Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

There is no greater love than that of a parent’s for their child. Created by their own flesh and blood is their young, which whom the parents cares for from the time of the child’s birth to the parents last dying days. So when a parent loses a child, pain and sorrow sweeps over the parent like a giant ocean wave as they passionately grieve. This passionate love for one’s child is displayed in the poem On My First Son by Ben Jonson. The significance of the poem’s sorrowful grievance tone is exemplified and apparent through Jonson’s use of irony, metaphor, and word choice. Jonson’s sorrowful tone in the poem is expressed in the irony of the line, “my sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.” One senses Jonson's acceptance of the death, despite the state of grievance, he realizes that his son was only on loan to him and his death was therefore inevitable. Even though Jonson knew that his son’s life would be short he loved him no lesser then he would a child who would live a fuller life. All the time and energy he exerted in the child’s seven years of life seemed wasted, which fueled his anger of death because it seemed as though fate picked a day for his child to die and he could do nothing to stop it. H