How might Ben Jonson's "Epitaph on S. P., a Child of Queen Elizabeth's Chapel" compare with Robert Herrick's "Upon Prue, His Maid"?What are the...

Ben Jonson’s poem “Epitaph on S. P., a Child of Queen
Elizabeth’s Chapel” and Robert Herrick’s poem “Upon Prue, His Maid” are two works, by
seventeenth-century writers, that commemorate the dead. However, the differences between
the two works are more striking than their
similarities.

Herrick’s poem is very brief and, partly for
that reason, somewhat witty. Consisting of a mere four lines, the poem does mention the
full name of the person commemorated, Prudence Baldwin, but it gives us almost no
impression of her as an individual person or personality. The language is as simple and
plain as the poem is brief. Just as the urn in which Prue is buried is “little,” so the
same thing is true of the poem in which Herrick commemorates her. Indeed, the word “urn”
here may even refer, metaphorically, to the poem itself (1). One gets the sense that the
poem did not require much time or effort to write – not because Herrick did not value
Prue but simply because epitaphs were often short. (Many of them, in fact, were
inscribed on cemetery headstones and thus could not be very
long.)

In contrast, Jonson gives great attention to “S. P.”
(Salomon Pavy), a boy actor who had acted in several of Jonson’s dramas and whom Jonson
seems to have genuinely respected. Jonson in fact begins by referring to his own grief
at Pavy’s passing, and he also directly and explicitly addresses the reader, as Herrick
does not (1). The first four lines of the poem suggest that Pavy’s death is, and should
be, an occasion of grief for practically everyone, including even a personified Death.
Jonson presents a far more detailed picture of Pavy’s personality and individual
character than Herrick presents of Prue’s. We learn about Pavy’s precise age (9), the
length of his career as an actor (11-12), the kinds of roles he played (14), and his
skill as an actor (16).

Jonson pays unusual tribute to a
non-aristocratic youth, just as he plays unusual tribute to a member of a profession –
acting – that was not especially respected by many people during his era. One senses in
Jonson’s poem the kind of personal loss and genuine tenderness that a poem like
Herrick’s was never intended to express.  Herrick’s poem, though accomplished, is merely
conventional; Jonson’s poem gives us a sense not only of Pavy’s character but also of
the writer’s own personality and values. The mere existence and length of Jonson’s poem
implies the rich value of Pavy’s life. The poem speaks, by implication, as attractively
about Jonson as it does explicitly about Pavy. The fact that Jonson took the time and
made the effort to celebrate Pavy in this way helps refute the claim (associated with
the historian Lawrence Stone) that the deaths of children was not felt as keenly in the
early modern period as they would be in later centuries.

By
the end of the work, Jonson manages to convince us that there is real emotion behind the
poem’s opening lines:

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Weep with me, all you that
read

This little story;

And
know for whom a tear you shed,

Death’s self is
sorry.

Jonson’s poem, unlike
Herrick’s, does indeed help us “know” (emphasis added) the specific
person whose death the poem laments.