“On My First Son”

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy ;       My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy. Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,       Exacted by thy fate, on the just day. Oh, could I lose all father now ! For why       Will man lament the state he should envy? To have so soon 'scaped world's and flesh's rage,       And if no other misery, yet age ! Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say, Here doth lie       Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry. For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such       As what he loves may never like too much.

Volpone

Volpone, or The Fox (in Italian: "Big Fox"), is a black comedy by Ben Jonson first produced in 1606, and considered one of the finest comedies of the Jacobean period.

Volpone fakes a long illness to pique the expectations of all who aspire to his fortune. Mosca tells each of them, Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino, in their turns, that they are to be named Volpone's heir, thanks to Mosca's influence. Mosca then announces Volpone's impending death. The hopeful heirs shower Volpone with gifts. Corbaccio disinherits his own son in Volpone's favour; Corvino offers Volpone his wife. Complications ensue, and just as Volpone is about to be outsmarted by Mosca, he reveals all in open court and the characters are punished according to their crime and station.

Metaphysical Poets

A term used to group together certain 17th-century poets, usually DONNE, MARVELL, VAUGHAN and TRAHERNE, though other figures like ABRAHAM COWLEY are sometimes included in the list. Although in no sense a school or movement proper, they share common characteristics of wit, inventiveness, and a love of elaborate stylistic maneuvers.

Metaphysical concerns are the common subject of their poetry, which investigates the world by rational discussion of its phenomena rather than by intuition or mysticism. DRYDEN was the first to apply the term to 17th-century poetry when, in 1693, he criticized Donne: 'He affects the Metaphysics... in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts.' He disapproved of Donne's stylistic excesses, particularly his extravagant conceits (or witty comparisons) and his tendency towards hyperbolic abstractions. JOHNSON consolidated the argument in THE LIVES OF THE POETS, where he noted (with reference to Cowley) that 'about the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets'. He went on to describe the far-fetched nature of their comparisons as 'a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike'. Examples of the practice Johnson condemned would include the extended comparison of love with astrology (by Donne) and of the soul with a drop of dew (by Marvell).

Reacting against the deliberately smooth and sweet tones of much 16th-century verse, the metaphysical poets adopted a style that is energetic, uneven, and rigorous. (Johnson decried its roughness and violation of decorum, the deliberate mixture of different styles.) It has also been labelled the 'poetry of strong lines'. In his important essay, 'The Metaphysical Poets' (1921), which helped bring the poetry of Donne and his contemporaries back into favour, T. S. ELIOT argued that their work fuses reason with passion; it shows a unification of thought and feeling which later became separated into a 'dissociation of sensibility'.”

They include:   John Donne   George Herbert   Henry Vaughan   Edward Herbert   Thomas Carew   Richard Crashaw   Andrew Marvell   Richard Lovelace   Sir John Suckling