Summary
“On My First Daughter” is an epitaph commemorating the death of Ben Jonson’s six-month-old daughter, Mary. Epitaphs were traditionally inscribed on gravestones, although in the early modern period they were also sometimes published in collections. Ben Jonson was writing for a collection of epitaphs, but he still begins as though these words would accompany his daughter’s body.
In the first two lines, then, he writes that his daughter is buried here. Her untimely death makes her parents grieve, especially because they are themselves both too young to have suffered such a loss. However, the father (Ben Jonson himself) feels less sad when he remembers that she truly belonged to God, who had a right to call her back to heaven.
After only six months, Mary left this world. She died with her innocence intact, guaranteeing her a place in heaven. Her soul is now protected by the Virgin Mary, who she was also named after, because the tears of Mary’s own mother have inspired the Virgin Mary’s feelings of empathy. However, Mary’s soul and body remain severed from one another. While her soul is in heaven, her body is in the ground, covered by soil.
Analysis
In “On My First Daughter,” Ben Jonson responds to the death of his young daughter, Mary, in the form of an epitaph, a well-worn genre for writing about death. In many ways, the poem is highly conventional, but the final three lines present an assertively bleak perspective on death.
Epitaphs are short pieces of writing commemorating someone who has recently died. They were popular in Ancient Greece and Rome, usually as a way of recording the accomplishments and characteristics of the deceased. Some were as short as a name, but others were lengthy and complex works.
In the early modern period, these classical epitaphs became popular again, and people began writing poems inspired by them. However, rather than directly engraving them on gravestones, many epitaphs were published in books. Sometimes, a collection of epitaphs by different poets was published to commemorate the death of an influential or wealthy person. Other times, authors published their own epitaphs along with other poems, which is how “On My First Daughter” appeared in print.
Ben Jonson was a strident adherent to classical standards. A contemporary of Shakespeare, he famously criticized the other playwright’s work for failing to adhere to the rules of classical drama. “On My First Daughter” is an expression of Jonson’s devotion to classical forms. The poem is most directly inspired by an epigraph by the Roman poet Martial, who lived and wrote between 38 and 104 AD. He wrote an epigraph for “little Erotion,” a daughter of slaves who died before she turned six.
Like “On My First Daughter,” Martial’s poem takes comfort in the fact that Erotion will escape the bounds of hell because of her youth and innocence. It ends, “and let the soft turf cover her brittle bones:/ earth, lie lightly on her: she lay lightly on you.” This closely parallels the ending of Jonson’s poem, “This grave partakes the fleshly birth;/Which cover lightly, gentle earth!” Despite the deeply personal subject of “On My First Daughter,” Ben Jonson isn’t exactly writing from the heart: he’s drawing on his own extensive literary knowledge, and adapting from the most relevant material he’s familiar with.
However, most classical epitaphs had three traditional parts: praise, lamentation, and consolation. Jonson’s epitaph for his young daughter basically forgoes the first two, and instead focuses almost exclusively on arguing that the parents should be consoled.
The scholar Ann Lauinger talks about the conventions Ben Jonson uses in a more general sense. She says that there are two forms of comfort that epitaphs can offer: continuity and finality. Continuity is the idea that the dead person continues to live on in some form. Perhaps their contributions still make the world a better place, or perhaps they live on in heaven. Conversely, finality takes comfort in the fact that death is an ending. These arguments emphasize that endings are natural. Rather than a loss of life, they are a part of life. In a Christian context, the point of life is to eventually die and be closer to God.
Jonson invokes both of these traditional arguments. The first four lines are primarily focused on taking comfort from finality. The poem begins with the conventional remark, “here lies.” The brief, stark phrase feels plenty final, and not in a good way. Jonson goes on to acknowledge the feelings of grief her death has inspired in both him and his wife. The detail of their own youth, which he references in the second stanza, heightens the tragedy of Mary’s death: the two parents have many years left to live, and their daughter should have outlived them.
The next two lines provide a more comforting reading of the meaning of Mary’s premature death. She was a gift from heaven, and always fated to one day return back to where she came from. Her death has simply closed the circle, even restored order to the universe. The fourth line uses ambiguous syntax to play with this idea. The primary meaning is: knowing that Mary was always meant to die makes the father’s grief less severe. However, the line can also be read as: the act of grieving lessons the father’s strength of character. In other words, being a good Christian father requires Jonson to accept his daughter’s death without too much grief. Ironically, being a good father means letting go of being a father.
The fifth and sixth lines begin to shift from this focus on finality to the possibility of continuity after death. The fifth line reiterates Mary’s departure, once again casting it as a moment of ending. However, the next line reminds us that Mary left accompanied by “her innocence.” The image of Mary leaving with her innocence intact creates a sense of continuity between her life and characteristics on earth and her experiences after death. Jonson knows his baby daughter was innocent when she was alive, and thus he also knows that she is now safe in heaven.
From here, the poem gets significantly more interesting, even if the content remains conventional for Christian epitaphs. First, it’s worth pointing out the conventions the poem uses. The emphasis on the Virgin Mary’s ability to extend comfort, especially to the humble and innocent, was well-worn territory. So was the emphasis on heaven, with the assertion that the dead person was saved acting as an antidote for grief. However, lines 7-10 stand out because of their carefully honed syntax, which links together the child Mary, her mother, and the Virgin Mary.
Reading these lines, it can be hard to keep straight who Jonson is referring to. For example, the line “whose soul heaven’s queen, whose name she bears” alternates between referencing the child Mary and Mary, Jesus’s mother. We might have to go back and reread before we recognize that the soul belongs to the child Mary, while “heaven’s queen” is the Virgin Mary. The second phrase is even more ambiguous. Given that the child Mary was named after the Biblical figure, we can conclude that Jonson meant, “whose [The Virgin’s] name she [the child] bears,” but the phrase also makes sense if “she” refers to the Virgin and “whose” to the child.
The confusion of subjects only gets more intense in the next line, where Jonson introduces the character of his wife. He means that the child Mary’s mother weeps for her, and her tears comfort the child as she enters heaven. However, the Virgin Mary is also a mother (in fact, the archetypal mother in Christian theology), and her pity for the child’s death is also a source of comfort.
Jonson’s syntax thus blurs the lines between his infant daughter, the child’s mother, and the Virgin Mary. The three all accompany one another, and both mothers are sources of comfort and safety for the child. Theoretically, this world is also a source of comfort for Jonson, who can now feel certain that his child’s life continues on in heaven. However, this system of relationships is also strictly feminine. It hinges on the affinity not only between Mary the mother of Jesus and the mother of the child Mary, but also on the ambiguity of the pronoun “she,” which keeps ambiguous who the poet is referring to. There’s no place for Jonson’s masculinity, or his identity as a father, in this formulation. He’s left out in the cold of the first four lines, and must be satisfied with giving his daughter up to God, rather than being with her as his wife is.
That sense that Jonson is somewhere outside the poem’s comforting message can help explain the bleak last three lines of the poem. As mentioned earlier, Jonson here is drawing on a Roman poem with a similar subject, which also ends by acknowledging the child’s place beneath the soil. However, Jonson, unlike his pagan inspiration, was a Christian, which changes the connotations of the conclusion.
Christians in Jonson’s time believed that body and soul separated when someone died, with the soul going up to heaven, and the body staying in the ground. When Jesus returned, then the bodies would also be resurrected and reunited with their souls. The word “severed” refers to that division. Although Jonson believes that his daughter’s body and soul will one day be reunited, his focus is on the present moment, where her body is left on its own, in the ground.
Although Jonson is really referring to a theological concept, it’s hard not to read the word “severed” as a reference to the brutality and physicality of death itself. That physicality intensifies in the rest of the poem’s final lines. He references the “fleshly” nature of the buried girl, as well as the mounds of earth that cover her body. We leave the poem, not with the certainty of a child in heaven—which was so important in the beginning of the poem—but rather an image of her rotting body in the ground.
That doesn’t mean Jonson was denying the afterlife. The poem never questions that the soul is saved, or even that Christ will one day return to unite body and soul again. However, his shift in emphasis prevents the poem’s consolation from feeling entirely convincing. All the conventional comforts have to do with the soul, but as Jonson buries his baby daughter, that isn’t the whole reality. Mary is also a body, and when push comes to shove, it’s that body that Jonson seems unable to get out of his head.
