Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy!
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.

These lines come from Ben Jonson’s elegy on the death of his eldest son, Benjamin Jonson, who died of the plague in 1603 at the age of seven. Jonson, a poet and dramatist of the early Stuart period, wrote the poem as a private act of mourning shaped by Christian resignation and classical restraint. The phrase “child of my right hand” puns on the Hebrew-derived meaning of the name Benjamin (“son of the right hand”), turning the boy’s name into an intimate address. The poem is notable for its self-reproach: Jonson frames excessive parental attachment as a kind of “sin,” and tries to discipline grief by casting the loss as a debt paid to God.

The speaker bids farewell to a beloved child while simultaneously chastising himself for having invested too much hope in him. Calling the boy “joy” underscores how completely the child embodied the father’s happiness, yet the next line pivots to moral accounting: “My sin was too much hope of thee.” Jonson treats grief not only as sorrow but as a spiritual test, suggesting that to love a child as if he were secure in this world is a form of misplaced trust. The couplet’s poignancy lies in its tension between tenderness and self-command—an attempt to convert raw bereavement into acceptance, even as the language reveals how deep the attachment ran.