Poetry: Creating an Intense Emotional Experience
- modernlinguists
- Feb 24, 2015
- 3 min read
No formula can cover all different motivations of writing poetry. But most poets are trying to do one or both of the following:
Creating an intense emotional experience.
As for now, I delve a little deeper into the former of these goals of poets.
Poetry constantly presents its readers with bursts of concentrated emotion – the poem that makes your beloved fall in love with you; the poem that comforts a suffering friend; the poem that celebrates a day of joy or triumph; the poem that praises god, mourns the dead, or exults in the universe. The more attention you pay to poetry, the more you will savor these surges of passion and understanding.
In his poem “On My First Son,” Ben Jonson a Renaissance poet who lived at the same time as Shakespeare, writes a poem of farewell to his son, who has died at just 7 years old. The poem contains a few examples of Renaissance English (words that you may trip over initially), but only a few. Read the poem silently, and then read it aloud:
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy:
Seven years thou wert leant to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O 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 loved may never like too much.
Here is a brief list of the phrases you may find unfamiliar in this poem:
child of my right hand: The name Benjamin means “son of the right hand” in Hebrew, so this phrase means both “son of whom I am especially proud” and is a pun in the name of both the father and the son.
the just day: The day on which payment is due on a debt. The boy was “lent” to the speaker for seven years, and then “fate” (the lender) “exacted” (required) repayment on the due date.
O could I lose all father now!: This passage could mean, “Now I am no longer a father,” or “After such pain, I never want to be a father again.”
‘scaped: This is just the poetic way of saying “escaped.”
And if no other misery, yet age: Here the poet is saying that even if his son escaped no other misery, at least he escaped getting old.
Ben Jonson his: This is a fancy way of saying “Ben Jonson’s.”
Across five centuries, this poem delivers the speaker’s suffering to you. But notice that Jonson never refers directly to his own pain. The line “O could I lose all father now!” is the closest the poem comes to that. Instead, you can guess at the great suffering from the tender restraint in this poem: “Rest in soft peace” is one of the tenderest leave-takings in all poetry; the punning on “best piece of poetry” (the son is the best “poem” Ben Jonson ever created) and the name Benjamin (which in Hebrew means “son of my right hand”) suggest, without dwelling on them, the father’s fondness for his son; and the vow at the end – to love things in this world, but not to become attached to them – suggests the suffering of a father at the death of his child without speaking any of those words directly.
“On My First Son” is a quiet, dignified poem, but the concentrated emotion in it is unmistakable. Ben Jonson gives you a demonstration of what poets everywhere try to do: Lead you into an intense encounter with feeling.
Come back tomorrow for the latter goal of poets.
コメント