The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [75]
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy:
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon ’scaped world’s and flesh’s rage,
And, if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and asked, say, “Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.”
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.
The son’s name, like the father’s, was Benjamin, which means, in Hebrew, son of the right hand. But the right hand is, by implication, also Jonson’s writing hand, and the word poetry comes from the Greek word that means making. So the making of the son and the making of the poem are parallel acts, and in this case, the one substitutes for the other. The embedded inscription, “Here doth lie / Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry,” gestures, in a way that is technically called deixis, pointing or indicating, to the fact that the poem itself functions like a funeral monument. (“Here” is the sign, often found on actual monuments.) The enjambed line (“Here doth lie / Ben Jonson”) suggests both a colon and a question (who lies here?), while the use of “his,” in what is now an archaic form (“Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry,” rather than “Ben Jonson’s best piece of poetry”), allows for a double meaning: what lies “here” is both the poet’s “best piece of poetry,” or making, and also Ben Jonson, the father and the son. The personal adjectives and personal pronouns in the lines that follow (“for whose sake”; “all his vows”; “what he loves”) continue the willed conflation or confusion of father and son. “On My First Son” becomes the monument; the word “on,” typical of epigrams, essays, and other short pieces in the period, is also a pointer gesturing toward the poem. (This is what rhetoricians call deictis.)
This kind of analysis will be familiar to any reader of midcentury critical classics like W. K. Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon or Cleanth Brooks’s The Well-Wrought Urn, the titles of which provide examples of the phenomenon they describe. (Brooks’s title comes from John Donne’s “The Canonization.” Two other “urn” poems, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar,” became similar iconic touchstones for close readers of poems about poetry.) I’d like to point out a number of corollaries to this method of reading, which is the one in which I was trained and which I still find deeply satisfying: first, the method validates those works that fit its methodology. Thus, poems about poetry, or poems that could be read as poems about poetry, including most so-called metaphysical verse, gained high status, including the poems of Andrew Marvell, many Romantic lyrics and Wordsworth’s “Prelude,” Shakespeare’s sonnets and “Phoenix and Turtle,” and a good deal of modern poetry, from Yeats to Wallace Stevens.
Conversely, poems that seemed to resist or to deny the validity of this reading method—like, for example, Cavalier lyrics or Byron’s Don Juan—tended at the time to be rated lower on the scale. And poems that were either narrative (Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Crabbe’s The Village) or epic (Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Pope’s Dunciad or Rape of the Lock) were either quarried for verbal gems that could be explicated as if they were lyrics, or else subjected to a different regime of criticism, one that treated them like works of fiction (plot, character, etc.) or works of “influence” (Milton echoes and rewrites Spenser, who echoes and rewrites Virgil; Wordsworth and all the Romantics echo and rewrite Milton; Stevens