Answer:
Ben Jonson, ‘On My First Sonne’.
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sinne was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy,
Seven yeeres thou’wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day …
An elegy on the death of Jonson’s son Benjamin, this is a deeply touching poem about the loss of a child, written at a time when infant mortality was considerably higher than it is now.
Jonson says that his one sin was to entertain too many hopes for his son’s future. This is a ‘sinne’ (a twisting of ‘Sonne’: ‘On My First Sonne’), because the child’s fate, like everyone’s, is not in Jonson’s hands, but God’s: not up to his father but Our Father, he might say.
