Poems That Make Grown Men Cry Read Free

the while I think on thee,dear friend,
    All losses are restored and sorrows end.
    (1609)

    The writer and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg (b. 1939) has published more than twenty novels, most recently
Grace and Mary
(2013), and fourteen works of nonfiction, including
The Adventure of English
(2003). He has also written two books for children and four screenplays, including
The Music Lovers
(1970) and
Jesus Christ Superstar
(1973). For
several decades he has presented TV’s
The South Bank Show
and BBC Radio’s
In Our Time
. He was created a life peer in 1998.

On My First Son
    BEN JONSON (1572–1637)

    JOHN CAREY
    I have, thank God, never lost a child. But every parent has a lurking dread that it may happen, and an inbuilt sympathy with those to whom it has. Over and above these obvious
triggers of grief in Jonson’s poem, though, it is the tone that makes it, for me, impossible – or anyway, unsafe – to try toread aloud.
    I know, from experiment, that I cannot be sure to get any further than the last two words of the second line – ’loved boy’. They sound so natural, so like a loving
afterthought, as if he has turned to the child and addressed him in an altered, gentler voice, as you might do after making some more public announcement – just to reassure him, in case he is
afraid or bewildered.I think that, once that point is past, I could manage to read the rest. Jonson blaming himself, and consoling himself by thinking of the tribulations his child will not now
have to suffer, reaches a kind of precarious equipoise, and by the end he’s looking to the future. It’s that ‘loved boy’ that’s the killer.
    On My First Son
    Farewell, thou child of my right hand, andjoy;
    My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.
    Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
    Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
    O, could I lose all father now! For why
    Will man lament the state he should envy?
    To have so soon ‘scap’d world’s and flesh’s rage,
    And, if no other misery, yet age?
    Rest in soft peace, and, asked,say, ‘Here doth lie
    Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.’
    For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such
    As what he loves may never like too much.
    (1616)

    John Carey (b. 1934) is emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, twice chairman of the Man Booker Prize judges, and a frequent broadcaster.Among his many published works are studies of Milton, Dickens, Thackeray, Donne, and Golding, a polemic entitled
What Good Are the Arts?
(2005), and his new memoir,
The Unexpected
Professor
(2014).

Amor constante más allá de la muerte
    FRANCISCO DE QUEVEDO (1580–1645)

    ARIEL DORFMAN
    It is the last line that does it; the tears come from beyond me, and perhaps from beyond death. The eyes that shed those tears will become dust, the eyes that have seen over
and over the love of my life, Angélica, the woman who helped me survive exile and tribulationsand peopled my world with hope – those eyes will have been closed by the final shadow.
And yet the
polvo
, the dust, is
enamorado
, is in love.
    Except that there are no words in English that can offer us the equivalent of
enamorado
or
enamoramiento
, so much so that I have had a correspondence with my friend, the
extraordinary Spanish author Javier Marías, about the right translation intoEnglish for his equally extraordinary novel, entitled
Los Enamoramientos
, and we reached the conclusion
that there was no perfect fit for such a word, not in English, not in any language.
    Quevedo knew this many centuries ago and finished his poem with that word, which tells us that we are filled with love, we fall into love as if into an abyss, we ascend to its invitation to
enamorar
,a verb that enhances what both lovers must do, make someone love me, find myself overflowing with love.
    That last verse never fails to make me cry. The laws of the universe discovered by physics assure humanity that we are composed of atoms and that