Seven years tho' wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
In these lines, Jonson portrays his son as a loan given by God. When the boy died, Jonson was forced by fate to pay the loan back. In making this argument, the speaker is trying to convince himself not to resent his son’s death. After all, it’s only “just” to eventually pay a loan back, and the loan-giver should decide when the money comes due. Yet the metaphor also suggests that the speaker has conflicted feelings toward God. The relationship between borrower and loan-giver is distant and hierarchical. The one who gives the loan has certainly done the borrower a favor, but they also exert power over the borrower. It’s a cold business relationship that sharply contrasts with the speaker’s loving and intimate relationship with his son. We get the sense that although Jonson recognizes the justice of his son’s death, he finds it hard to feel close to the God who caused it.
O, could I lose all father now!
After arguing for the justice of his son’s death at God’s hands, Jonson makes this exclamation. The ambiguous phrase can be read in two ways, both of which emphasize the poet’s feelings of bitterness and the impossibility of his situation. First, the phrase articulates Jonson’s desire to lose his own identity as the boy’s father, which would enable him not to grieve. After all, he goes on, if he could see the event objectively, he’d envy his son for the chance to escape the miseries of life in the world. Jonson’s sadness at his son’s death thus makes him resent his own identity as a father. However, the expression “all father” also recalls the Christian figuring of God as a father. Given the speaker’s belief that his son has been taken back by God, we can also see this exclamation as a desire for a world without that God, where he might still have his son.
Rest in soft peace, and, ask'd, say, "Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.”
In the most famous lines in the poem, Jonson compares his son to a poem. The line shows the relationship between the poet's feelings and his intellectual work. He addresses his son, and tells him to “rest in soft peace.” The personal address and the addition of the word “soft” both emphasize the intimacy between Jonson and his son, and the importance of their relationship to the poem. However, the pronouncement that his son was “his best piece of poetry” dehumanizes the boy, comparing him to Jonson’s other works. Given the poem's focus on Jonson's love for his son, it makes the most sense to read that dehumanization as a response to the son's death—even though Jonson still speaks to his son as though he is alive, he can't help treating his corpse like the object that it is. The line also diminishes Jonson’s poetry, by stressing that it is worth less than the son who is now dead and buried. It thus expresses a profoundly bitter attitude.
