Summary and Analysis of “The Canonization“
The poet demands that some complainers leave him alone to like. The complainer should turn his attention elsewhere, and no-one is hurt by love. they’re not sinking ships or causing floods, delaying spring or causing others to die, or supporting wars or lawsuits. The poet and his lover take their chances together; they’re unified in their love. they’re like candles which will blow out on their own, yet they need to be been reborn together in a fire just like the fabled Phoenix. On the opposite hand, their love may be a beautiful example for the planet which will be immortalized, canonized, a pattern for all other love within the world.
Analysis
In “The Canonization,” Donne sets up a five-stanza argument to demonstrate the purity and power of his love for an additional. Each stanza begins and ends with the word “love.” The fourth and eighth lines of every stanza ends with a word also ending -ove (the pattern is consistently abbacccaa), all of which unifies the poem around a central theme.
The title leads the reader to expect a poem concerned with saints and holy practices, but the very first lines sound more sort of a line delivered on stage. “For God’s sake hold your tongue” is almost blasphemous when following the sacred title. By the top of the poem, the reader determines that “canonization” refers to the way that the poet’s love will enter the canon of true love, becoming the pattern by which others judge their love. As usual, this hyperbole also leads the reader to seek out a spiritual or metaphysical meaning within the poem, and as was common, this may lead us to ascertain that Donne sets out the perfection of divine love because of the only realistic model for all others.
In the first stanza the poet complains that his verbal assailant is misguided. Has he no more important work to try to than criticize others’ love? He could even as easily attack Donne’s “gout” or “palsy” (line 2) or maybe his “five gray hairs” (line 3), but he should get employment or attend a school or enter a profession, goodbye as he leaves the poet alone. The king’s “stamped face” (line 7) presumably refers to coinage with the king’s likeness. the items of the planet are often left to the critic and therefore the world, goodbye because the critic “will let me love (line 9).
The second stanza takes a live-and-let-live individual rights perspective: “who’s injured by my love?” (line 10). The lovers aren’t making war, fighting lawsuits, interfering with commerce, or spreading disease. They respect others’ property; his tears don’t trespass. They take their chances together in their fleeting lives, because of the third paragraph notes. To the remainder of the planet, they’re tiny flies or candles that will burn together in peace.
They may destroy themselves within the act of burning with passion for each other, yet by the center of the poem, Donne translates their like to a better plane. First he compares himself and his beloved to the eagle and dove, a regard to the Renaissance idea during which the eagle flies within the sky above the world while the dove transcends the skies to succeed in heaven. He immediately shifts to the image of the Phoenix, another death-by-fire symbol (the Phoenix may be a bird that repeatedly burns in the fire and comes back to life out of the ashes), suggesting that albeit their flames of passion will consume them, the poet and his beloved are going to be reborn from the ashes of their love.
In their resurrection, their relationship has become a paradox. The key paradox of affection is that two individuals become one. By uniting during this way, they “prove/Mysterious by this love” (lines 26-27). These words may imply the mystery of marriage because it reflects the connection between Jesus and his church, as stated by Paul in the First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians. Indeed, the new union is unsexed albeit it incorporates both sexes: “to one neutral thing both sexes fit,” a bit like in Christ there’s not any male or female (Galatians 3:28). Compare the story of affection in Plato’s Symposium where the first citizenry had the marks of both sexes before they were split into male and feminine, everyone is left to hunt his or her spouse.
The fourth stanza opens bent considers the legacy of the poet’s love together with his beloved. Their love will endure in legend; the language of “verse” and “chronicle” suggests canonization at nearly the extent of Scripture, which is counted by verses and has books called Chronicles. albeit their love isn’t quite at that level, songs are going to be sung and sonnets composed commemorating their romance.
On the one hand, their love is self-contained and excellent, sort of a “well-wrought urn.” (This may be a phrase that might become famous after poet Keats wrote “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and critic Cleanth Brooks wrote a book treating each poem like its own beautifully and punctiliously crafted urn, full unto itself.) On the opposite hand, the ashes during this urn are meant to spread, during this case covering half an acre but symbolic of spreading the story of perfect love throughout the planet.
The final stanza voices the poet’s sense of future vindication over the critic. The poet expects that the remainder of the planet will “invoke” himself and his beloved, almost like the way Catholics invoke saints in their prayers. during this vision of the longer term, the lovers’ legend has grown, and that they have reached a sort of sainthood. they’re role models for all the planet, because “Countries, towns, courts beg from above/A pattern of your love” (lines 44-45). From the lovers’ perspective, the entire world is present as they appear into each other’s eyes; this sets the pattern of affection that the planet can follow.
The Canonization by John Donne , Poem
