Two lines are enough for Katherine Philips to announce her verdict: nothing on earth deserves our trust, because "Youth and Beauty both are dust." Everything after that is evidence. The title tells us the dead child is the poet's own son, so the voice is a mother's, and the poem moves from a sweeping maxim to one particular story. There are seven childless years, then the gasp of "A Son, a son is born at last," then a life that lasts "less than six weeks." The baby is the proof of the opening claim. He is "exactly lim'd and fair," a living example of the youth and beauty that turn to dust.
The form is plain and tightly controlled. Most lines are short, about seven syllables, with a trochaic tread that makes them sound like a chant or an inscription, and they pair off in rhyming couplets. Each couplet closes a thought with a click: "trust" with "dust," "past" with "last." Philips lets the lines swell only where the joy is. "A Son, a son is born at last" and "Full of good Spirits, Meen, and Air" both run to eight syllables, as if the verse can't quite hold its delight. The one couplet that fails to close cleanly comes just as the hope collapses: "promised" and "dead" barely chime. After the long line promising a "long life," the rhyme slips, and so does the child.
The middle of the poem turns grief into an argument. "Too promising, too great a mind / In so small room to be confin'd" gives a reason for the death, and "Therefore" announces the consolation. He was too fit for heaven to stay, so "He quickly broke the Prison shell." The shell suggests both a prison and an egg, so death becomes a kind of hatching. Yet the tidiness of the logic, with its doubled "too," reads like someone reaching for comfort rather than someone who has found it.
The alchemist image is the most unusual in the poem. The "Hermes Seal" is the airtight closing of the alchemist's vessel, a ghost of which survives in our phrase "hermetically sealed." No seal, the poem says, can hold "The powerful spirit's subtler flight," because the volatile spirit escapes anyway. The earlier "good Spirits" quietly prepare this pun, so the baby's liveliness and the alchemist's vanishing essence become the same thing. The image also echoes the mother's labour. "Long we gathering are with pain" could describe an alchemist's patient work as well as the long wait for a child. Judging by the grammar, the "him" who is bid "long good night" is the alchemist, the one left behind in the dark after all his effort. The consoling argument holds, but the loss is still felt.
The final image gathers the poem's themes of light and burial. The child's eyes are brighter than the sun at its rising, but like the sun he "takes a shrowd, / Buried in a morning Cloud." "Shrowd" is a burial cloth and a covering of cloud at once, and "morning" stresses how early the darkening comes, before the day has even started. A clouded sun is hidden rather than destroyed, which leaves a faint hope of heaven. The word "Buried," though, is blunt and final, and Philips ends on the cloud rather than on any promise of return.
The poem is significant because it is both disciplined and personal. It never wails. It gives a mother's loss the shape of an argument, with a maxim, a story, a consolation and two images, and the compression makes each word weigh more. "Seven years childless" does the work of a paragraph, and the clouded sunrise does the work of a funeral. The poem also shows an early modern poet using the learned language of alchemy to say something very human. Its comfort is real but unfinished, and the way the logic strains against the grief is what makes it moving.