Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, October 11th, 2004. Today's poem is by Ben Johnson, great Elizabethan poet and playwright, and the closest thing William Shakespeare had to an artistic peer. In his own day and afterward, people

sometimes referred to the other artists who gathered around Johnson as the tribe of Ben.

And though I'm not sure there's any direct relation between us, I certainly like to consider

myself an honorary member of the tribe of Ben.

And imagine we're kin in spirit, if not in flesh.

Speaking of flesh, our poem today is called On My First Son.

And it sounds like it might be one of those schmaltzy sentimental poems, the kind of song that the lead singer of a rock band writes after he has his first child.

But fair warning, this is a poem of grief and loss, though it is a beautiful poem.

I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and then read it one more

time. On my first son. 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. Oh, could I lose all father now? For why will man lament the state he should envy?

To have so soon escaped worlds and flesh's rage, and if no other misery, yet age,

Rest in soft peace, and asked, say,

Here doth lie Ben Johnson his best piece of poetry,

For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,

As what he loves may never like too much.

There's an ongoing dialectic in this poem, an internal dialectic Johnson persuading or reasoning with himself about the proper expression of his grief. He is laying to rest

his eldest firstborn son at the age of seven, a tragedy that no one should have to live through,

obviously. And he says in the middle of the poem, this is in form, it suggests a sonnet,

though it's arranged in more isolated rhyming couplets, which break up the structure. And then,

of course, it's cut off early. We don't have 14 lines, but only 12, just as the life of his son is cut short.

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