THE CANONIZATION

1.       The Canonization is a poem by English metaphysical poet John Donne.

2.       First published in 1633, the poem exemplifies Donne's wit and irony.

3.       It is addressed to one friend from another, but concerns itself with the complexities of romantic love: the speaker presents love as so all-consuming that lovers forgo other pursuits to spend time together.

4.       love is asceticism, a major conceit in the poem.

5.       he poem's title serves a dual purpose: while the speaker argues that his love will canonise him into a kind of sainthood, the poem itself functions as a canonisation of the pair of lovers.

6.       Donne has the capacity of opening a poem abruptly adding a dramatic quality to the poem.

7.       “For God’s sake hold your tongue” is nearly blasphemous when following the sacred title.

8.       The speaker asks his addressee to be quiet, and let him love.

9.        If the addressee cannot hold his tongue, the speaker tells him to criticize him for other shortcomings (other than his tendency to love): his palsy, his gout, his “five grey hairs,” or his ruined fortune.

10.   He admonishes the addressee to look to his own mind and his own wealth and to think of his position and copy the other nobles (“Observe his Honour, or his Grace, / Or the King’s real, or his stamped face / Contemplate.”)

11.   The speaker asks rhetorically, “Who’s injured by my love?” He says that his sighs have not drowned ships, his tears have not flooded land, his colds have not chilled spring, and the heat of his veins has not added to the list of those killed by the plague.

12.    Soldiers still find wars and lawyers still find litigious men, regardless of the emotions of the speaker and his lover.

13.   The speaker tells his addressee to “Call us what you will,” for it is love that makes them so.

14.    He says that the addressee can “Call her one, me another fly,” and that they are also like candles (“tapers”), which burn by feeding upon their own selves (“and at our own cost die”).

15.   In each other, the lovers find the eagle and the dove, and together (“we two being one”) they illuminate the riddle of the phoenix, for they “die and rise the same,” just as the phoenix does—though unlike the phoenix, it is love that slays and resurrects them.

16.   He says that they can die by love if they are not able to live by it, and if their legend is not fit “for tombs and hearse,” it will be fit for poetry, and “We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms.”

17.   A well-wrought urn does as much justice to a dead man’s ashes as does a gigantic tomb; and by the same token, the poems about the speaker and his lover will cause them to be “canonized,” admitted to the sainthood of love.

18.   All those who hear their story will invoke the lovers, saying that countries, towns, and courts “beg from above / A pattern of your love!”

19.   The five stanzas of “The Canonization” are metered in iambic lines ranging from trimeter to pentameter; in each of the nine-line stanzas, the first, third, fourth, and seventh lines are in pentameter, the second, fifth, sixth, and eighth in tetrameter, and the ninth in trimeter. The rhyme scheme in each stanza is ABBACCCDD.

20.   Each stanza begins and ends with the word “love.”

21.   New Critic Cleanth Brooks used the poem, along with Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Man" and William Wordsworth's "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802", to illustrate his argument for paradox as central to poetry.

22.   The speaker begs his friend not to disparage him for loving, but to insult him for other reasons instead, or to focus on other matters entirely.

23.   He supports his plea by asking whether any harm has been done by his love.

24.   The speaker describes how dramatically love affects him and his lover, claiming that their love will live on in legend, even if they die. They have been "canonized by Love.”

25.   The poem features images typical of the Petrarchan sonnet.

26.   In critic Clay Hunt's view, the entire poem gives "a new twist to one of the most worn conventions of Elizabethan love poetry" by expanding "the lover–saint conceit to full and precise definition," a comparison that is "seriously meant".

27.   In the third stanza, the speaker likens himself and his lover to candles, an eagle and dove, a phoenix, saints, and the dead. A reference to the Renaissance idea in which the eagle flies in the sky above the earth while the dove transcends the skies to reach heaven.

28.   Cleanth Brooks argues that the phoenix, which means rebirth, is a particularly apt analogy, since it combines the imagery of birds and of burning candles, and adequately expresses the power of love to preserve, though passion consumes.

29.   All of the imagery employed strengthens the speaker's claim that love unites him and his lover, as well as giving the lovers a kind of immortality.

30.    The conceit involving saints and the pair of lovers serves to emphasise the spirituality of the lovers' relationship.