Ben Jonson's ‘best pieces of poetry' and a comparison of their symbolic nuclear principle*

Our subject consists of two poems composed by Ben Jonson on the deaths of two of his children. It might be of note that Jonson himself was a posthumous child, born one month after his father's demise. Although we know little of Jonson's early life, we are certain that he married in 1592 at the age of twenty, that in May of the following year he had his first daughter, and that some six months later she died from the plague; a subsequent son, born in 1596, lived for seven years before he too was fatally stricken by another of London's all too frequent plagues.