On my first Daughter

Ben Jonson

Here lies, to each her parents’ ruth,

Mary, the daughter of their youth;

Yet all heaven’s gifts being heaven’s due,

It makes the father less to rue.

At six months’ end she parted hence

With safety of her innocence;

Whose soul heaven’s queen, whose name she bears,

In comfort of her mother’s tears,

Hath placed amongst her virgin-train:

Where, while that severed doth remain,

This grave partakes the fleshly birth;

Which cover lightly, gentle earth!

Analysis:

1st line:

 Jonson doesn’t mention Mary’s name because he wants to make death universal;
 He also wishes to distance himself from the situation,
 He doesn’t want to admit it to himself.

2nd line:

 The ‘daughter of their youth’ makes the death even more painful because Mary was their first
child during their youth when they were in their pride, their BEST.
 He admits here that it was Mary his daughter. There is an overflow of emotions here and he just
cannot help but realise it is his own daughter. He cannot distance himself.

3rd line:

 The ‘Yet’ suggests he has a conflict within himself.

 In this line he also comforts himself about the inevitably of the death, as al ‘heaven’s gifts’ and
‘heavens due.’ What God gives, he must take away.

4th line:

 The inevitability of death takes away the full impact of the pain, as Mary wouldn’t have been on
earth forever anyway.

5th line:

 We are told here that Mary died when she was six months. The word ‘parted’ suggests denial,
because when people part ways they are still alive, there is still the possibility of coming in
contact. In contrast, death is permanent.
 Words like ‘Ruth’, and ‘rue’ suggest bitterness rather than an overwhelming sense of anger.
Could this suggest that Mary died of natural causes?
 ‘Ruth’ and ‘Rue’ are archaic words- This gives us a sense of the time this poem was written.

6th line:

 ‘With safety of her innocence’- Mary died so young, so her innocence is intact. If she had gotten
older she would have been exposed to the vices of the world. Mary has escaped the natural
world, and she is considered lucky because innocence equates safety and an assurance for an
entry to heaven.

7th line:

 ‘heaven’s queen’- This refers to Mary, Jesus’s mother, whose name she bears. The use of these
two words makes her seem virginal and like royalty.
8th line:

 ‘In comfort of her mother’s tears’: The mother is being comforted because the child has gone to
heaven.

9th line:

 ‘virgin train’ Mary is special because there aren’t many virgins who have died. So Mary, Jesus’s
mother, would take a likening to her. She is therefore special. This idea is to comfort the
parents.

10th line:

 ‘severed doth remain’- The child is cut off from the parents, so the parents doth remain with the
memory of the child and the pain. ‘Severed’ gives the impression that the separation was so
quick and sudden.

11th line:

 Heaven has taken Mary’s soul, and here it is almost as if Jonson is looking at the body of the
child as he’s speaking. Could this be the burial?

12th line:

 Jonson orders earth to cover her gently. He is being commanding. Earth will be Mary’s next
mother, and the motherliness should take care and protect her. Jonson is saying that she is still
innocent, she is still his baby and that earth shouldn’t be too hard on her. Note that he did not
ask heaven to be gentle. He asked earth because earth is ‘partaking’ in the process.
Title:

 ‘First’: His first child, and capitalised to show importance and reinforce how he sees his daughter
as someone he had put ‘first’. While losing a loved one is always going to be heartbreaking, this
is their first child (only child at the time). He reveals as much in the second line as this is the
daughter of ‘their youth’ and thus before they have had the chance to become aware of the
tragedies that befall all our lives.

Theme(s):

 Acceptance and coping: The poet’s suffering and attempts to cope with his loss.
 Death
 Parental love

Structure:

 Epitaph: Read at someone’s funeral or inscribed on the grave. i.e. Jonson’s daughter.
 Six rhyming couplets:
 The number six relates to the age of the child when she died, as she was six months.
 Tells us about how love is shared between 2 individuals, and without the latter line, the
former line does not/cannot rhyme with itself. This may be directly referenced to the
second line of the first couplet where Jonson says ‘daughter of their youth’, meaning Jonson
is talking about his one between him and his wife along with his late daughter.
 Can reflect the daughter’s perfection. It is uncorrupted, as she as so young when she died.
She is still innocent. The daughter is pure, and the couplets relates to the idea that ‘to halves
make a whole.’
 Simple rhymes: The simplicity reflects the youth and innocence of his daughter, while the
softness of the words throughout the poem, and the rhymes in particular, connects us with a
sense of gentle grief. (to denote the simple and pure nature of his daughter and life, along with
the youth and innocence of his daughter).
 Light tunes: Allows Jonson to grieve and the reader to relate.
 Is short and brief: To suggest the quickness with which the daughter died.

Tone:

 Sombre tone: Due to the subject of the poem, that which is upsetting. Even when Jonson
envisages hopes of a better existence in heaven, he is never far from grief as reveal by his
emotional plea at the end of the poem.
Important terms and stylistic devices:

 ‘Daughter of their youth’: Basically, Mary was an offspring of the love shared between Jonson
and his wife. Alternatively, the mortality of everyone’s youth and how time will catch up and we
all will eventually grow up. Mary dying could denote the ending of the youth of Jonson and his
wife.
 ‘Heaven’s gifts…heaven’s due’: A metaphor.
 Comparing his daughter to a heavenly gift, thus shows the divine and spiritual impact his
daughter has had on Jonson. This allows the father to deal with his loss and bear the
burden of his daughter’s passing: all gifts from heaven must be repaid, ‘due’. So it’s as if
he was borrowing the divine creature – ultimately having to give her back. This adds to
Jonson’s spirituality and how he could be denoted as a religious person and his outlook
of life as preplanned by a higher power.
 It also allows him to deal with his loss – ‘makes the father less to rue’ as he knows that
our gifts from heaven must be repaid and her return would always, eventually, be
‘heaven’s due’. Thus he feels like his time with his daughter was incredibly special as he
was borrowing a divinely perfect creature, but she would always have to return.
 Metaphor of a loaned gift as a coping mechanism: The idea that Mary will return to heaven
makes the guilt of a parent unable to keep their child alive easier to bear, and he reminds
himself that the spiritual creature had to return at some point.
 ‘Safety of her innocence’: To ensure safe entry to heaven as in six months she has not been
exposed to sin or to evil that could bar her entry, as if it is a figurative armor designed to protect
her and thus allows her to claim a spot in heaven. This flies in the face of earlier Catholic belief
that unbaptised babies cannot enter heaven, but instead enter the rather unappealing state of
limbo. Luckily England was a Protestant country so baby Mary was allowed to have a golden
ticket.
 ‘Six months’: Gives us the time period of her life and shows how the poet gradually reveals
information on his daughter.
 ‘Heaven’s queen’: Referring to the Virgin Mary – Jesus’s mother who is considered to be divinely
pure, innocent and chaste. The child was called Mary, and also a virgin – thus could be seen as
Jonson’s individual Virgin Mary and relates her privilege to the actual Virgin Mary and gives her
similar respect and importance, if not more.
 ‘Virgin-train’: The poem places baby Mary alongside the Virgin Mary as an attendant in her
‘virgin-train’, which suggests that he views baby Mary’s innocence and purity as making her
special and important to the Virgin Mary.
 ‘Mother tears’: This is Jonson elevating the importance of his daughter in order to help him cope
with the loss by imagining she will be supremely well looked after. He’s letting Mary know that
her parents are thinking about her and she has their protection.
 Exclamation mark at the end:
  The soul is considered to be the true essence of a person, but Jonson wants her body to
be treated kindly as well, and thus shows the true nature of his love and concern for
Mary.
 There is urgency in his tone with the exclamation mark at the end as if his role has
ended as she is out of his mortal control, and is now in the control of the earth.
 He desperately needs Mary to be taken care of so he may move on with his life, bearing
in mind that his daughter is now safe in the arms of Earth.
 He pleads the earth to be gentle with the flesh of his daughter’s body, as he says ‘cover
lightly’ as the process of decomposition might be painful for his baby girl and thus
ensure that her body is comfortable even in its lifeless state.
 Personification: Earth is personified as being gentle. The baby is going to another home where
she would have parents.
 Imagery:
 1st line: ‘Here lies’ – These are usually the words placed on a tombstone It makes us
immediately think of death.
 The repetition of heaven in the 3rd line emphasises heaven, God has given and God will
take away. Jonson is Christian.
 Biblical allusions: Heaven, Mary, etc. This could suggest that Jonson is a Christian and that in
times of grief and sorrow he has found comfort in Christ.
 Apostrophe: Addressing something non-living – ‘Which cover lightly, gentle earth!’