The Poetry of Jonson by Ben Jonson
"The Poetry of Jonson" refers to the body of work produced by Ben Jonson, a prominent figure in English literature during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Known for his vibrant personality and strong opinions, Jonson's poetry is often characterized by a blend of personal expression and classical influences. He is frequently contrasted with William Shakespeare, with Jonson representing labor and classical imitation, while Shakespeare embodies innate genius. Jonson's poetry includes a range of themes, notably personal lamentations, tributes to notable figures, and reflections on death, especially following the loss of his young daughter.
His famous poems, such as "On My First Sonne" and the elegiac tribute to Shakespeare, reveal a deep engagement with personal experience and emotion. Jonson's work reflects his scholarly background, showcasing his admiration for classical literature and his ability to craft lyrical pieces suited for musical accompaniment. Additionally, he explores spiritual themes across his poetry, demonstrating a lifelong interest in religious contemplation. Despite being often labeled a satirist, his poetry encompasses a rich variety of styles and subjects, leaving a lasting impact on subsequent generations of poets, including the Cavaliers and later figures like Dryden and Pope.
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The Poetry of Jonson by Ben Jonson
First published:The Workes of Benjamin Jonson, 1616 Containing Epigrammes and The Forrest); The Workes of Benjamin Jonson The Second Volume, 1640 (Containing The Under-wood and Horace, His Art of Poetrie); Ben Jonson’s Execration Against Vulcan. With divers Epigrams by the same Author to severall Noble Personages in this Kingdome, 1640; Q. Horatius Flaccus: His Art of Poetry. Englished by Ben Jonson. With Other Workes of the Author Never Printed Before, 1640
Critical Evaluation:
Ben Jonson was an overpowering individual. People who knew him were rarely neutral: they liked him, some almost to idolatry, or they disliked him with an intensity that vibrates through the centuries. His vigorous personality intrudes and makes dispassionate appraisal of his poetry difficult. A second factor which interferes with cool judgment of his work is the time-hallowed tradition of contrasting portraits of Shakespeare and Jonson. In these conventional portraits, Shakespeare stands for genius, humanity, and native woodnotes; Jonson for labor, bookish pedantry, and classical imitation. It is ironic that one of Jonson’s two most popular poems is the noble tribute to his supposed bitter rival.
Unlike Shakespeare—who may or may not have unlocked his heart with his sonnets, but certainly left posterity little personal allusion in his other writings—Jonson wrote to and about many people who had a share in his life. He had been classified as primarily an occasional poet, except in his dramatic works. Perhaps his earliest extant poem is a brief lament on the death of his six-month-old daughter Mary:
Whose soule heavens Queene, (whose
The distinguished scholar C. H. Herford pointed out the poem’s indebtedness to Martial, who wrote an epigram on the death of a small slave girl, Erotion; however, it is more deeply indebted to medieval Christian tradition than to the classics.
Jonson left two other moving poems on the deaths of children: “On my first Sonne,” which contains the couplet:
Rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say here
and the “Epitaph on S. P.,” which tells of the death of a boy actor who acted old men so well that he deceived the Fates. Though prematurely and mistakenly carried away from earth, Heaven has vowed to keep him. The personal note is also sounded in the epigram “To William Camden,” the poet’s former schoolmaster:
Camden, most reverend head, to whom
This high praise is less extravagant than the uninitiated might think, for Camden, formerly a promising fellow student of Sir Philip Sidney, was a poet, an antiquarian praised by Edmund Spenser, and a leading historian and geographer of his country. His works are still mined by scholars. Several of his pupils became important and influential men. He fired Jonson with enthusiasm for scholarship and poetry.
One of Jonson’s fairly early poems was an “Ode ALLEGORIKE” prefixed to Hugh Holland’s PANCHARIS. This poem pays a tribute to a former fellow student under Camden. It portrays Holland as a black swan and foreshadows the more famous poem on the Swan of Avon. It also points the way to passages in Milton’s “Lycidas” and John Dryden’s odes. Jonson’s fondness for the ode as a literary type began early in his career and continued into his old age; one of his most ambitious poetic efforts is a Pindaric ode in memory of Sir Henry Morrison, friend of Lord Falkland, noblest of the Sons of Ben. Sir Henry was killed in 1629, eight years before Jonson’s death. This impressive ode is best remembered for a single strophe, often quoted out of context as a separate lyric:
It is not growing like a tree
THE FORREST in the 1616 Folio of Jonson’s works contains fifteen poems, three of which are connected with the Sidney family. Like his master Camden, Jonson obviously had great admiration for Sir Philip Sidney as author and man. One of the poems is a somewhat playful birthday ode written to Sir William Sidney, the youthful nephew of Sir Philip and son of Sir Robert, who became Earl of Leicester. Another is an “Epistle to Elizabeth Countesse of Rutland,” the daughter of Sir Philip; and the third is “To Penshurst,” a favorite of many Jonsonians. This last piece, more than a hundred lines long, begins with praise of the austere architecture of the building to which the poem is addressed, proceeds to admiration of its natural setting and its resources for hunters and fishermen, pays graceful compliments to members of the family who have dwelt therein (including Sir Philip himself), and honors the present family for its hospitality and graciousness and for the deserved love of the neighbors and retainers. Particularly, in the final portion, the satirist shows his face and makes clear that not all the nobility share the qualities of Sir Robert Sidney and his wife. This poem is representative of many tributes to noble and prominent individuals, though the literary device of addressing the building instead of the persons is unusual. Especially notable among the numerous commendatory pieces are those written to noble ladies, since Jonson is often portrayed as a misogynist.
The poet also wrote tributes to many who made their marks in the arts rather than in politics or worldly affairs. The most famous of these poems is the majestic “To the Memory of my Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare,” included in the Shakespeare First Folio. The late Hazelton Spencer praised this as the finest occasional poem in the English language. Although this praise may be somewhat extravagant, the poem, like “To Penshurst,” is a noble composition with several themes harmoniously unified. It contains epithets which have become part of the English inheritance: “Marlowes mighty line . . . Thundering AEschilus . . . the merry Greeke, tart Aristophanes . . . neat Terence, witty Plautus . . . sweet Swan of Avon . . . Soule of the Age”; and it contains prophetic utterances not bettered by the idolaters of Shakespeare:
Thou art a Moniment without a tombe,
In spite of Jonson’s numerous poems of praise, many critics think of him primarily as a savage satirist and consider his satires as personal as his other poems. He did indeed have an acid gift of irony or downright invective. It is worth noting, however, that his poems attacking individuals by name are excluded from the collections of verse he himself published. In these, like Swift, he chose to lash the vice but spare the name. Undoubtedly his most masterful handling of satire is in his plays rather than in his poems; but there is strong mutual influence between his “comicall satyre” and his satirical poems. No doubt he heightened his satirical characterizations with traits borrowed from individuals; but the nineteenth century tendency to identify every satirical portrait with a living individual was unsound, and happily seems to have subsided. Sometimes in the poems, though not in the First Folio, the object of the attack is named: Alexander Gill, son of John Milton’s schoolmaster, and Inigo Jones, the King’s architect and Jonson’s collaborator on the masques, are lashed by name. True, in both cases the provocation was great.
In “An Execration upon Vulcan” the poet attacks the fire god with mock fury. He lists works destroyed by a fire (probably in 1623), including some of his own compositions and manuscripts borrowed from antiquarian friends. He takes advantage of the incident to list also works which thoroughly deserved the fire: flamboyant romances, popular journals, alchemic and mystical writings, and extravagantly artificial verses. The poet’s good-humored fortitude under adversity serves as a warning to take his strictures with a grain of salt: he probably read with pleasure many of the works he suggested were fit food for Vulcan, including those in “the learned Librarie of Don Quixote.”
Jonson wrote a number of translations and adaptations of classical writers; but he had a way of making such works his own. The most famous so-called translation by Jonson is the love lyric “To Celia” (“Drink to me only with thine eyes”). This song, with its combined appeal of music and words (the origin of the music is disputable), has retained its popularity for centuries. It is not really a translation, but a pulling together of scattered prose sentences from the EPISTLES of the Greek rhetorician Philostratus (c. 170-245); these passages are combined and transformed into a unified poem, a new and original piece.
This lyric is but one of many written by Jonson to be sung, not merely read. Music for many of them still survives. The poet’s collaboration with musicians of his day and his familiarity with musical techniques shaped many of the lyrics. Eccho’s song in CYNTHIA’S REVELS begins:
Slow, slow, fresh fount, keepe time
The same play contains another of Jonson’s popular lyrics, “The Hymn to Diana (Cynthia)”:
Queene, and Huntresse, chaste, and
Another of the songs which still has life on the concert stage is “Have you seen but a bright lily grow?”
In the masques there are a number of songs with the flavor of nursery rhymes or folk poetry. Three of these are:
CATCH
In his lament for his daughter, Jonson demonstrated at an early date his interest in religious themes. This interest lasted throughout his career, for his longest, perhaps his last, original non-dramatic poem, “Elegie on my Muse,” (the ninth poem in EUPHEME, a memorial to Lady Venetia Digby) is steeped in the traditions of medieval Christianity. In “An Execration upon Vulcan” Jonson lists among the works lost in his fire:
. . . twice-twelve-yeares stor’d up hu-
The fruits of this twenty-four-year period of religious study are scattered through the poet’s works. In “The Forrest,” published in the 1616 Folio edited by Jonson himself, appears a poem in the penitential tradition with a highly personal tone: “To Heaven.” The collection of poems called “The Under-wood” in the 1640 Folio (published three years after Jonson’s death) opens with three “Poems of Devotion”: “The Sinners Sacrifice,” “A Hymne to God the Father,” and “A Hymne on the Nativitie of my Saviour.” All three of these pieces are in subject matter and form much like the penitential poems of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. A brief quotation from each will show its quality:
All-gracious God, the Sinners sacrifice,
In summary, much of Jonson’s non-dramatic poetry is personal; much of it is grounded in his learning, particularly his classical learning; but much of it escapes the limitations laid down by critics of the past. Although it leaves an impression of considerable variety, it is, on the whole, poetry of statement rather than poetry of suggestion. When it is difficult to understand, the difficulty usually lies in linguistic changes wrought by three centuries or in stylistic compression, rather than in far-fetched imagery or vague mysticism. Though it is intellectual poetry, it is far from empty of feeling. Its influence on later poetry, particularly that of the Cavaliers and Dryden and Pope, was potent.