ABSTRACT
In January 1629 the aging poet Jonson, bedrid at fifty-six by an earlier stroke, poor, his masques out of favor at the new court of Charles I, saw his play The New Inne fail on the public stage. He sought consolation in an “Ode to Himselfe” (“Come leave the lothed stage”) in which he vigorously attacked his audience and, invoking the example of Pindar, Horace, and other classical singers, turned to praising the King. Later the same year, in August 1629, young Sir Lucius Cary, one of the “sons” of Ben, lost his close friend Sir Henry Morison, dead of sickness at twenty or twenty-one; they had been fellow soldiers in Ireland when Cary’s father, Sir Henry, was Lord Deputy there.1 Again Jonson roused himself to confront the facts of human frailty and defeat, now in their ultimate form. His great ode of 1629-30, “To the Immortall Memorie, and Friendship of That Noble Paire, Sir Lucius Cary, and Sir H[enry] Morison” (Und. 70), demonstrates that his powers to turn or transform are undimmed. Indeed, the consolation he fashions for Cary is one of his purest and most moving poems, its control and grace belying the range and complex interrelatedness — as yet not adequately recognized — of the classical materials from which his argument is woven.2
