Article: A link between two Jonson poems.(Ben Jonson)

Two poems in The Underwood, #43 and #47, are connected in an unobtrusive fashion. The couplet ending the first poem, "An Execration Upon Vulcan," has the same rhyme--and virtually the same rhyme words--as the one beginning the second poem, "An Epistle Answering to One that Asked to be Sealed of the Tribe of Ben." The echo is then confirmed by an allusion to fire, which in the first poem is literal and in the second is metaphoric.

The last tour lines of Execration Upon Vulcan" conclude a "civil curse" (190) on the god of fire who has destroyed Jonson's library:

Pox on thee. Vulcan. thy Pandora's pox

And all the evils that flew out of her box

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