Grieving a Loss

The central theme of the poem is grief and how it manifests in different ways. The poem is an elegy, or a genre of poetry written to lament the death of someone else. Early modern English elegies tended to draw their inspiration from the Roman poet Virgil and his Eclogues, a series of pastoral poems that contained elegiac songs for lost shepherds. Jonson's poem for his son retains some of the classic elements of the elegy, including exclamatory expressions and rhetorical questions. However, Jonson's poem also departs from this elegiac tradition in that it is written directly to the deceased person, his son.

This direct address underscores the intimacy of the poem that is either not present in most of Jonson's work or present in an ironic way. Here, however, the intimate tone of the poem emphasizes the difficulty of the experience: Jonson's son...