Most prayers ask for mercy. Ben Jonson's begins by asking for the opposite: "Use still thy rod." The speaker wants God to keep punishing him, and the six short stanzas of "A Hymn to God the Father" explain why. They move from that startling request to a quiet, confident surrender, and the central idea is that suffering, rightly understood, can be a form of love.
The logic is plain and a little uncomfortable. Stanza two imagines the alternative: if God had left him "free," he would have "forgot / Myself and thee." Freedom here means drifting, forgetting both God and one's own nature. Stanza three gives the reason: "sin's so sweet" that "minds ill-bent / Rarely repent, / Until they meet / Their punishment." The speaker is not claiming to be better than other people. He is admitting that temptation is pleasant and that only pain gets through to him. That honesty gives the poem its force. He calls his "broken heart" his "best part," a paradox that makes sense once you see that a heart broken by guilt is the only part of him ready to turn back to God.
The middle of the poem shifts from confession to argument. "Who more can crave / Than thou hast done?" he asks, and the language becomes that of money and ownership. Humanity was "first made of nought" and is now "with all since bought." Christ is the price paid "to free a slave," and the slave is the speaker. Having said this, the poem turns on a hard little line: "Yet I rebel / And slight the same." The word "slight" is exact. His rebellion is not a grand defiance but a casual brushing-off of something enormously costly. The earlier stanza about sin's sweetness feels more shameful once the cost has been spelled out.
The form matches the argument. Almost every line is only four syllables long, with about two beats, so each thought arrives in a short, compressed burst. There is no room for ornament, and the lines read like someone speaking plainly and quickly while afraid of running out of time. The stanzas follow a symmetrical pattern of six lines, five, five, then six, five, five, so the poem seems to fall into two matching halves. The first half deals with punishment and the second with redemption. Rhyme closes each stanza firmly, and Jonson often piles several lines onto one sound: "name / overcame / same" in stanza five, "loss / toss / cross" in the last. In that final stanza the repetition feels like a settling, as though the restless "toss" is finally answered by the "cross." The first stanza also pairs "prove" with "Love," which a modern reader may hear as a near-miss rhyme, a faint reminder that the speaker's tidy theology doesn't quite resolve itself.
The imagery works through suggestion rather than description. "Rod" evokes a parent's or teacher's discipline, which fits the title's address to God as Father. In stanza five the vocabulary turns military. "Overcame," "rebel," and "win" suggest a kingdom, a conqueror and a rebellious subject. The last stanza combines these images with something like a refuge. "But I'll come in / Before my loss / Me farther toss" suggests someone being thrown about by events and choosing shelter before things get worse. Judging by the wording, the speaker also pictures himself "under His cross" as a soldier stands under a banner, so that the cross is both a safe place and a flag he can fight for. The word "win" is surprising here. He expects to win by surrendering, which is the same paradox as the broken heart that is "best."
The poem is worth reading because it is short and honest at once. Jonson was a poet and dramatist of Shakespeare's era, and this hymn has none of the elaborate show that people sometimes expect from writing of that time. It gives no excuses and no flattering self-portrait, only a mind that knows its own weakness and has run out of arguments. The poem ends on a decision ("I'll come in") rather than a feeling. For a reader today, the most striking thing may be how modern that is: the plain admission that we often learn only through pain, and the hope that it can still lead somewhere good.