ON MY FISRT SONNE Throughout On My First Sonne we are able to see that Jonson is trying to find the positive aspects of his son’s death and is looking at it in a positive way. Jonson would actually like to stop his emotions, to stop feeling like a father: “O, could I loose all father, now”, i.e. if only I could give up feeling this terrible grief for my son – but, of course, he cannot. If he could stop feeling like a father, then he might be able to see some faintly positive side to what has happened: his small son has escaped the “world’s, and fleshes rage” , i.e. the terrible passions and griefs we all experience, including, no doubt, the terrible pain that Ben Jonson now feels as a father. Jonson is urging himself to mourn in a selfless, unegoistic way. He senses that he may have had too much of his own pride invested in the little boy: now, terribly, the child just “lent” to him for a while by “fate”, has been “exacted” from him like a debt. He has had to pay him back to “fate” or heaven. This I unlike the “Manhunt” where the persona is remembering the negative aspects of the man
DIGGING
The relationship between father and son seems to be one of tension and distance as conveyed to the readers at first. For instance, the narrator "looks down" at his father digging, as shown in the second stanza, which can either be interpreted in two ways. One way is that the narrator is situated above his father who is in the fields digging, or another way in which the narrator looks down upon his father and sees no value in his occupation. As shown, the narrator's position is above his father because he has an education, which is reinforced from the start: the narrator is a writer, and most likely received more education than his father who is a potato farmer. The mood reinforces the distant relationship between the father and the son. The mood of the poem at first is solemn and grave. This is exemplified in the onomatopoeia; "a clean, rasping sound" In