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.
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