Ben Jonson's «To Heaven» begins with a complaint that sounds almost comic: the speaker cannot even think of God without becoming gloomy. Yet the poem is not really about gloom. It is about being believed. Will anyone, God included, take this sorrow for what it is? Or will it be written off as a sickness of temperament, or as showy piety? "Is it interpreted in me disease / That, laden with my sins, I seek for ease?" The speaker is anxious about how his own sadness will be read, and the whole poem grows from that anxiety.
That worry explains why the language is so legal. God is called on as "witness" and "judge" and, a few lines later, as "advocate." The speaker invites scrutiny of his motives: "if I be sad for show, / And judge me after." The phrase "that the reins dost know" reaches for an old biblical image in which the kidneys, the "reins," were the seat of hidden feeling, so God is imagined as seeing what no human observer could. The poem works like a testimony in which the defendant is also the one who suspects himself.
Jonson builds this with very plain materials. The poem is a run of rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter, and the rhymes are simple and firm: "thee" and "be," "disease" and "ease," "scorn" and "borne." Most of the vocabulary is short and everyday. Nothing is ornamental, which suits a speaker trying to prove he isn't performing. The rhetoric is also carefully patterned. Lines 9 to 12 pile up triads: "First, midst, and last," then "My faith, my hope, my love," then "My judge, my witness, and my advocate." Three-part lists echo the Trinity the speaker names ("converted one, and three"), so the form quietly acts out the belief it describes.
Midway the poem turns from argument to something closer to plea. "Where have I been this while exil'd from thee? / And whither rap'd, now thou but stoop'st to me?" The verbs carry the drama. "Exil'd" and "rap'd" make the speaker's distance feel like a journey he was swept along on, while "stoop'st" shows God bending down to him. Then comes the doubled command "Dwell, dwell here still," as direct as the poem gets, followed by a small piece of logic that works as comfort: if God is "everywhere," how can the speaker "doubt to find thee ever here?" Doubt is answered by reasoning, though the reasoning has the sound of someone talking himself into peace.
The last third darkens. The speaker lists his condition: "Conceiv'd in sin, and unto labour borne, / Standing with fear, and must with horror fall." The balance of "standing" against "fall" makes even stability sound like a delay before collapse. Then comes the starkest image, a body so full of suffering that "scarce is ground / Upon my flesh t' inflict another wound." The rhyme of "ground" and "wound" may once have been fuller than it looks now, depending on how "wound" was pronounced, and in either case the pairing suits the idea of pain that has no room left.
The ending is the most revealing part. The speaker will not wish for death "with holy Paul," a reference to the apostle's longing to depart and be with Christ. He holds back, "lest it be thought the breath / Of discontent." Here the syntax gives him away. Until now the sentences have mostly stayed within their couplets, but this one spills over three of them, each clause adding a fresh qualification: "or that these prayers be / For weariness of life, not love of thee." He can't stop second-guessing his own motives. The last word, "thee," returns to the poem's first rhyme, closing the circle on the one thing he wants to be certain of.
What makes «To Heaven» memorable is that it treats sincerity as a hard problem. Many religious poems declare faith or repentance with confidence. This one shows the anxious work of checking whether a feeling is honest, and it ends without any easy resolution, only a speaker who would rather stay silent than be misunderstood by God.