to feel real—comes to feel like a supernatural fact of nature. Consider the difference between our response to a joke and the sense of spiritual exultation engendered by a "topper" for it. The independent arbitrary unions that meter and rhyme make in, say, an iambic pentameter couplet can interact similarly to transform an artificial union into a unit—a thing, a whole perceived as an identity stronger than the identities of its distinguishable parts.)

In line I of "On My First Son" the mere wit of child of my right hand coexists with an equally trivial suggestion of honor, importance, and usefulness that comes with right hand, a term idiomatically familiar in the notion by which a great man's second in command is his "right hand" (the Oxford English Dictionary cites this from 1581: "that arch-Papist Edmund Campion, the Pope his right hand")—and daily repeated in the Apostles' Creed ("[Jesus Christ] ascended unto heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty"). As the English words child of my right hand "miraculously" say "Benjamin," so both the honor inherent in the phrase right hand and the notions of father, son, and immortality in heaven inherent in the most famous con-

text of right hand also miraculously fit a context in which a father considers the premature death of a son. Play on those connotations of right hand is only potential—and is most effective for being so. I suggest that the potential lies just behind the consciousness of a reader (whose mind is as a mind is just before it seizes on a witty connection between disparate things), and that the felt potential for unexploited wit gives a feel of rightness that exploited potential (like that in "Benjamin" and its etymology) loses by virtue of the advertisement of artifice that the action of making the openly witty—and thus openly arbitrary—connection brings with it.

Ultimately, I think, the rhetorical failure of the first couplet—the failure inherent in the fact that we attend more to its etymological cleverness than to its substance—outweighs and overwhelms the effects that can be justly said to militate against that failure. The same is true of the second couplet:

Seuen yeeres tho'wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
  Exacted by thy fate, on the iust day.

That couplet fails for a reader who, like me, objects that it sweats too much in elaborating the analogical symmetry of the loan metaphor—a metaphor traditional since classical times, but rarely used with so cool a display of craftsmanlike thoroughness. The couplet fails, I think, even for a reader who takes pleasure in noticing and admiring the fullness of the metaphor. In either case the couplet—the artist's immediate, palpable product—is the object of a reader's attention and not the couplet's substance.

I want, however, to consider a different sort of rhetorical failure in the second couplet, a failure that makes for rhetorical strength. The interaction of exploited and latent energies in the second couplet is far more complex than that in couplet 1. Like the first, the second couplet is at once ostentatiously, extravagantly tenuous and possessed of effective suggestions that there is mysterious underlying validity to the speaker's line of thinking. The key element in the couplet, the one that lets us accept it without stopping to evaluate its justice, is its appeal to the idea that

one cannot fight fate—specifically to the idea that some people are fated to die young. However, most of the energy of the lines is devoted to invoking another tradition, one that is both appropriate and inappropriate, and one that is a means whereby an easy, platitudinous gesture acknowledges considerations capable of revealing the insufficiency of the narrow, arbitrarily conceived consolation it offers. The couplet's inclusion of reminders of uncomfortable ways of thinking about the child's death gives a still-platitudinous and simplistic gesture the feel of a philosophy that has been tested and found sufficient.

Let me explain.

Most of the energy of the couplet goes into the analogy between a life span and the stipulated term of a loan—an analogy proverbially familiar in notions such as "owing God a death" and "paying one's debt to nature," and therefore, by a logic comparable to the precedental logic of common law, automatically persuasive. There is an obvious justice to the analogy; and, since its currency augments that justice, a gesture toward it can be efficient—even though the analogy fits a normal life span of three score and ten and is desperately impertinent to the death of a child.^[8]

In the second couplet of "On My First Son," however, Jonson disables the persuasiveness that we are culturally conditioned to accept from the analogy. Jonson's self-assertive display of financial terms calls so much attention to the "poetic" justice of the analogy that it calls attention to the fact that application of the analogy is arbitrary, the product of the poet's decision to "look at it this way." (After all, any simile or analogy asserts its own inadequacy; the mere fact that it must be invoked advertises the fact that what it makes evident is not evident in the given sit-

[8] The analogy appears to similarly comfortable effect in the second couplet of "On My First Daughter," where its logical action is only to say that the child would have died anyhow, but where it also carries a logically illicit implication that the death in question was in the nature of things just as death at seventy would be.

uation as normally perceived.) In this case, moreover, Jonson brings the brevity of the dead child's life into the analogy (Seven years thou'wert lent to me ), and challenges his own device in on the just day, which asserts the desired conclusion so openly as to advertise the injustice of applying the analogy to this situation. The obviously ameliorative analogy thus also aggravates the sense of injustice that a child's death evokes. Sheltered as it is by the easy efficacy of the couplet's gesture toward fatalism, Jonson's financial analogy actively generates exactly the response to the poem's occasion that the debt metaphor generically signals its desire to combat.

I suggest that there is positive rhetorical value in reminding the poem's reader of the arbitrary narrowness of the premises from which the conceit offers consolation. No conceit for dealing with the death of a child can succeed. No way of thinking about the death of a child can make it feel other than wrong. And, except where speaker and audience are genuine fanatics, that includes conceptions based in the transparently sufficient comforts of Christianity. Genuine belief in death as a benefit cannot—and never could—combat knowledge that death is an evil.^[9]

Comfortable and uncomfortable conceptions of death ordinarily live side by side in the mind, and ordinarily they do not

[9] Many students and some of their teachers are given to starting for a historical rabbit hole when confronted with poems like this one. They announce that "in those days" the faith of Christians was so intense and so literal that they could think of a dead child in paradise much as a modern parent thinks of a child away at a fashionable boarding school. No one can deny the depth and sincerity of Christian faith during any period, but "in those days" no less than in our own the number and the urgency of reminders from friends, clerics, and poets of the metaphysical truth of the situation testify loudly to the need for such reminders and to their insufficiency. Although the analogy is far-fetched and coarse, I suggest that to accept Christian protestations that the deceased is lucky as straightforward historical evidence of the general prevalence of the state of mind they so strenuously promote is logically comparable to taking the "No Spitting" signs that festooned the United States in the first half of this century as evidence that in the first half of this century Americans did not spit in public places.

effectively touch.^[10] In this second couplet of "On My First Son"—a couplet that includes connotations of the just day that pertain to the premature death of a child and do not pertain to the loan analogy—a fanciful and contrived escape from the responses premature death inevitably elicits is openly fanciful and contrived. In admitting the frailty of the conceit, in acknowledging the consideration it is designed to exclude, the couplet admits—includes, lets come in—the very facts and responses that evoke the need for consolation. That substantive admission augments the implication of breadth and scope that the couplet has by virtue of its double conception as a familiar statement of fatalistic resignation and as an application of the equally familiar analogy between death and paying a debt. By acknowledging the existence of considerations beyond both of its strictly limited frames of reference, the simplistic, pathetically eager little couplet takes on some of the authority of a genuine panacea. The rhetorical weakness of a particular tactic, the debt analogy, makes the couplet rhetorically stronger and more capable of providing consolation.

[10] And, when they do touch, they do not efficiently touch, do not effectively crash into one another and do damage to one another. Occasions when minds notice the discrepancy between what they sincerely believe and what they actually think and feel are likely to be comfortably comic. Consider, for example, Feste's proof that Olivia is a fool for mourning the death of a brother she knows to be in heaven (Twelfth Night, 1.5.52–67), and Friar Laurence's speech to Juliet's grieving parents on the day they had expected her to marry Paris:

The most you sought was her promotion,
For 'twas your heaven she should be advanced;
And weep ye now, seeing she is advanced
Above the clouds, as high as heaven itself?
(Romeo and Juliet, 4-5.71–74)

Both the fool's trick and the friar's strike us as just that—tricks, clever pieces of choplogic that are amusing because the matter-of-fact practical consolation the speakers quite logically presume is unthinkable for even the most devout of Christians.

(Here and throughout, I quote Shakespeare in the revised Pelican text, ed. Alfred Harbage et al. [Baltimore, 1969].)

There is still more to be said about elements in the second couplet that are foreign to its overt strategy and purpose. At the same time that on the just day triumphantly continues and adds a disconcerting final flash to the loan analogy, and at the same time that the idea of justice disables the comfort of that analogy, the components of the phrase introduce a free-floating, "accidental," suggestion of the day of judgment—an idea irrelevant to the neat, narrow loan analogy but urgently relevant both to death and to efforts to comfort survivors. The suggestion is evoked by the context in combination with the verbal echo of "day of judgment" and, more actively, its common synonym, "day of account."^[11] Here, as with right hand in the first couplet, a verbal hint of an unexploited line of thinking vouches rhetorically but illogically for the validity of the alien proposition in which it occurs. It quietly dissipates one's sense of the arbitrary narrowness of the line of thought that is pursued, and it beckons one's mind toward collaborating with the speaker and saying "not only that, but ..."

A similar effect occurs in this same couplet in another dimension entirely. The couplet points toward, but does not pursue, an alternate conceit—one that, if exploited, would have been both more just than the loan analogy and perfectly unjust as well. The length of the child's life, seven years, is accidentally the traditional term of an apprenticeship. Since the departure of an apprentice after seven years is of the nature of the system in which it occurs, the analogy between a father bidding resigned farewell to a prematurely dead child and a craftsman regretfully but cheerfully discharging a "right-hand man" whose indenture is fulfilled is, in one way, a much stronger persuasion to sanguine acceptance of the child's death than the loan analogy.

However, where the natural span of an apprenticeship is seven years, that of a human life is seventy. So, although the appren-

[11] Jonson himself uses the term in Discoveries; see H&S 8:603 (lines 1282–84): "When the great day of Account comes . . .there will be requir'd of him a reckoning...."

ticeship analogy offers a desirable sense of rightness in the death, the falseness of the analogy would be transparent if it were applied overtly. As the couplet is, the unexploited, latently present apprenticeship analogy is both more effective than its full development could have been and —because it comes to us as if of the nature of the situation—more effective than any open (and therefore openly purposeful, calculated, and arbitrary) request that we "think of it this way."

Although the slick, determinedly detached intellectuality of the first two couplets is undercut, it is nonetheless extreme. The next four lines—the exclamation in line 5 and the lurching syntax that trails off from it through line 8—present themselves as a frustrated reaction to the preceding neatness:

O, could I loose all father, now. For why
  Will man lament the state he should enuie?
To haue so soone scap'd worlds, and fleshes rage,
  And, if no other miserie, yet age?

Now the surface is hysterical—all passion. But, as the boxlike orderliness of the two earlier couplets was sabotaged by metric and ideational loose ends, the desperate flailing of these two loose middle couplets is countered by the cold dexterity of Jonson's play on all father and "the mother." The actions of that conceit make it an emblem of the physics of the whole poem: as a mere witty device—a word-trick that steps aside from tragedy to play—the father /"mother" conceit is counteractive to the emotional tone of the line and, since the substantive "point" of the squalid little gimcrack is to conceal and then reveal a reference to hysteria, the conceit also cooperates with the exclamation and with the variously informal syntax that follows it.

That syntax coexists with the formal couplet pattern—overlies it—but mirrors it neither grammatically (as it might if the completion of syntactic units coincided with line ends), nor logically (as it might if the completion of each proposition coincided with the rhyme that completes the formal identity of each couplet). As a result, the loosely connected outpouring of propo-

sitions in lines 5 – 8 has the random feel of ungoverned emotion. However, from For why on, the substance expressed in those four lines is not only rationalistic but the stuff of traditional efforts to reason one's way out of grief. The stuff of those four lines is the stuff of the classic, cliched[clichéd], sanctimonious choplogic Feste echoes in his transparently arbitrary, transparently valid, and transparently irrelevant comic proof that Olivia is a fool for mourning a brother in heaven—and of the equally inefficient, traditional arguments that the shorter one's passage is through this vale of tears the better (see note 9 above).

Those middle four lines enact a paradox: hysterical intellectualization. And, like the whole poem—in which the two modes of response have so far fought each other to a draw—those four lines point toward despair. The situation is equally invulnerable to emotional and to rational mediation.^[12]

And the new couplet in lines 9 and 10 begins by giving up: Rest in soft peace —the requiescat in pace of tombstones—a dignified formula that had already come to suggest "so much for that." However, just as he had done in his previous sorties, Jonson disables his new tactic—giving up, dismissing the matter as finished—in the very act of executing it. The word soft —which introduces a very gentle, perfectly undemanding pun on in indicating condition (as in plain "Rest in Peace") and in in its most literal sense, indicating location (as in "rest in bed" or "rest in soft sheets")—particularizes the formula, revitalizes it, and (like the more explicit bed metaphor at the end of "On My First Daughter"), demands our awareness of the physical fact of a human body bedded down in earth.

[12] The words "lose" and "father" in "O, could I loose all father, now" at the beginning of the third couplet bring it a substantively irrelevant feel of simultaneous "wrongness" and "rightness" that makes it casually emblematic of the stalemate of competing considerations and realities in the speaker's mental situation. A father lamenting a loss wishes for a loss; what he has lost is a son, and what he now wishes to lose is "all father." On the other hand, no two words are more pertinent to the poem's topic than "lose" and "father"—no two are "righter" for this poem.

Rest in soft peace also opens the way for a further complication by echoing a phrase "spoken" by a gravestone.

Rest in soft peace, and, ask'd, say here doth lye
  Ben. Ionson his best piece of  poetrie .

The conjunction of Rest in soft peace and and asked say initiates a confusion among three of the four parties to the poem—a vastly complex confusion, even though, because each signal so perfectly pertains to one of the systems in which the poem is organized, it does not effectively confuse the fourth party, the reader.

When a gravestone "says" "Rest in Peace," it addresses the deceased, and we consciously understand it to be delivering a message from the stone's sponsors. The second gravestone formula in the couplet is different. When a gravestone "says" "Here lies ...," it addresses passersby, and, though we know that any sign speaks for a human being who set it there, we think of the sign as we would if it were autonomous; we do not think of any "they" who are trying to get the information to us.^[13]Rest in soft peace is spoken by the father/speaker directly to the child (who has been addressed throughout—expressly addressed in the first two couplets and, by inference, still auditor to the outburst in the second two). Line 9 addresses two instructions to the child: Rest and say . The first instruction echoes a gravestone's stock wish for the deceased who lies beneath it, and—since the poem presents itself as if it were an inscription on a gravestone—Rest in soft peace here is both the stock phrase and a witty revivification of it. The second instruction, say (in and, asked, say ), is just an ordinary imperative, addressed by the speaker to a listener capable of obeying it. The action of understanding say thus inci-

[13] The difference in our senses of the relation between these two messages and messengers is comparable to the difference between the way we think about a sign that says "No Parking" and the way we think about a sign that says "Bush Street." Compare "Trespassers will be prosecuted" and "Trespassers W," ancestral home of the Piglets.

dentally involves—and thus casually, effortlessly assumes—the revivification of the child whose death is the poem's occasion. A split second later, the speaker tells the child what to say. The logic of the sentence presents Here doth lie / Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry as words the child is to say. But the child is dead. The only physically available speaker for the prescribed response to askers is the stone on which the poem is engraved and which thus fulfills the injunction the syntax addresses to the dead and speechless child. Moreover, the words echo words ordinarily "spoken" by a gravestone legend of the sort this poem adopts as a sort of persona.

There is nothing even theoretically difficult about reading Rest in soft peace: the speaker speaks words that a gravestone would ordinarily permanently repeat for him. But one does not ordinarily think of "Here lies ..." as a message in which the deceased identifies himself in the third person. Yet the "Here lies" formula "belongs" here (because this is a gravestone poem) and "belongs" in this particular line (which begins with a gravestone formula). The various ways that "Here lies" belongs overwhelm the probability that we will pause to realize that, asked, we could not say just what the particulars are that we so easily comprehend as we move across line 9—a line that, however much and however justly I may analyze it into nonsense, remains perfectly easy to follow, so easy that editors do not bother to explain it.

What line 9 gives its readers is what the whole poem has sought to provide: an ability to comprehend—to grasp as one can a physical object—ideational substance that exists in more than one physics and does not, except in the purely verbal simplicity of this line, quite exist in any single one.

At the end of line 9 we know, as we always did and always will, which is the father and which is the child; and we know the differences among what the father says, what tombstones say, and what the child may be fancied as saying; but in the action of understanding this easily understood line our minds have behaved as they would if we confused a dead child with a living one, a

dead child with his gravestone, and a father (who is writing a poem for a gravestone) with the gravestone.

Line 9 ends before it completes the formula here doth lie begins and promises to fulfill. No matter what the first words of the next line might have been, any reader would have tried to understand them as the name of the deceased: "Here lies name ." And line 10 does indeed begin with a name: Ben Jonson . The poem momentarily asks us to understand that the poet—the antecedent for My in the title of this epitaph he is writing on another person—is the deceased, is the person in the grave. That, of course, is impossible. One's first, momentary response to Here doth lie / Ben Jonson is likely to be a momentary suspicion that one has misread. In fact, we are indeed mistaken; and the poem contains two quite separate, mutually incompatible demonstrations of the error. One precedes the error: the solution to the elegant puzzle in line i told us that the child's name was Ben Jonson; so we did not misread the "Here lies" formula; we only misunderstood it. The other demonstrator of error is the word his, the word that signals a syntax capable of accommodating best piece of poetry (and thus redefines a whole clause and renders consideration of the son's name obsolete and pragmatically irrelevant): these lines are not trying to say "Here lies Ben Jonson" but "Here lies Ben Jonson's ..." This genitive construction in which "his" does what "s"—or in recent times "'s"—ordinarily does was a literary fad among language-conscious Elizabethans.^[14] Although Jonson's contemporaries would have been familiar with the affectation and modern readers are not, I think the four centuries between us and the long-forgotten fad has only intensified, and lengthened the

[14] Renaissance genitives in proper name-plus-his are principally found in self-consciously elegant, learned, and pompous writing. My guess is that the affectation arose from an ignorant belief that his represented the pure, uncorrupted state of a construction that had degenerated into s . In fact, the apostrophe by which we now indicate the inflected form may well have gained currency from the same linguistic speculation: it may have been understood to be a sign of ellipsis.

duration of, an effect that was always there: all readers have always been offered the potentially complete assertion Here doth lie Ben Jonson before coming upon the modification provided by his .^[15]

Similarly, a reader's mind can for an instant take hold of a potentially sufficient assertion ending with "his best peace" before the phrase expands into his best piece of poetry . Jonson's contemporaries, not conditioned to orthographic distinctions between homonyms,^[16] were presumably opener to piece as an echo of Rest in soft peace than we are, but even eye-governed modern readers probably hear a connection between here doth lie Ben Jonson his best piece^[17] and Rest in soft peace —a connection that vaguely confirms and further complicates our sense that these lines require us actively to reject unreasonable suggestions that the poet himself is dead. The lines momentarily contain vague, unanchored reference to the traditional notion of death as a way to peace—of death as desirable for such traditional reasons as are rehearsed in the preceding couplet.

As his made us put aside momentary considerations about Here doth lie Ben Jonson, the last two words of the couplet, of poetry, require us to put aside any transitory awareness of the general pertinence of the sound of "peace" in piece . Only one sense of that syllable is now locally pertinent. Once again, however, the new element that narrows and clarifies our understanding introduces a new challenge. This one is overt: what lies in the grave is a child's body, not a poem. Everything I have said about this couplet demonstrates that, as one reads the sentence begun in line 9, the phrases and their interactions repeatedly and variously tease one toward consciousness that the sentence delivers

[15] In context of asked, say, and a succession of transparently artificial efforts to assert resignation to the will of heaven and/or fate, it is possible also that a reader's consciousness may be momentarily tickled by the momentarily justifiable "Here Ben Jonson tells falsehoods" in Here doth lie / Ben Jonson .

[16] OED reports "peace" as a spelling for the word also spelled "piece" from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It gives examples of Renaissance spellings common to both words.

[17] Compare the construction of Antony and Cleopatra 2.3.41: "In the East my pleasure lies."

its simple message in a perverse, unreasonably confusing way. The arch etymological play (on poet as maker and poem as thing made) and the just hut creaky analogy between child and poem^[18] differ from the other peculiarities of the couplet principally in being showy and demanding: we have to work out—and applaud and congratulate ourselves on solving—the puzzle; we have to see not only that this apparently strange statement is only a strange locution, but how .

I submit that, however trivial and distracting the glitter of its final conceit, this couplet puts us through a tiny but real experience of seeing justice in a series of bizarre events (here merely verbal events); the experience of reading "Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say here doth lie / Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry"—the experience of reading the sentence as sentence—is comparable to the larger, more desirable, unattainable mental experience of perceiving the secret logic of the mind of God. The couplet—as couplet, whatever its content—is a box; the word poetry, its second rhyme word, closes it. The same word completes a noun phrase that allows us to brush away the last of the tiny, fleetingly misleading incidental signals that heighten our mental achievement in finally seeing the justice of the lines—in seeing that Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry equals "my son."

From its first line on, this poem has offered to substitute the satisfaction of discovering the logic of its anomalous verbal events for the desired satisfaction of discovering a logic behind the unreasonable fact of a child's death. A reader's "Oh, I see" about the piece of poetry /child puzzle substitutes for the fully informed concurrence both speaker and reader would like to have in the divine logic by which a child is dead. We are urged to walk away from the grave as contentedly as we can now walk away from one of these easy little couplets.

[18] The ostentatiously surprising etymological quibble is quietly sustained by the "brainchild" tradition, the tradition in which poets speak of their works as their children. For famous examples, see the metaphors in the first sonnet of Astrophel and Stella, the introductory letter Sidney prefaced to Arcadia, Amoretti 2, and Shakespeare's Sonnet 76.

Although completion of the phrase piece of poetry gives us a moment of triumphant clarity and simplicity derived from the final, satisfyingly solvable puzzle, the end of this couplet is not the end of the poem. Moreover, the word poetry —the word that closes the couplet and cuts off further concern about what the lines mean to say—is also specially suited to keep us uneasy—not consciously uneasy about our conclusions, but uneasy about the conclusiveness of the miniature triumph of solving the piece of poetry puzzle. What we are reading here is a piece of poetry (that lies before us on a page and presents itself as a gravestone inscription). Moreover, the couplet that concludes with piece of poetry calls attention to its dutiful obedience to Procrustean metric demands. Thus, like so many earlier effects in the poem, the couplet reminds a reader that even the limited mastery the poem offers is arbitrary and artificial—is of the couplet rather than of the situation it deals with. We have been reminded that this is verse. We are reminded, first, because neither the formula "Rest in Peace" nor the formula "Here lies ..." is quite present in line 9: one has an extra syllable, soft, and the other is doth lie and not the traditional "lies"; these are not gravestone formulas but echoes of them, echoes puffed out to fit the meter. Second, we are made aware of the poem as poem—the poem as artificial buffer between its audience and the realities that occasioned it—because, even with the syllables added for metric regularity, the meter of line 9 is rough anyway, made so by its insistence upon the two syllables of ask'd, say (which both invite stress), rather than the metrically predictable "asked[askèd], say."

The satisfying finality that comes with our arrival at the word poetry is further diminished when the next couplet—the sixth and last—turns out to be a syntactic continuation of the one poetry so neatly ended:

Rest in soft peace, and, ask'd, say here doth lye
  Ben. Ionson his best piece of  poetrie .
For whose sake, hence-forth, all his vowes be such,
  As what he loues may neuer like too much.

And, oddly enough, the new couplet—which the pronoun whose makes so openly dependent on the preceding syntax—so quickly generates an independent identity that it feels as tight, neat, and self-contained as the first, second, and fifth do.^[19]

The paradox by which the last couplet is and is not separate from the couplet that precedes it is worth noting only because, in its own tiny way, it requires a reader—or, better, enables a reader—to perceive in a way typical of the means—and crucial to the ends—of both the couplet and the whole poetic enterprise of "On My First Son." The independence of related things—knowing where one thing ends and another begins—is of the essence of the dilemma that the epitaph attempts to handle. The stylistic paradox relates to the general situation: the body is dead / the soul lives on; the child is gone / the body remains; the child is dead / the father lives on.

The paradox of the last two couplets' disunity and unity, their simultaneous independence and interdependence, also relates to the inherent function of any epitaph: an epitaph perpetuates the memory of the deceased and is an act of dismissal, a final assertion after which no more need be said. An epitaph is a means of going on and leaving what is "dead and done with" behind. As an act of conclusion, an epitaph's chief asset is conclusiveness. The quality we label in the word "epigram" is similar; we say that something is epigrammatic when it encloses a large complex matter in a quick, final-sounding, summary pellet of language. The things we call epigrammatic are gestures toward forestalling further consideration of their topics. Epigrams seal the elements of a topic in one relationship to one another by presenting that relationship in a way that seems organic—of the nature of the topic. Their chief means are ideational and/or phonetic patterns

[19] In support of the proposition that the last couplet seems like a selfsufficient logical-syntactical unit, I offer the testimony of editors who have prepared modernized texts for student anthologies. I have not attempted an exhaustive study, but a majority of the repunctuated texts I have seen retain the period that appears after poetrie in the 1616 Folio.

that are superimposed upon their topics so that the identity established by the patterns of presentation (for instance, rhythms, rhymes, puns, polyptotonic kinships, alliterative series), fuses with the propositions they present. The reality of the amalgam is simultaneously strengthened by persuasively neat correspondence between elements of the topic and elements of the particular sentence that presents it (for instance, between proposition and analogy or proposition and metaphor).

The thing-like, pseudo-organic identity of an epigrammatic proposition is peculiarly self-sufficient—peculiarly immune to modification or correction from other considerations and points of view—because its special identity is internally established—is due more to the affinity its own elements have for one another than to a correspondence between the proposition and the facts to which it is addressed. However, the ostentatious neatness of epigrams calls attention to the fact that they shut out inconvenient considerations—that, although they are all-encompassing in manner, they are not so in matter but exclude the very considerations that lead one to want a topic managed once and for all in a single summary pronouncement. The inherent advertisement and admission of their own arbitrariness and narrowness is, I think, the root source of the benign contempt with which epigrammatic utterances are treated; we know they are "just epigrams": not as just as they momentarily seem to be.

My description of the first ten lines of "On My First Son" has been designed to demonstrate the ways in which those lines offset the limitations of their own epigrammatic neatness without losing their epigrammatically engendered feel of summary completeness. The last couplet—to which the issues of finality and completeness are most urgent—generates the same sort of double identity, but does so more successfully than any other section of the poem.

The final couplet is splendidly final: "For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such, / As what he loves may never like too much." I assume that readers go away from the poem having understood those last two lines as the poet's vow never again to

make the mistake of being too fond of what he loves. That assumption derives first from my memory of my own response to the couplet and secondly from the negative evidence of various editors who annotate the poem. No editor I know of explicates the last couplet. I take the general silence as evidence that, like me, the editors find the sense of the couplet so clear that their readers will not need help; and, if the couplet does not need explaining, then the only sense readily adaptable to the context is the vague one I offer. My statement of what I think readers take the couplet to be saying is many mental steps from the readings syntactically signaled for the actual phrases on the page, and I will shortly take up the relation between readers' experiences of the words on the page and those readers' vague, easy, contextually inferred understandings of the couplet. Before I do that, however, I want to talk about the one element of the couplet that is not entirely transmuted in my capsule summary of the general purport of the lines: the witty, ideationally central distinction expressed by loves and like in the last line.^[20]

Whatever else may also be true, what he loves may never like too much is straightforwardly paraphrasable as "what he loves may never be too pleasing." The use of "to like" as a simple synonym for "to be pleasing" is now obsolete, was never very common, but usually is (and presumably was in the past) obvious in context; see, for instance, the last line of Jonson's prologue to The Devil is an Ass: "If this play do not like, the Devil is in't." As scholarly annotators have long recognized, this last clause of "On My First Son" duplicates the essential elements of the last line of

[20] The first critic I know who found it worth his while to gloss the word like in this line is L. A. Beaurline (in "The Selective Principle in Jonson's Shorter Poems," which first appeared in Criticism [8, Winter 1966]; I cite Beaurline's essay in the revised form given in Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets, ed. Hugh Maclean [New York, 1974], 516–25). Beaurline does a full and splendid job, but—although he acknowledges that "most readers think that like is a weaker form of love, and they imagine that Jonson ends with a cynical turn of thought: he vows he'll not love as intensely in the future" (519)—he is much more confident than I am that the complexity of dealing with like in this context is purely the product of the four-century gap between Jonson's English and ours.

an epigram by Martial (VI.xxix, on the death of a friend's servant boy): quidquid ames, cupias non placuisse nimis, "you should desire that whatever you may love may not be too pleasing."^[21]

In Martial's stoic caution against allowing oneself to become in any way dependent upon anything prey to the vicissitudes of fortune and time, the distinction between what is loved and what is pleasing is considerably more prosaic than it is in Jonson's version.^[22] Where Martial used the Latin verbs amare and placere, Jonson uses "to love" and "to like"—two verbs that, as near but imperfect synonyms, commonly distinguish distinct kinds and degrees of affection notoriously difficult to distinguish from one another (moreover, since "love" and "like" are phonetically similar and phonetically very different, their sounds are an accidental mirror of their complex semantic relationship). The wit of Jonson's line—the "punch" it has as a concluding and conclusive-sounding flourish—derives from the pointed juxtaposition of loves and like in a context that, since the line does indeed concern a contrast between related emotional responses, activates the more familiar contrast between loving (what he loves ) and another and more nearly parallel sense of "liking" ("what he likes").^[23]

Although a good deal remains to be said about the activities of loves and like in line 12, I want, for the moment, only to say that by activating a locally casual extra contrast between "to love"

[21] This and all subsequent citations of Martial are to Walter C. A. Ker's Loeb Classics edition (2 vols. [London and Cambridge, Mass., 1919, rev. ed., 1968]).

[22] The principal wit in Martial's line is in the use of the verb cupire . The context ultimately requires that cupias be understood as "you should wish" (the Loeb editor translates the line "Whate'er thou lovest, pray that it may not please thee too much"), but the verb cupire, which here follows immediately upon a use of the verb amare, usually describes not wishing but lusting. Another sense of cupire, one irrelevant to Martial's particular syntax, is "to be well disposed to," which pertains to Martial's general context of a benevolent master and a servant eager to serve.

[23] In fact, a modern reader who does not recognize "to like" as a synonym for "to be pleasing" may very well take like in this line as the imperfect synonym of "to love" and arrive at the sense of the clause by reading it as an ellipsis for "what he loves [he] may never like too much."

and "to like," Jonson generates opacity in a clause that is also and simultaneously altogether clear and straightforward. The experience of reading such a clause is of a piece with a reader's continuing experience of clearly distinguishing between absolutely distinct entities (speaker and topic, father and son, poem and gravestone, and so forth)—that also drift toward interchangeability. The experience of reading the clause is also, I think, a miniature, purely literary, approximation of the kind of unified, easy, common-sense apprehension of metaphysical and physical truth that is so very unavailable to a particular bereaved Christian thinking about the premature death of a particular child—a child released from the vicissitudes of life into the better life beyond and also a victim of fate, its parents' loss, and a pitiable corpse.

The other "effects" of the last couplet are not noticeably witty. They are comparable to the loves/like contrast, but, where the last clause is a demonstrably clear and straightforward one that is incidentally and wittily clouded, the rest of the syntactic units of the couplet are exactly the opposite: demonstrably opaque, but apprehended as prose-clear. I suggest that in apprehending those units readers understand what they still do not understand—see sense in what does not make sense. And much the same claim that I made for the experience of reading the last clause can be made for its rhetorical obverse: the paradoxical failures of logically unassailable arguments of Christian comfort.

What mourners need, and what a comforter attempts to provide, is an effective harmony between what the mourners feel and the comfortable things available for them to think. A mourner's sense that death is unjust and unreasonable derives from logics altogether immune to invasion by comforting conclusions based on consideration of such "facts" as the inevitability of mortality, the painfulness of life, the immortality of the soul, and the reunion of body and soul at the Last Judgment. Therefore the ambition of poems like this one and of any other saying of "comfortable things" is to enable a mourner to do the impossible, to understand what remains beyond understanding. The couplet

repeatedly presents us with impossible challenges to the understanding, challenges that we casually surmount without noticing that we have gone beyond limitations inherent in our expectations about language and the human mind.

The number and diversity of easy obstacles to comprehension in the last couplet are so great that there is no obvious efficient way to describe them. I propose merely to quote the last third of the poem again and then present a piecemeal description of its many genuine but curiously nonobstructive hurdles.

Please bear in mind that I insist on the presence of the difficulties I am about to describe only because they do not give us anything like the difficulty common sense suggests they should. In reading the lines we go beyond common sense. Bear in mind too that, however great the likeness between this analysis and ingenious arguments for "new readings," I have no ambition to reinterpret, or even interpret, these lines. They do not need interpretation—do not need an agent between them and a reader; that is precisely the fact of this final couplet that prompts me to discuss it. The following analysis is designed to be literally inconsequential: it does not, and does not hope to, lead a reader to new responses to the couplet. I beg you, however, not therefore to assume that the following paragraphs are inconsequential in that word's metaphoric sense.

What I am trying to do is demonstrate a reader's achievement in easily comprehending the couplet and justify the assertion that what the lines allow our minds to do with their self-generated, merely literary challenges becomes a surrogate for the mental mastery over the fact of a child's death that both speaker and reader seek. I believe that poems are enabling acts. They free their readers from mental limitations comparable to the limitations of physics. Although such analysis as that which follows is joyless, its ambition is to point toward the sources of the joy poems give.

Here again, then, are lines 9–12 of "On My First Son"—the last couplet and the one from which its syntax emerges:

Rest in soft peace, and, ask'd, say here doth lye
  Ben. Ionson his best piece of  poetrie .
For whose sake, hence-forth, all his vowes be such,
  As what he loues may neuer like too much.

To begin with a relatively easy example of the ease with which we meet and master demonstrable, but only theoretically potent, challenges to our understanding, consider the matter of how and when we recognize that the prescribed speech introduced by say in line 9 has concluded. At some point during the poem's last line, the logic of the situation makes it obvious that the whole of the last couplet must be understood as spoken by the poet-father in his own person. But, as we read line 11, whose can as easily refer to the senior Ben Jonson as to his best piece of poetry, the newly clear synonym for "my son." And the structural and ideational likeness between his vows and his best piece of poetry suggests that the child's answer is still in progress. The drift in our understanding continues and complements the previously generated indistinctions among father, son, and gravestone inscription.

There is a valuable, though nonsignificant, hint of scope, of sweeping validity, in the word For, the word that introduces the last couplet and suggests its relation to the ten preceding lines. Its function is instantly defined by whose, the word that follows it, but it occurs in a context where the conjunctive function it had in line 5 (where it introduced a reason for wishing "to lose all father") would be welcome, a context of necessarily inadequate effort to respond to a need for explanation, a need for a reason why a seven-year-old should have died. As a momentary gesture toward explaining, the word For includes a suggestion of that action in the nonexplanatory clause it introduces.^[24]

[24] Note that Jonson's first readers were used to hearing the word "for-why" as a synonym for "because." For them, the last two syllables of line 5, heard or read before the poem gives any sign of the rhetorical question that emerges in line 6, would presumably have, for a moment, actually said "because," would have promised some sort of explanation to follow. The simultaneous presence and absence of "because" there would thus once have given the poem one more fillip of doubleness and let its readers experience one more instance of contrariety.

Once one understands that whose refers to "my son," the phrase For whose sake presumably presents itself as preface to some sort of pious vow, a grieving father's resolve for some future virtuous action to be dedicated to the memory of the son. So far, then, this next-to-last line appears to be a vow. The following nounphrase, all his vows, confirms that impression by actually mentioning vows, but that confirmation is also something of a surprise: this is a vow about kinds of vowing. That is a strange topic for vows. And yet, this poem has previously been self-conscious about its identity as poem, a verbal product of its speaker, a professional poet; moreover, the general, generic likeness of vows and poems is quietly underscored both in the superficial structural likeness between all his vows and his best piece of poetry and in the relation between vows and the literal reference of whose (an altogether improbable and altogether impractical literal reading of the line could be "For the sake of his best poem . . .may all his vows be equally excellent poems").

So the introduction of vows as the topic of this line is at once variously a continuation of previous local patterns of the last lines of the poem and a surprising departure from them. In that respect the relation of the word vows to what precedes it is comparable to that between the last two simultaneously interdependent and independent couplets, and, as I will explain shortly, between the topics and considerations of the preceding ten lines and those of this couplet.

What interests me most about the next crisis of this couplet, the "be such as" construction, is the telling fact that the modern editors from whose omissions I have already concluded so much do not gloss it. For a modern reader, the "such as" formula presumably signals a kind of construction incompatible with the phrase such / As introduces here–a construction such as this one (in which the formula introduces an example, "this one," and "such as" functions as "like" might), or a construction like

"be such as would do him credit" (where "such as" means "of a kind which"), or one like "be such as you would want them to be" (where "such as" means "what"). The easily demonstrable but evidently inaudible challenge of the "such as" construction is unusual here because, like the challenge of "to like" meaning "to be pleasing," a pennyworth of scholarship will dissolve it: this use of "such as" is an example of a once-standard idiom in which "as" performs the function "that" would perform for us; fully spelled out, such / As here means "of a kind to ensure that."^[25] Jonson was particularly fond of the idiom. Among the modern editions of Jonson's poems, William B. Hunter's (in the Anchor Seventeenth-Century Series, New York, 1963) is the most scrupulous about explaining idioms unfamiliar to twentieth-century nonspecialists. Hunter glosses "as" meaning "that" in lines where its sense is much more readily apparent than it is here,^[26] but neither he nor editors of general student anthologies (such as The Norton Anthology ) explain the "such as" construction in "On My First Son." Once again, I take the omission not as a sign of editorial laxity but as another sign that the puzzles of this demonstrably–but only demonstrably–incomprehensible couplet do not ordinarily puzzle anyone. Here, evidently, the force of context is so strong that modern readers entirely unfamiliar with the idiomatic use of "such as" to mean "such that" read the couplet with the casual competence of people who have heard and used the idiom all their lives.

I want now to return to the incidental activities of the word like, the word so pointedly distinguished from loves and so close to being indistinguishable from it. As I said earlier, the substan-

[25] Even though Jonson's contemporaries would have been familiar with the idiomatic use of "such as" for "of such a kind to ensure that," the particular example of that idiom in the last couplet of "On My First Son" must always have allowed a reader's comprehension of the sentence to float free from his moment-to-moment apprehension of the words on the page: the necessary idiom is only finally signaled by the verb like in the middle of the final line.

[26] See, for example, Hunter's glosses on "as" meaning "so that" in Epigrammes 35 (line 5), 67 (line 4), and 102 (line 17).

tively operative sense of "to like" here is "to be pleasing," and the juxtaposition of like with loves colors that sense with suggestions of "to like" meaning "to have a liking for." However, the senses carried by three other, often overlapping, groups of "like" words also pertain to matters Jonson considers in the poem and to the experience of reading the twelve lines. One group indicates similarity, likeness (for instance, the common prepositional and conjunctional uses of "like"; the verb "to liken" and, in Jonson's time, the verb "to like to," meaning "to compare [something] to," "to liken [something] to"; and the always-rare "to like" meaning "to make a likeness of" [OED gives this example from 1622: "Her lily hand (not to be lik'd by Art) / A pair of pincers held"]). Another group corresponds to the various forms and derivatives of the word "thrive" (for instance, the verb "to like" in this OED example from 1601: "Trees generally do like best that stand to the Northeast wind"; and the noun "liking" in this OED example from 1590: "I have one sheep . . .that's quite out of liking"). Yet another group of "like" words indicates probability, likelihood (for instance, the verb in Much Ado About Nothing 5.1.115: "We had liked to have our two noses snapped off") and, in particular, promise of success (as in "a likely lad" and in "a fellow of no mark nor likelihood" [1 Henry IV 3.2.45]).

Talking about the broad pertinence of those locally impertinent senses of "like" is a touchy business because it can either invite foolishly ingenious fresh interpretations—alternative paraphrases—of what the couplet is telling its readers or invite levelheaded and justly suspicious readers to suppose that I myself am trying to sell them on an alternate reading of the lines or on the presence of some paraphrasable latent meaning in them. Carefully, then, "to like" meaning "to be promising" is even less likely than "to like" meaning "to be pleasing"—the sense that fits the syntax—ever to have immediately proposed itself for inclusion in a sane English speaker's sense of the purport of a line that so pointedly pairs like with the verb "to love." But the thwarted promise of a hopeful child is naturally pertinent to the general topic of premature death—and was overtly introduced

into this poem in line 2 when the poem momentarily focused on the idea that a child's death may be divine punishment for a parent's sin: My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy . Similarly, although like in what he loves may never like too much cannot reasonably be said to say "thrive" and is most certainly making no reference to similitude, the idea of thriving obviously pertains to a poem about a child who perished, and the idea of likeness between the senior and junior Ben Jonsons has been a constant and insistent incidental element in the poem ever since the etymological fuss about their shared first name in line 1.

To see yet other aspects of the complex relationship between the words on the page and the purport one carries away from them, consider what happens to the phrase For whose sake and the words henceforth and vows as one progresses from line 11 through line 12. Here for reference are those two lines again:

For whose sake, hence-forth, all his vowes be such,
As what he loues may neuer like too much.

As a reader comes upon the "for . . .sake" construction, it carries an implication of benefit to the antecedent of whose . But that implication—present in a reader's understanding at the moment of reading and generally appropriate to the speaker's situation (a grieving father might reasonably vow to dedicate some future action to his deceased son)—is irrelevant to the kind of vows we do in fact hear about—vows that, to the degree that we can conceive of them as vows rather than hopes or prayers, are vows to minimize emotional vulnerability. How can a father's vows to protect himself be thought to benefit a dead child? (The couplet's overt logic can color a reader's perception of it with a suggestion that no future object of the father's affection will supersede this child, but—however appropriate that suggestion is to the speaker's situation—it is only a suggestion.)

If, having read through to the end of line 12, one were to go back to For whose sake to see just what logical connection it makes between the preceding couplet and the substance of this one, one would see that the phrase must be glossed "on account of

whom," "because of whom," and works as "therefore" would. That gloss is contextually dictated (I know of no other use of the "for . . .sake" idiom so completely devoid of implication of benefit).^[27] Moreover, that gloss is effectively irrelevant to a gloss on the whole couplet because the phrase itself is also ultimately irrelevant to a reader's final sense of what the lines are saying. The idea of benefiting the child vanishes, but not before it has made a gesture that the completed sentence cannot reasonably be thought to make. The child is beyond any human help but prayer, but For whose sake colors the experience of reading about the father's future welfare with an illogically comforting, fleeting implication that such help is possible, that the child's welfare is like the father's—still susceptible to actions of the human will.

As to the word henceforth in this last couplet, its action does not have substantively vital reverberations, but, to the extent that the process of understanding it is one in which a reader's mind leaves the quasi-physical limitations of syntax behind, a reader's experience of henceforth is comparable to the experience of For whose sake. Henceforth operates as if it appeared twice: "may all his vows from this time forward" and "that whatever he loves from this time forward may never ..."

[27] One prominent instance of the "for . . .sake" idiom used to mean "on account of" is Othello, 1.3.195–98. There "For your sake" first signals "for your benefit," but the developing sentence ultimately allows the phrase to deliver only "on account of you." Brabantio says this to Desdemona: "For your sake, jewel, / I am glad at soul I have no other child, / For thy escape would teach me tyranny, / To hang clogs on them."

The closest thing I can find to another instance of "for . . .sake" used simply to mean "on account of" is Herrick's use of the construction in line 54 of "The Dirge of Jephthah's Daughter" (and even there the idea of benefit remains):

No more, at yeerly Festivalls
   We Cowslip balls,
Or chaines of Columbines shall make,
   For this, or that occasions sake.

(This and all subsequent citations of Herrick are from the Oxford Standard Authors edition, ed. L. C. Martin [Oxford, 1965].)

The vowlike opening the phrase For whose sake gives to line 11 probably always dictated that vows be understood as a twentieth-century reader understands it. In a suitable context, however, the word "vow" was used like its French and Latin cognates to mean "prayer" or "wish" (OED gives this illustration from 1563: "So when those thynges whyche we have desyred, do fall oute accordinge unto oure mynde, wee saye we have oure wishe or vowe"). And just such a suitable context emerges in line 12. As I suggested earlier, once line 12 tells us what these vows will be designed to achieve, it becomes evident that they are prayers or hopes or wishes. Of course, since the ultimate meaning of vows is contextually evident, awareness of the now-forgotten archaic sense of "vow" (which editors and commentators do not—and do not need to—mention), does not much clarify one's understanding of the means by which this couplet has meaning. However, the mere fact that our understanding of vows shifts in the course of the sentence—the fact that the word vows has one sense at the moment it is read and another by the time the couplet is complete—does matter because it adds one more mental victory over physics to our experience of the poem. Once again, one thing is two things.

I began discussion of the final couplet by pointing out its simultaneous dependence on the syntax that precedes it and independence from it. A comparable paradox occurs on the larger scale in which the couplet continues and completes the poem as a whole and—in vows, the syntactic focus of lines 11 and 12—introduces a wholly new matter for consideration. The words henceforth all his vows be such / As what can justly be said to be merely a satisfactory, though vaguely disorienting, substitute for "he vows that henceforth," a substitute that fills out the meter of the couplet, provides a convenient rhyme word, and—since, although the noun "vow" was regularly used to mean "prayer," the verb "to vow" was not used to mean "to pray"—enables the incidental metamorphosis in which a reference to pledging becomes a reference to wishing.

And yet the words on the page are undeniably there and do make his vows the couplet's syntactic focus rather than the vower or what is vowed. The idea of resolution—determination to go on and determination of a future course—is generically and emotionally pertinent to the resolution of a funeral elegy. Furthermore, the fact that the focus on vows diverts readers from the track of particulars they have followed coexists with the fact that vows, as real but purely verbal actions, relate by a sort of ideational alliteration to a poem that has been a series of efforts to make altogether just assertions supersede an unjust situation.^[28]

Everything I have talked about in the final couplet and in the poem at large has been a manifestation of the interplay of closedness and openness. That is true even of the puzzles on "Benjamin" and "the mother." Closedness manifests itself in syntactic and semantic precision and is regularly complemented by syntactic and semantic imprecision in exactly the same phrases (for instance, Here doth lie Ben Jonson in lines 9 and 10) and words (for instance, henceforth in line 11, like in line 12, or, in line 1, Farewell —an incidental emblem of the whole poem, a word that is always a gesture of finality and is an imperative for the future welfare of the person addressed). Closedness manifests itself in the formal identity of the individual couplets and is countered by substantive and/or syntactic continuity between couplets. Closedness manifests itself in the identities of the poem's princi-

[28] One could, I guess, work out a connection between vows and the possible play on "here doth tell untruths" in here doth lie in line 9. Or one might point out a connection between vows and the legal bond in the second couplet. Less far-fetched, but still in sorry need of fetching, is the connection between the last couplet and line 2 (My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy ), a line and a line of thought that are not directly related to the body of the poem. Loves and like too much echo loved boy and too much hope, but the echo is chiasmic, must carry over eight intervening lines, and—since one must extrapolate a link to vows from hope (for instance, through the idea of a father confidently planning his son's future and vowing to secure such and such advantages and opportunities for him)—so vague that the connection would strain the understanding even if the first and last couplets stood alone as a four-line poem.

pal creatures (father, child, gravestone inscription) and is regularly and variously complemented by their tendency to become casually and momentarily confused.

The interplay of the two principles is visible in the overall sentence structure of the six couplets that make up the whole (a structure that makes the poem—the poem as object—a physical emblem of its speaker's efforts to achieve his object, namely, to get his feelings and his philosophy into a single closed box). The last couplet both does and does not complete the pattern (the first and second couplets are closed, syntactically and logically independent units; the four middle lines spill logically and syntactically across formal divisions of line and couplet; the fifth couplet is a neat, self-contained unit; the last couplet is not syntactically independent but feels isolated and, in its substance, is so).

Similarly, the poem seeks relief in alternative ways of thinking about the child's death—ways alternative to one another and, above all, alternative to the ordinary, heartbroken way natural to the situation: one can retreat into a verbal therapy that remains merely verbal (as in lines 1–4); or one can attempt to substitute logic for emotion (as in 7–8 and the "For why" question in lines 5 and 6), but the logic has power only where its premises operate in convenient, arbitrary, fragile isolation from the premises to which the poem responds. The verbal escapes are variously undercut by the poem's own inconvenient appeals to logic (for instance, why bother with etymological games? what is just about a premature death?), suggestions of emotion (for instance, and joy ), and gratuitous confusions (for instance, Here doth lie Ben Jonson ). And the efforts to reason away grief are disabled by the frantic, spastic syntax that mocks the passionless formality of line and couplet divisions in lines 5–8.

The last couplet reaches the poem's extremes of epigrammatic tightness, formal control, determined rationalism, and summary dismissal and also of syntactic, logical, and ideational openness. The paradoxical nature of both the poem and the situation it treats appears at its largest in "what he loves may never like too

much," the poem's simultaneously cold and heartbreaking last clause—arbitrary, witty, self-sufficient, ideationally isolated, and the poem's most evocative reminder of the preciousness of the lost child and the persistence of the grief that occasioned the poem and that the poem seeks to allay.

The accomplishment of the final couplet is to give (not assert but give ) infinity to what is finite and to put limits on what remains boundless. That is an immense accomplishment, one toward which the whole poem aspires but one that the poem as a whole fails to achieve. My opening objection holds true: the poem is overwhelmed by the glittering cleverness of its etymological tricks. Above everything else, the poem engenders admiration for itself. Even for the most casual reader, the primary pleasure of "On My First Son"—the one that dominates because it must precede the operation of the poem's other effects—is critical, is the pleasure of translating child of my right hand and piece of poetry . One might persuasively argue that the poem's fancywork and its ostensible substantive ambitions complement one another (a piece of poetry on a page is the child of the hand that writes it out); and etymology itself pertains to the poem's topic (a father and son are an original and a different creature derived from that original). But the fancywork remains fancywork. Confusions of identities do enter the poem, but only syntactically. And by the time they do, the poem is already in the shadow of its own surface brilliance and asking to be dismissed as clever.