2—
"On My First Daughter"

One's overall sense of "On My First Daughter" seems to me likely to be altogether different from one's overall sense of "On My First Son." The clevernesses of "On My First Son" insist that its readers engage with it—if only as an exercise in wit. Indeed, it is so busy and so successful in its insistence that, ironically, it has taken me almost twice as long to give an account of

the operations of "On My First Son" as it will to do the same for its humble sibling, the poem I champion as worthier of the two. "On My First Daughter" invites us to dismiss it as dowdy, casual, and ineffectual—as just another rehearsal of traditional words of comfort. The invitation is metrically underscored by the inherently chipper octosyllabic couplets. Where the decasyllables of "On My First Son" can feel like needlessly expanded octosyllables and therefore have the dignity of enforced slowness, these lines trot along with an easy glibness that implies a like ease and lightness in what the poem says.

Here lyes to each her parents ruth,
Mary, the daughter of their youth:
Yet, all heauens gifts, being heauens due,
It makes the father, lesse, to rue.
At sixe moneths end, shee parted hence
With safetie of her innocence;
Whose soule heauens Queene, (whose name shee beares)
In comfort of her mothers teares,
Hath plac'd amongst her virgin-traine:
Where, while that seuer'd doth remaine,
This graue partakes the fleshly birth.
Which couer lightly, gentle earth.

The poem only once comes close to demanding attention to its wit, and even then—in the speaker's parting instructions to the earth that covers the child's grave—the conceit is such as to seem merely sweet, an ornamental ruffle that calls attention to its easiness, artificiality, and perfect incapacity to redefine either the facts of the situation or anyone's perception of them. There is undeniable wit in Jonson's uses of safety in line 6 and of virgin-train in line 9, but, although the business of explaining those effects to a modern reader can seem to make them comparable to the showy and demanding little puzzles in "On My First Son," there is nothing in "On My First Daughter" to make a reader aware either of the poet's brilliance or the poem's effectiveness in enabling its reader's mind to perceive the fact of the child's death

in a single set of terms (the poem) that recognizes and subsumes all the pertinent but mutually exclusive terms available (for the most obvious instances, those of grief and those of Christian comfort).

The wit of "On My First Daughter" is undemanding, apparently natural to the English language and the topic. It is a kind typified by the play on on in the title of this poem, of "On My First Son," and of innumerable other epitaphs; in the particular case of "On My First Daughter" its first phrase, Here lies, abruptly changes the meaning of On in the title from "on the subject of"—"about"—to "over"—"on top of." Play on on indicating topic and on indicating location is so common, so much an accident of the language, and so contextually just in both of its applications in epitaph titles that even to label it wordplay is to exaggerate its intensity and its impact upon a reader's conscious perception. Although the paragraphs that follow will attempt to demonstrate great complexity and subtlety of effect in "On My First Daughter," I want it understood in advance that the fact of that complexity and subtlety coexists with the fact not only of the poem's genuine simplicity but with the fact of its genuine vapidity. Whatever else and however grand "On My First Daughter" may be, it is also as insipid as this poem, the most vapid of Herrick's several pallid imitations of it:

          Upon a child
Here a pretty Baby lies
Sung asleep with Lullabies:
Pray be silent, and not stirre
Th'easie earth that covers her.

The first line of "On My First Daughter" is altogether matter-of-fact: a flat statement, interrupted by "to the sorrow of each of her parents" (an interruption by which the fact of the parents' grief becomes syntactically indivisible from—and as unalterable as—the fact that "here lies Mary") and further augmented by

further identification of Mary in terms of the parents.^[29] Like their newly departed youth, their newly departed daughter is gone forever, and at the simultaneous completions of the clause and the couplet there is no more to say:

Here lyes to each her parents ruth,
Mary, the daughter of their youth:

Line 3 begins a new independent clause, and the concluding rhyme of the second couplet seals off another isolated, self-sufficient assertion:

Yet, all heauens gifts, being heauens due,
It makes the father, lesse, to rue.

However, the word Yet, the first word of the second couplet, makes a small syntactic gesture of connection between the two couplets and thus of continuation beyond the matter-of-fact finality of the two opening lines. That syntactic gesture corresponds exactly to the same word's ideational gesture, its signal that some sort of modification of the preceding assertion is possible and will follow. Moreover, the vowel sound of the first rhyme pair, ruth / youth, returns in the second, due / rue; and the cognates ruth and rue have a sort of polyptotonic "rhyme"—just as ruth and less to rue "rhyme" ideationally. And yet the two couplets, one a flat hopeless statement and the other a philo-

[29] Although immediately meaningful, use of each her for "each of her" is unusual; I know no other examples of the construction; it appears to be analogous to such standard constructions as "all her" for "all of her" and "both her" for "both of her." Compare "every / These happen'd accidents" in Tempest 5.1.249–50 and "some your servants" in Sejanus 5.59. I see no clear reason why Jonson chose each her over the more available and more obviously serviceable "both her." Perhaps he hoped to approximate the division of parents effected in the use of the singular pronoun tibi with two appositives in Hanc tibi, Fronto pater, genetrix Flaccilla in line 1 of Martial V.xxxiv, the last lines of which are the model for the last line of "On My First Daughter."

sophical bromide, are effectively isolated from one another—two assertions on the same topic but from spheres of thought as separate as Earth and heaven.

The second couplet may be a mere bromide, but it is also full of entirely unostentatious energy, energy generated by quiet interaction between valid and invalid assertions. That interaction, I think, contributes a lot to the ultimately invaluable feel this confident, easy couplet has of philosophic insecurity and poetic ineptitude. The lines contain one valid assertion (nothing on this Earth lives forever), and two that are—in very different ways—invalid. The metaphor of gifts and debts in line 3 contains an inaudible assertion of injustice (gifts by definition are not loans; givers surrender all proprietary rights). I say the reported injustice is inaudible for two reasons: first, because the wit of the oxymoronic paradox by which heaven's earthly gifts are never more than loans had sunk into cliche[cliché] and from cliche[cliché] had passed into entirely undemanding commonplace centuries before the first readers of "On My First Daughter" were born and, second, because the gift-debt metaphor is vehicle for a proposition so obviously true as to be a truism. Similarly, I think, the unarguability of the truism that nobody lives forever holds us off from pausing to observe the couplet's other invalid assertion—pausing to doubt that anyone could ever have hoped to comfort or to be comforted by the thought that a dead baby would have died in sixty or seventy years anyway (there may be some conceivable comfort for the parent of a dead infant in the thought that the child has scaped world's and flesh's rage / And, if no other misery, yet age, but none from stoic realization that all human life is transitory).

The third couplet takes a third approach to the topic—narration of the immediate facts of the child's death:

At sixe moneths end, shee parted hence
With safetie of her innocence;^[30]

Once again, the couplet is closed, final, isolated. Moreover, the new couplet asks to be recognized as another exercise in appropriate commonplaces, one poetic (the euphemistic metaphor of

a journey), and one theological (the child died before worldly contact could endanger her soul). And yet, without jarring a reader's sense that this is just an instance of the traditional mechanical prettification and diversion everyone is used to, this couplet eases its reader into some emotionally valuable, casual (and thus genuine) assumptions. This third couplet is not what it would be if line 5 reported that Mary died at the age of six months and line 6 began with the sort of distinction that "but" or "however" would make—the distinction Yet makes in line 3 between two separate frames of reference for considering the fact of death. Here consideration of the child's death and consideration of the future life of her soul cohabit in a single thought, casually joined by with . The fact that she died unstained by contact with earthly ambitions and temptations is relevant only in a theological frame of reference. Here (a) the fact that calls for comfort and (b) the comfortable thought that the child died freed, by baptism, of original sin and free of mortal sin as well are part and parcel of the single traditional metaphor of travel. Note also that the metaphor emerges gradually—first in the word hence (until which parted is effectively only a synonym for "died"), and, as I will explain shortly, fully in safety .

The primary sense of with safety of her innocence is (and was) "with her innocence intact," but "a safety" was apparently "a passport," a document guaranteeing safe conduct to a traveler.30 The idea of the child setting forth with her innocence as a pass-

[30] OED, which fully exemplifies with safety of meaning "without damage to" (1.c), approaches the additional gloss on safety I propose here (see headings 3 ["A means or instrument of safety"] and 4.1 [which includes "Under safety of" meaning "under the protection of"]). But OED overlooks "passport" or "safe conduct" as a sense of safety, the sense that appears to lie behind Herrick's metaphoric use of the word in the opening lines of "The Plaudite":

If after rude and boystrous seas,
My wearyed Pinnace here finds ease:
If so it be I've gain'd the shore
With safety of a faithful Ore....

The noun "safetie" meaning "passport" or "safe conduct" also appears in a stanza of William Wyrley's "Glorious Life and Honorable Death of Sir John Chandos" (a verse monologue—printed in 1592 as an appendage to Wyrley's The True Use of Armorie —in which Chandos philosophizes his life and "tragike death" in the Mirror for Magistrates manner); Wyrley's Chandos says that, in honor of St. George's Day, Edward III prepared

A royall feast, proclaiming it before
    In Fraunce, Flaunders in Henault, and Almaine,
All knights that would vouchsafe to take the paine
    Should safetie haue for to returne in peace
    When as the lusts and knightly sports did cease.
(37)

"Safety" is used similarly by Richard Niccols in the final couplet of "Concordia. In Manus, " Epigram 15 in his "Vertues Encomium" (in part 2 of his one-volume collection called The Furies. With Vertues Encomium .... [1614]): "Concord in peace, a Musick is therefore; / In war a safetie honour'd euermore" (sig. E2).

port could have been presented in a full-blown conceit that would have advertised itself as a chosen, arbitrary, carefully closed way of thinking about the facts. As it is, with safety of her innocence does not transform the flat assertion that Mary died at the age of six months, but rather infuses it with an image of a young woman (someone old enough to travel alone) departing after a six-month visit—departing for somewhere else. As a reader progresses over the two lines, the child grows up—is conceived of as living out the life she lost—and does so in a clause that is nonetheless a statement of harsh fact rather than a fanciful, inevitably ineffectual substitute for it. The lines cause one to idly generate an adolescent or adult Mary in one's own mind; a comforting fancy becomes an incidental reality of the reader's experience of the facts. The difference between evoking that experience and openly presenting and recommending a way of thinking is the difference between rhetorical success (making a viewpoint on the facts inherent in them) and a merely admirable, merely interesting mere appeal.

There is similar, and similarly unobtrusive, persuasiveness in the syntactical continuation in a subordinate clause of the logically complete sentence that closed in line 6 with the formal close of the couplet:

At sixe moneths end, shee parted hence
With safetie of her innocence;
Whose soule ...

This is the first time that the conclusion of the couplet rhyme pattern has not been followed by a logically independent new clause. Like the life of the infant in the coffin, the sentence in lines 5 and 6 is finished—enclosed in its boxlike couplet. And, just as a reader's imagination has casually continued the child's life, the syntax of line 7 expands the syntax of the preceding couplet beyond limits that nonetheless remain in force. (If I did not fear seeming to interpret the syntax by wantonly and ingeniously suggesting a sort of syntactic equivalent of onomatopoeia, I would point out that the phrase "Whose soul" is to the body of the sentence apparently concluded at the end of line 6 as the departed soul is to the corpse.)

The phrase whose soul also continues one's simultaneously fanciful and realistic thinking about Mary. The mention of soul in this context signals the expected statement that Mary's soul is in heaven. However else its particulars cause it also to be perceived, the completed clause (whose soul heaven's queen . . .hath placed amongst her virgin-train ) must be perceived as making that statement; and, as the pronoun that in while that severed doth remain indicates, the next clause proceeds as if it followed a simple assertion that her soul is in heaven. The whose soul construction, however, is very different from "her soul." The phrase at once preserves the distinction between the mortal, earthbound body and the immortal soul and also invites readers to continue conceiving physically of the Mary who departed for heaven. Bearing in mind that I am talking not about what one thinks but about how one thinks it, it is reasonable to say that the phrase whose soul asks one to think as one would if one were told that Mary and her soul were in heaven. That way of thinking is sustained by she, the pronoun at the end of line 7: Whose soule heauens Queene, (whose name shee beares ).

Before following the subordinate clause that begins the fourth couplet (lines 7 and 8) to its verb in line 9, I want to comment

on the incidental actions of the parenthetic second of the two whose clauses that constitute line 7. In its relation to the first half of the line, that second clause both duplicates and continues the physics of the preceding six lines. The two halves of the line, each beginning with whose, are urgently comparable; and, like a pair of rhyme words or the two lines paired in a couplet, are at the same time urgently different—different in that the two pronouns have different antecedents. The first whose refers to Mary Jonson and is followed by references to the Virgin Mary (heaven's queen ); the second whose refers to the Virgin Mary and is followed by reference to the infant Mary (she ).

That a, b, b, a, pattern of the persons of the line (a pattern that–because, as the parenthetic clause points out, they have the same name—can be stated as a, á, á, a ) is internally unified. But—since the second whose expands ideationally from heaven's queen, an element in the syntactic expansion begun by the first whose —the same sequence participates in the poem's newfound freedom from the bounds of closed couplets. The sequence thus can contribute to a reader's vague sense of an analogous liberation of Mary from the finality of death. (Any parenthetic clause, after all, asserts and exercises a right and power to go beyond limits whose existence and validity it also acknowledges.)

Structurally, the parenthetic clause is a self-confessedly gratuitous syntactic digression; and yet, at the same time, the repetition of whose suggests otherwise. The substance of this clause is also digressive; and yet naming is the primary action of tombstone inscriptions and of the first couplet of this poem—and bears, which here means only "carries," is in accidental relation to the topic of motherhood and birth (in fact, lines 7–9 end up having presented us with two mothers and a child who bears).^[31]

[31] Compare the action of heaven's earlier in the line. At just the point that the syntax is escaping the limits of the form, heaven's echoes, and thus asserts a link to, the two previous genitive uses of the same word in line 3. The word hence in line 5 also participates in the echo pattern of the three heaven's . In Renaissance pronunciation the word "heaven," even where not spelled "heav'n," was dissyllabic or monosyllabic as rhythm—formal or informal— dictated. Moreover, Renaissance writers and readers seem to have delighted in interchanging pronunciation within a single poem or line; for example, line 3 may well have been pronounced something like "yet all 'hens' gifts beeng heavens due." The word hence and the monosyllabic heaven's in line 7 presumably sounded nearly alike. (For a fuller discussion of such matters, see the notes on "spirit" and "spirits" in line 5 of Sonnet 86 and on "ev'n" in line 6 of Sonnet 15 in my edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets [New Haven, Conn., 1977, 288–89, 156].) Note also that hence, which says "from here" in line 5, embodies a sound that denotes the destination of the departed, heaven; hence thus manifests the same general sort of incidental, logically casual, purely verbal paradox that I attribute to whose in line 7 and Where in line 10 and that occurred back in line 2 when the sound of their made an altogether inconspicuous, wholly insignificant pair with Here in line 1.

Above everything else, the introduction of the parenthesis and of what it says generates a special kind of confusion—one that cannot possibly confuse the reader (anyone can follow a sentence interrupted by a brief parenthesis, and no one can ever have confused Mary the subject of this poem with Mary the queen of heaven), but a confusion of one line of thinking with another in a clause whose substance demands an easy, trivial, incidental exercise in perceiving that a word, "Mary," that says one thing also says another.

The fourth couplet is completed in another parenthesis. This one—line 8, In comfort of her mother's tears —is not set off in physical parentheses on the page, and this one is an immediately germane modifying phrase for the clause it interrupts, but line 8 is one more obstacle in the way of the long, structurally onomatopoeic climb toward grammatical predication in Hath placed amongst her virgin-train . The now-completed couplet, like all those that precede it, is very ordinary in import (this is just so much prettifying, just cute mythmaking, just sentimental hackwork); but this couplet now concerns three beings who are complexly like one another: two are mother and daughter; two are virgins named Mary; two are mothers tragically bereaved of their children. This plodding, perfunctory little poem is opening more and more paths of mental possibility.

At sixe moneths end, shee parted hence
With safetie of her innocence;
Whose soule heauens Queene, (whose name shee beares)
In comfort of her mothers teares,
Hath plac'd amongst her virgin-traine:

Virgin-train is a specific allusion to "the hundred and forty and four thousand" virgins—"they which were not defiled with women"—whom St. John describes as singing "before the throne," "redeemed from among men," and "without fault before the throne of God" (Revelation 14: 1–5). Although St. John's use of the word "virgins" is akin to the narrow one to which the word is limited in modern English, Jonson's contemporaries were used to understanding it less anatomically than we do and, in context of discussions of the salvation of infants, were used to hearing "virgins" used as we would use "innocents." The virgin choir in Revelation 14 had figured for several centuries in both formal theological and informal popular discussion of infant salvation.^[32]Virgin-train, then, is an easy, pretty, periphrasis by which the poet introduces another traditional particular of Christian comfort.

Yes, but virgin-train appears here in company with another easy periphrasis, heaven's queen for the Virgin Mary. Together they constitute a quietly persuasive court metaphor that complements and continues the process by which the particulars of a series of pious commonplaces implies and embodies the happy, thriving adolescence of which the dead infant has been deprived. These lines fulfill just the sort of parental ambition that they supersede: they present Mary as she would have been had she achieved the likeliest secular fond ambition of a London parent: lady-in-waiting to the queen.^[33]

[32] See pages xix–xxvii of E. V. Gordon's introduction to the Oxford edition of Pearl (1953), and R. Welleck, "The Pearl: An Interpretation of the Middle English Poem," in Studies in English, 4, Prague, 1933.

[33] Although the possibility is of only biographical significance and no way pertinent to the experience of reading the poem, the unrealized earthly future shadowed forth in lines 5 to 9 of this poem on Jonson's dead daughter reflects an element of a vision Jonson had of his dead son in 1603. Jonson told Drummond of Hawthornden about it in 1619. Drummond concludes his account of the apparition with this sentence: "He appeared to him, he said, of a manly shape, and of that growth that he thinks he shall be at the Resurrection" (H&S, 1:140).

When, in line 9, a reader reached the syntactic equivalent of salvation in arriving at long last at the verb of the clause begun in line 7, that clause concluded in the middle of a couplet. As the mortal finality of the first three couplets was superseded by a syntax that went on to report on the afterlife, that syntax has now come to rest at a point that cannot be final because, although the necessities of the couplet form have been superseded, they have not been neglected. Like the fact that the baby is dead, the fact remains that the poem cannot end until it reaches a rhyme for train . The necessary next line immediately sends a reader's mind back toward the facts of the other domain:

Hath plac'd amongst her virgin-traine:
Where, while that seuer'd doth remaine,
This graue partakes the fleshly birth.
Which couer lightly, gentle earth.

That necessary line—line 10, Where, while that severed doth remain —does complete the couplet, but it also opens a new, still incomplete syntactic unit. The next line completes that, but it in its turn requires a rhyme for birth, a rhyme that the syntactically unnecessary last line provides. The last couplet thus presents us with one more miniature, purely literary, but nonetheless real experience of our capacity to deal matter-of-factly with the coexistence of mutually exclusive systems for perceiving simultaneous finality and infinity.

The greatest achievement of which this poem makes its reader capable derives from the experience of following Jonson's sentence smoothly from virgin-train at the end of line 9 to This grave partakes in line 11.

The logical hinge on which the passage turns is the word Where .

The action of that word is the most difficult thing in the poem to talk about.

Readers have no trouble with Where or with the logic of the lines. Once again, my evidence for saying so is the nearly universal silence of editors and commentators.^[34] I suspect that line 10 is effortlessly understood as "while that severed doth remain there " would be. And yet, once again, the words on the page are there and are read, and the words say "amongst her virgin train: / Where . . .this grave partakes the fleshly birth." I still insist that the lines make easy, ready sense, but I also insist that the construction is meaningless—unreasonable, the assertion of a physical impossibility, an impossibility as great as being dead and alive or in heaven and on Earth.

[34] I say "nearly universal" because, in the essay cited previously, Ann Lauinger has commented at some length on the syntactic relation of Where at the beginning of line 10 to what precedes and follows it. Faced with a discrepancy between, on the one hand, a sense of "amongst her virgin train: Where . . ./ This grave partakes the fleshly birth" effortlessly derived by synesis (effortlessly derived on the basis of the probabilities of the given situation) and, on the other, the sense signaled by a syntax that places the grave in heaven, Lauinger tries to give the impression that the discrepancy doesn't exist and that her essay has demonstrated that. Unless I misunderstand entirely, there is something like a shell game going on in her sentences about the syntactic action of Where in line 10: "In terms of both syntax and sense, line 10 belongs with the two lines that follow it. Although the subject of line 10 (the child's soul) and its initial where refer back to the virgin-traine of line 9, the two halves of the couplet are separated as decisively as body and soul after death" (230). Later Lauinger says,

The intended sense of line 10 must be something like, While that, i.e., the soul, remains in heaven parted from the body . However, the medial placement of sever'd makes it probable that we will interpret that word as part of the subject before realizing that it forms part of the predicate. A first rendering of the line is thus likely to be, While that which has been severed, i.e., the soul, remains in heaven . A reading so evidently undoctrinal as this, which seems to set temporal limits to the soul's enjoyment of heaven, will obviously put readers on the track of a revised interpretation. But the earlier reading lingers and lends its problematic coloring to our amended understanding of the line. (232)

The process of conscious interpretation and revision Lauinger supposes is not one I can imagine occurring—particularly in view of the silence of all the editors—professional crux finders—who annotated the poem in the years before her 1989 essay.

If my experience of talking about these lines with students and colleagues holds true, you should now have looked back at the lines to see just where and how I have misread them. You are an intelligent person and, if you read essays like this one, surely a careful reader. The issue between us here, I think, is not whether the lines, which seem straightforward, are straightforward: in things made of words seeming is being. The issue is whether or not the lines, which seem straightforward, can be demonstrated to be so according to the probabilities of semantics and syntax.^[35]

The thing that makes the action of Where so hard to talk about here is that, when—under pressure from my analysis—one goes back to prove to oneself that the lines contain a semantically and syntactically acceptable sense, one can find a reading as straight-forward in theory as the lines are in fact. "Where" often had the sense "whereas" (it still does; I have systematically used it that way throughout this essay). And that reading of Where not only makes sense but makes the general sense that I argue is derived suprasyntactically on the basis of contextual probabilities (on the basis of what one comes to the poem already knowing about heaven, Earth, there, and here): "amongst her virgin-train. Whereas . . .this grave...."

I do not, however, believe that any reader reads, or ever read, Where as "whereas" in line 10 of this poem. For one thing, modern editors who gloss that use of where in line 99 of Jonson's "On the Famous Voyage" do not gloss the word here. For another, those of my colleagues with whom I have discussed the word Where in this poem do not come up with the "whereas" explanation until we have been talking, puzzling, and squabbling for some time. Most: important, I doubt that readers actually read

[35] For instance, the contexts in which one hears the current American idiom "I could care less" make it understood as it would be if it were "I could not care less." That, therefore, is what the expression means. However, it demonstrably—but only demonstrably—means just the opposite and demonstrably—but only demonstrably—does not make sense in the contexts where it is customarily used.

Where as "whereas" because its context is so insistently one of place. The poem is concerned throughout with here, where Mary lies, and there, where her soul has gone; and the principal overall action of line 10 is to reassert the initial focus on here —is to reassert the physical facts: the grave and the corpse.

Lines 5–9 have more efficiently blurred a reader's focus on the painful facts of earthly reality than any comforting words I know. Now Jonson attempts, and succeeds in taking, a daring but necessary further step toward effective comfort. Had Jonson left his readers where line 9 delivers them, the poem's achievement would have been less because, although lines 5–8 start from the facts of physical death, they leave them behind; the consolation the lines embody is therefore vulnerable to resurgent awareness that a poor little baby is dead.

To succeed fully, the poem must persist in including the ugly facts that evoked it, the inescapable facts that one would like to escape. One way to characterize this poem would be to say that it substitutes "and" (the baby is dead and immortal) for "but." The poem deals constantly with separation—both in its substance (the child is divided from the parents, as is her soul from her body), and in its stylistic incidentals (for instance, the unity inherent in the word parents ' in line 1 is qualified by the each her construction, and the philosophical father and emotional mother are considered both separately and differently in the body of the poem). But—as the fused realities and overlapping organizational systems in lines 5–9 illustrate and as the poem's abundance of genitives witnesses—the poem just as persistently demonstrates a unity in divided things.

Reading this poem is a mentally miraculous exercise in practical paradox. That exercise culminates in line 10. Line 10 is syntactically conjunctive. And it reconnects consideration of metaphysical fact with consideration of physical fact. And, thus, it reasserts the distinction between the two. And, if I am right about the way our minds deal with Where, line 10 enables its readers momentarily to think as they would if they were capable of confusing here and there—capable of thinking of one crea-

ture as physically present in two places at once—and capable of conceiving of body and soul as physically separated and physically one, and capable of conceiving of Earth and heaven as absolutely distinct and absolutely indistinct from one another.

Line 10 evokes a sort of syntactic pre-experience of the reunion of bodies and souls on resurrection day. Line 10 lets the poem do what the grand verbal double-shuffle of "the glory of the terrestrial" and "the glory of the celestial" and of "the natural body" and "the spiritual body" in 1 Corinthians 15 only suggests can be done. This is 1 Corinthians 15:50–54 as it appeared in the Anglican burial service (note the seeming contradictions about corruption and uncorruption):

This I say brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, neither doth corruption inherit uncorruption. Behold, I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, and that in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye by the last trump. For the trump shall blow, and the dead shall rise incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. When this corruptible hath put on incorruption, and this mortal hath put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.^[36]

What the action of the word Where imitates, the rest of line 10 specifically alludes to: while that severed doth remain . Once again, words that insist on severance also suggest union. Here that suggestion is in the word while, a word whose action is emblematic of the larger stylistic paradox in which it participates. While here means "for as long as" and thus points forward toward resurrection day. And while here means "at the same time as" and thus asserts the distinction between the concurrent realities of body and soul. Moreover, like the word that precedes it, while has la-

[36] The Book of Common Prayer: 1559, ed. John E. Booty (Washington, 1976), 312. In subsequent citations, I will refer to Booty's edition as BCP .

tent potential as a word meaning "whereas" and indicating a distinction in logic ("whereas the soul remains severed").^[37]

Like the final couplet of "On My First Son," the last two lines of this poem adapt and improve on an ostentatiously epigrammatic, syntactically isolated pair of conclusive closing lines at the end of a poem by Martial.^[38] And like the final couplet of "On My First Son," the last two lines of this poem are a syntactical continuation of the lines that precede them and also feel as iso-

[37] Note also the double action of doth remain: (1) "remains in heaven" ("to remain" indicating continuation in place); (2) "remains separated" ("to remain" indicating continuation of a condition).

[38] The Martial poem, V.xxxiv, concludes with these lines: mollia non rigidus caespes tegat ossa nec illi, / terra, gravis fueris: non fuit illa tibi . The Loeb editor translates them as "And let not hard clods cover her tender bones, nor be thou heavy upon her, O earth: she was not so to thee!"

The sudden revival of interest in Martial among seventeenth-century English poets is probably the direct result of Jonson's fondness for him. Jonson's request at the end of "On My First Daughter" omits the central idea of Martial's conceit, the idea of relative weight—the idea that distinguishes Martial's variation on a timeworn conceit (as Charles R. Forker points out, fanciful appeals to the earth to lie lightly on a grave occur as far back as Euripides and Meleager [Notes and Queries, April 1983, 150]). Nonetheless, even given the crucial omission, "On My First Daughter" seems responsible for more than a century of imitations and echoes of the last lines of Martial V.xxxiv; the tradition culminates in Abel Evans's mock epitaph on his fellow writer, the architect of Blenheim Palace:

Under this stone, reader, survey
Dead Sir John Vanbrugh's house of clay:
Lie heavy on him, earth, for he
Laid many heavy weights on thee!

(The text is as given by Leigh Hunt in an essay called "John Vanbrugh" [reprinted in the Vanbrugh volume of the old Mermaid series, ed. A.E.H. Swaen, 1896].)

The idea of the child's weight is entirely absent from Jonson's couplet, but—although this concerns the poet rather than the poem and is therefore irrelevant to the present essay—I want to suggest that the diction of the last three lines reflects an interplay of puns and translations in Jonson's mind. Although Martial's gravis, "heavy," has nothing to do with the English word grave in line 11, and although "severe," the English for a standard metaphoric use of gravis, is only phonetically related to the verb "to sever" in line 10, I suspect that Jonson chose some of his words in response to those connections.

lated and emotionally summary as their models in Martial. The final couplet of "On My First Daughter" is variously comparable to the first. Where the first couplet, a syntactically independent two-line unit, was extended logically by Yet in line 3 and included in a four-line unit determined by phonic and polyptotonic relationships among ruth, youth, due, and rue, the last couplet, also capable of syntactic independence, is introduced as an appendage of the preceding syntax and, as the rhyme words of the second couplet repeated the vowel sound of ruth and youth, the final rhyme pair, birth, earth, repeats the concluding consonantal sound from the first pair. The last couplet establishes an overall 2-8-2 pattern—a sort of down-up-down pattern—for the twelve lines of "On My First Daughter": two lines on physical graveside fact; eight lines on the spiritual facts of the case; and two final terrestrial lines that, except for the implication of a spiritual realm inherent in the specificity of fleshly, limit themselves entirely to the material world.

This graue partakes the fleshly birth.
Which couer lightly, gentle earth.

The distinction between the last lines and those that immediately precede them is also established in a new heightening of a reader's sense of the ugliness of the mortal facts of burial and decay—and, in a similarly intense new intellectual refuge from physical reality, the openly fanciful cradle image of the last line. Jonson's insistence on the grimness he has sought to alleviate begins in line 10 with the word severed, which—though it functions here as a legalistic synonym for "separated"—carries with it connotations of suddenness and force (OED, 5).

Partakes is a similar case. It contains the sound "part," which echoes parted in line 5 and complements the idea remain expresses in line 10, and which, like parted and severed, is extrasyntactically pertinent to a poem that persistently concerns itself with parts and wholes. The word partakes also contains "takes" and thus sustains and continues the idea of rightful seizure introduced in line 3. Here partakes is effectively glossed by a reader's knowl-

edge of the function of graves (set between grave and fleshly birth, any verb at all would be taken as intending to say "contains"). And that sense is an ideational neighbor of a standard sense of "to partake": "to share in." But the verb "to partake" was already permanently colored by its repeated use in the Communion service, from which "partakes of"—"share in"—came to imply the specialized sense "share in eating ."^[39] In conjunction with fleshly birth, the word partakes infuses the line with the traditional idea of death and the grave as devourers.^[40] In fleshly birth, birth has the now-archaic, and never common, sense "baby," "child" (for which OED cites Coverdale's version of Jeremiah 20:17: "That the byrth might not have come out, but remayned still in her" and this collective use from Chapman's Homer: "When you come to banquet with your wife and birth at home"). Jonson's phrase (perhaps the accidental product of his need to rhyme earth ) can infuse the line with a vague analogy between little mortal Mary and the incarnate Christ, but its principal action is to insist upon the horrible fact of a tiny, fragile corpse hideously decomposing in the ground—to insist graphically on—and thus fully acknowledge and include—the horror that the poem tries to overcome.^[41]

On the other hand, the subordinate clause with which the poem ends literalizes—and thus debases—the Christian idea of the afterlife, presents it in a way generically akin to the cheapest,

[39] See, for example, these phrases from the Communion service; "partakers of his most blessed Body and Blood" (BCP, 263), "beseeching thee, that all we which be partakers of this Holy Communion, may be fulfilled" (264), and, in particular, "meet [that is, suitable] partakers of those holy mysteries" (258).

[40] See, for example, Psalms 49: 14: "Like sheep they are laid in the grave; death shall feed on them," and Proverbs 1:12: "Let us swallow them up alive as the grave...." Note "swallowed" in the Pauline paradox that concludes the passage I quoted earlier from the burial service.

[41] A modern reader may also hear pertinent reverberations of "the remains" in the verb remain at the end of line 10. Note, nonetheless, that OED does not record that euphemism for "corpse" before 1700.

sentimental twaddle: "She is only sleeping." However, as in the lines on Mary in heaven, Jonson does not ask us to "look at it this way"; he causes us actually and voluntarily to include the idea of a sleeping baby in our conception of the situation in which the speaker gives instructions to the earth. What Jonson does is wrap a gauzy, sentimental fancy so willfully flimsy as to be trivial in a plain one that does not involve any falsification of the essential facts of death. Graves are indeed covered with earth. And direct address to personified inanimate elements is so common, so mild, and so undemanding an appeal to the emotional energy of the pathetic fallacy that one accepts the poet's impotent imperative as a simple and traditionally expressed assertion of strong feeling about conditions beyond human control.

However, this particular instance of the stock poetic posture occurs in a context (a baby is lying in a grave; graves are obviously and traditionally bedlike)—whereas the verb "to cover" automatically calls up the cheerful analogy of a sleeping baby who will later awaken (as this one will in fact on resurrection morning). The key element in this line's success is not so much the word cover as the epithet gentle; it intensifies the personification of Earth and particularizes it. Gentle, which repeats some of the ideational content of lightly and thus gives a rhymelike feel of supralogical rightness and quasi-physical, quasi-natural complexity to the line, was a stock epithet of polite address—one that Shakespeare's plays have made familiar to all probable modern readers of Jonson's poem and one that carried with it an inherent implication of benign condescension to the person addressed. The epithet, never in any way insulting, was applied, like "good," to servants, and commonly preceded a request by a speaker in a position to command.^[42] Here it personifies earth as

[42] For simple examples, see The Two Gentlemen of Verona 2.7.42, Romeo and Juliet 4.3.1, and Shakespeare's several condescending uses of the epithet in 3 Henry VI, 1.1. The epithet bespeaks its user's sense of the relative dignities of himself and the person addressed. See Volumnia's address to the triumphant Coriolanus (2.1.172), and Subtle's greeting to Mammon in The Alchemist 2.3.1.

a nurse or nursery maid in whose care the departing parent casually and confidently leaves the child.

Jonson's achievement in the couplet is emblematic of his achievement in the whole poem. He does not deny—or ask us to deny—any of the truth of the situation. He does not offer us alternative ways of thinking about the child. Instead, he makes the stuff of comfortable conceits inherent to the process of registering insistently bare facts. The poem is artistically daring. And it is most so in daring also to be pedestrian and to use its careful insufficiency as a means of making the poor, category-bound human mind superior to its own limitations—the limitations that language reflects and services—and sufficient to an impossible mental task that remains impossible to us even as we perform it.