Personal and poet’s respond
The poem, “On my first Sonne” is the elegy that Ben Jonson wrote about the death of his first son, Benjamin. The writer shows his deep sentiment after such a cruel event happened to him. Te shows his grief and despair of a father using first person account because the death of his son was happened to the poet himself and he wants to convey what he feels directly to the audience.
Compared to “On my first Sonne”, the poem “The Song of the Old Mother”, written by William Butler Yeats, is about an old woman complains that she always work hard and laments the idleness of youths. First person account is used to show the old mother’s grief about herself working so hard and not to be respected.
Loads of the techniques such as use of structure, language, and imagery are used in the poem “On my first Sonne”. The poem is in rhyming couplets abc and each line has got 10 beats to have the rhythm in the poem itself. In line 2, when Ben Jonson says “thou child of my right hand...” the right hand represents Jesus sitting on the right hand of God, that his son was the most important thing. He uses a rhetorical question about the reason why is man sad about death man should envy the dead in line 6, so that you can escape the world of suffering. Word “Fleshes rage” means diseases, so that it is A metaphor of bad state of being, and the miseries that the world has. “Rest in soft peace” sets very gentle and sad mood, as this poem is a simple funeral poem.
The affliction of Margaret is a poem about a woman grieving for her son who is missing. The poem is in eleven seven-line stanzas, and each line has 8 syllables. In addition, the poem rhymes ababccc. The language of the poem is generally simple and direct, and it is more like an ordinary speech. These structure and use of the language are well suited to the form of the poem, telling the story. However, Margaret does not tell the audience the reason why the son left home, where is his father, and even the name of the child. She tells the audience such “well born, well bred” child has not returned and worries where he would be and what he would be doing. In stanza 4 she shows her grief that children never realize just how much parents worry about their children.
I favour the poem “On my first Sonne” because the poem’s grief about his son’s death is featured very well. He also shows his confidence in the poem in line 10, “his best piece of poetrie”. The theme of this poem shown in the last line, is that Ben Jonson “Loved his son too much”, and from now on, he’s not gonna love anything, anymore too much because it hurts too much when they leave.
