Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View
The speaker is the poet, Ben Jonson, who is attempting to console himself after the death of his daughter, Mary.
Form and Meter
The poem is written in rhyming couplets. The meter is iambic tetrameter, or four pairs of one unstressed followed by one stressed syllable.
Metaphors and Similes
In line 3, Jonson refers to his daughter as one of "heaven's gifts." This conventional metaphor stresses that people's souls are given to the world by God.
Alliteration and Assonance
In line 10, the /wh/ sound is alliterated, "Where, while that severed doth remain"
Irony
Line 4's syntax is ambiguous. It can be interpreted as either "remembering that my daughter was a gift lets me, her father, mourn less" or "it diminishes me, as her father, to spend time mourning." The latter reading feeds into a mode of masculinity that idealizes a lack of emotion. The line is ironic because in order to be a true, masculine father, Jonson must give up his feeling for his daughter.
Genre
Epitaph
Setting
Generic, the world
Tone
The poem begins in a measured, rational tone but ends on a more dejected note.
Protagonist and Antagonist
The protagonist is the speaker. There is no antagonist, although the speaker is in conflict with his own feelings of grief and his daughter's death.
Major Conflict
The major conflict is between Jonson's desire to comfort himself, and the bleak reality of the death of a child.
Climax
The climax of the poem comes in the last three stanzas, where Jonson describes his daughter's body lying in the ground. These lines bring to a head the tension between the poem's desire for rational comfort based on religious conviction, and the immediate, physical reality of death.
Foreshadowing
N/A
Understatement
The beginning of the poem understates the severity of parental grief, using conventional words like "ruth" and "rue" in place of strong emotional language. The phrase "she parted hence" is also a form of understatement: the euphemism replaces death with a less final action.
Allusions
Jonson is alluding to many classical epitaphs, especially the Roman poet Martial's epitaph for the dead slave girl Erotion.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
N/A
Personification
Jonson personifies both innocence and the earth. In line 6, he positions Mary's innocence as a companion who accompanies the girl to heaven and keeps her safe. In line 12, he addresses the earth directly, calling upon it to cover Mary gently as though the dead soil could feel his grief and empathize with him.
Hyperbole
N/A
Onomatopoeia
N/A
