In the hope to meet Shortly again, and make our absence sweet.

These lines are commonly attributed to Ben Jonson’s lyric “Song: To Celia” (the poem beginning “Drink to me only with thine eyes”), a courtly love song that circulated widely in manuscript and print in the early seventeenth century and was later included in Jonson’s collection *The Forest* (1616). The couplet functions as a graceful leave-taking: the speaker parts from the beloved with confidence in a near reunion, framing separation not as loss but as something that can be “sweetened” by hope and constancy. The poem’s polished, epigrammatic style reflects Jonson’s classical learning and the period’s taste for refined, urbane lyric address.

The couplet turns farewell into a moral and emotional stance. “In the hope to meet / Shortly again” emphasizes trust in continuity—love (or friendship) persists beyond physical presence. The phrase “make our absence sweet” suggests that distance can intensify affection: memory, anticipation, and fidelity transform what might be painful into something pleasurable or meaningful. In Jonson’s idiom, the sweetness is not sentimental excess but a controlled, witty revaluation of absence. The lines also imply reciprocity (“our absence”), presenting separation as a shared condition that can be jointly endured and aesthetically reframed.