The Canonization by John Donne: Summary, Analysis & Line-by-Line Notes (DSC-4, Unit 2)

“The Canonization” is one of John Donne’s most famous love poems, and it is also one of the poems you must study in Unit 2 of DSC-4 (14th to 17th Century English Poetry). The Delhi University syllabus lists three Donne poems together in this unit: ‘Sunne Rising’, ‘The Canonization’ and ‘The Good Morrow’. These notes cover the full poem: a stanza-wise summary, line-by-line meaning, themes, conceits, form, critical debates, comparisons, exam help and FAQs.

If you are revising the whole paper, you can find every unit on the 14th to 17th Century English Poetry category page or on the BA English notes hub.

Original text of the poem: read it on the Poetry Foundation, or see the 1633 text with editorial notes in the University of Virginia “Literature in Context” edition. Keep the poem open in a second tab while you read these notes. The line-by-line section below quotes only short phrases.

The Canonization at a glance

What is “The Canonization” about? It is a dramatic love poem in which the speaker tells a critical listener to stop interfering with his love affair. He argues that his love harms nobody. Then he claims that the lovers are so extraordinary that future generations will treat them like saints of love, and that poetry will be the “shrine” that keeps their memory alive.

The poem in five lines (one per stanza):

1. Stanza 1: “Stop lecturing me and let me love; go chase wealth and royal favour instead.”
2. Stanza 2: “My love has harmed nobody: no ships sunk, no floods, no plague deaths.”
3. Stanza 3: “Call us flies or candles if you like; we are also the eagle, the dove and the phoenix, and we die and rise through love.”
4. Stanza 4: “If our story does not fit tombs and chronicles, it will fit sonnets, and poems will make us saints of love.”
5. Stanza 5: “Future lovers will pray to us for a pattern of true love, because in our eyes the whole world is mirrored.”

Who was John Donne? (Background)

Biography of John Donne

John Donne was an English poet and priest, born in London in 1571 or 1572 (sources differ on the year) and died on 31 March 1631. He was born into a Roman Catholic family at a time when practising Catholicism in England was illegal and dangerous. His mother, Elizabeth Heywood, was a descendant of the family of Sir Thomas More. His brother Henry died in prison in 1593, an event that is often linked with Donne’s growing doubts about his inherited faith.

Donne studied at Oxford and later at Lincoln’s Inn, and he worked as secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton. In December 1601 he secretly married Anne More, Egerton’s niece. When the marriage was discovered, Donne was dismissed from his post and briefly imprisoned in the Fleet prison. Many years of money trouble followed. In 1615 he was ordained in the Church of England, at the insistence of King James I, and in 1621 he became Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. By then he was famous as one of the most powerful preachers of his age.

A useful way to remember his career is the old split between “Jack Donne”, the witty, daring young poet of the love lyrics, and “Dr John Donne”, the serious dean of the later religious writing. “The Canonization” belongs to the first Donne, but it already mixes sacred and sexual language, which is why it is so interesting.

John Donne’s contribution to English literature

Donne is the leading figure of Metaphysical poetry, a style known for intellectual cleverness, surprising comparisons (conceits) and arguments about love, death, religion and the soul. He wrote in a time of religious and political change, and his poems carry the worries of that time.

One correction students often need: Donne was not an unknown writer who was “rediscovered” only after his death. He was celebrated in his own lifetime, mainly as a preacher, and his poems circulated in manuscript among friends and readers. His poems were mostly printed only after he died (1633). His reputation then faded for a long time and was revived in the early twentieth century, when T. S. Eliot and the New Critics praised the way he joined thought and feeling.

Famous works of John Donne

1. Songs and Sonnets: the collection of love lyrics that includes “The Canonization”, “The Good-Morrow”, “The Sun Rising” and “The Flea”.
2. The Holy Sonnets: later religious poems about sin, death and salvation, including “Death, be not proud” (Holy Sonnet 10) and “Batter my heart” (Holy Sonnet 14).
3. A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning: the famous compass conceit for two lovers who must part.
4. The Flea: a witty seduction argument built on a flea that has bitten both lovers.
5. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624): a prose work written during an illness. Meditation XVII in it contains the famous line “No man is an island”. Note that this is prose, not poetry.
6. Sermons: including “Death’s Duel”, preached shortly before he died.

Related reading on this site: The Sun Rising by John Donne and The Good-Morrow by John Donne, the other two Donne poems in the same unit.

Historical and cultural context

Donne as a Renaissance poet

Donne wrote in the late Renaissance. The Renaissance began in Italy in the 14th century and spread across Europe, bringing a new interest in classical learning, humanism and the arts and sciences. In England, Donne’s early poetry belongs to the last years of Queen Elizabeth I (reigned 1558–1603), and his later career belongs to the reign of King James I (1603–1625).

The Renaissance gave importance to the individual voice, and you can hear it in Donne’s poems: they sound like a real person arguing with a real listener. Many Elizabethan love poets used the polite, worshipping conventions of the Italian poet Petrarch (the sighing, suffering, humble lover). Donne takes those conventions and often turns them upside down. “The Canonization” is a good example, because the speaker makes fun of the old claim that a lover’s sighs and tears can sink ships and flood fields.

How is Donne a metaphysical poet?

Metaphysical poetry developed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Its main features are:

• Intellectual argument: the poem behaves like a clever debate about love, death or God.
• Conceits: surprising, extended comparisons between very different things, such as lovers and the legs of a compass in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”.
• Wit and paradox: statements that seem contradictory but carry a deeper truth.
• Speech-like language: abrupt openings, questions, and a conversational voice. “For God’s sake hold your tongue” is a perfect example.
• Love as body and soul together: physical and spiritual love are not kept apart.

The label “metaphysical” was applied later by critics. It was not a name the poets gave themselves, and eighteenth-century critics such as Samuel Johnson used it partly as a complaint. Today it is simply the standard name for the group that includes Donne, George Herbert and Andrew Marvell.

Religious and political climate

Donne’s England was divided by the Reformation. Catholics were persecuted by the Protestant state, and Donne grew up inside a persecuted family. Later he moved into the Church of England, and that change shaped his life and career. Religious language runs through his poems, and it appears even in his love poetry, as “The Canonization” shows. Donne turns a Catholic idea (the Church declaring someone a saint) into a way of talking about two lovers.

Politically, the move from Elizabeth I to James I brought some stability, but tensions between the Crown and Parliament were growing, and these later led to the English Civil War. In “The Canonization”, the first stanza lists the usual roads to success: money, learning, a place at court and the king’s favour. The speaker rejects them, so the poem sits close to the world of court ambition even while it turns away from it.

When was the poem written and published?

The poem was first printed in 1633, two years after Donne’s death, in Poems, by J.D., printed by M. F. for John Marriot. The title page of that volume can be seen in the University of Virginia edition linked above.

The date of composition is not certain. Oliver Tearle of Loughborough University, writing on the Interesting Literature site, says this poem was written some time in the 1590s, like most of Donne’s love poetry. Other study guides say early 17th century. This matters for one popular reading: many students link the poem with Donne’s secret marriage and ruined career in 1601. If the poem was written earlier than 1601, that link becomes weaker. In an exam, say “often read in the light of Donne’s ruined prospects, though the date is uncertain”, rather than stating it as fact.

Summary of The Canonization (stanza by stanza)

The poem has five stanzas of nine lines each. A good way to understand it is to see it as a five-part speech, and some critics have compared the shape to a five-act play. The speaker begins angry, becomes witty and mocking, then builds one dazzling image after another, and finally ends in a calm, almost ceremonial voice.

Stanza 1: “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love”

The poem begins in the middle of an argument. The speaker tells his listener to be quiet and let him love. If the listener must criticise something, let him criticise the speaker’s other faults: his palsy, his gout, his “five gray hairs” or his “ruined fortune”. Then the speaker sarcastically advises the listener to improve his own wealth and mind, get a job at court, flatter people in power and study the king’s “real” face (the king himself, who gives favour) or his “stampèd” face (the king’s head on a coin, which means money). The stanza ends with the same plea it began with: do whatever you like, “so you will let me love”.

What to notice: the speaker sounds like an older man who is in love and is tired of being lectured. The “friend” is never named, and we never hear his words, only the speaker’s answer to them.

Stanza 2: “Alas, alas, who’s injured by my love?”

Now the speaker defends himself with rhetorical questions. Have his sighs drowned any merchant’s ships? Have his tears flooded anyone’s land? Have his colds delayed the spring? Has the fever in his blood added a single name to the “plaguy bill”, the list of plague deaths? Meanwhile, soldiers still find wars and lawyers still find quarrelsome clients. The stanza ends quietly: “Though she and I do love.”

What to notice: this is a parody of Petrarchan exaggeration. Love poets of the time claimed that their sighs made storms and their tears made rain. Donne’s speaker says, in effect, that real love is not as destructive as the poets pretend. This is also the first time the beloved appears, as “she”.

Stanza 3: “Call us what you will, we are made such by love”

Here the speaker starts building new images. “Call her one, me another fly” (an insect that dies quickly, or a moth drawn to a flame). “We’re tapers too”, candles that burn themselves away, and so “at our own cost die”. Then the lovers find “the eagle and the dove” in themselves, and the phoenix riddle becomes more meaningful through them: “we two being one, are it”. The stanza ends with the paradox that they “die and rise the same”, and this love makes them “mysterious”.

What to notice: this stanza is the heart of the poem’s wit. The images pile up quickly: insects, candles, birds, a mythical bird. Each one shows lovers who burn, die and are reborn. It also gives the idea of two people becoming one, “one neutral thing” that both sexes fit.

Stanza 4: “We can die by it, if not live by love”

The speaker faces the problem of being forgotten. If the lovers cannot live by love in the real world, they can “die by it”. If their story is not suitable for tombs and a hearse, “it will be fit for verse”. If they never enter a “piece of chronicle” (a history book), they will build “in sonnets pretty rooms”. A “well-wrought urn” honours great ashes as well as a “half-acre” tomb. So through poems and “hymns”, everyone will agree that the lovers are “canonized for Love”.

What to notice: the poem now explains its own title. Poetry becomes the shrine and the official record of the saints of love. This stanza is the main reason the poem is often read as a poem about the power of poetry as much as about love.

Stanza 5: the invocation of the saints of love

The last stanza imagines future lovers praying to this couple as saints. They will say: you, whose “reverend love” made you each other’s “hermitage” (a place of religious retreat), you for whom love was peace and has now become “rage”, you who compressed the whole world’s soul into the “glasses” (mirrors) of your eyes, so that “countries, towns, courts” are all reflected in you, “beg from above / A pattern of your love!”

What to notice: the poem ends with its speaker no longer arguing but being praised, and the first stanza’s “countries, towns, courts” of worldly ambition now live inside the lovers’ eyes. The world they rejected is gathered into them.

Line-by-line explanation and glossary

Use this section with the poem open beside you. Only short phrases are quoted here.

Stanza 1 (lines 1–9)

• “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love” – an abrupt, speech-like opening. “For God’s sake” is a mild oath, which is itself ironic in a poem about sainthood.
• “Or chide my palsy, or my gout, / My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune flout” – if you must mock something, mock my age, illness and money problems. “Flout” means to mock. These are small, human, un-heroic faults, set against the huge claim made later.
• “With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve” – improve your social position with wealth and your mind with learning. The speaker is sarcastic, as if listing ways a respectable man should spend his life.
• “Take you a course, get you a place” – choose a career and get an official post.
• “Observe his honour, or his grace” – pay attention to the honour of a lord or the “grace” (a title and favour) of a bishop or duke.
• “Or the king’s real, or his stampèd face / Contemplate” – study the king himself, or the king’s face on a coin. One means political favour; the other means money.
• “So you will let me love” – the point of the whole stanza.

Stanza 2 (lines 10–18)

• “What merchant’s ships have my sighs drowned?” – mocks the Petrarchan idea that a lover’s sighs create storms.
• “Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?” – tears do not flood farmland.
• “When did my colds a forward spring remove?” – my colds have not delayed the arrival of spring. “Remove” here means to put off or delay.
• “Add one more to the plaguy bill” – the “bill” is a list of the dead. In Donne’s London, weekly lists of deaths (“bills of mortality”) were published during plague. The speaker’s fever does not add a single name.
• “Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still / Litigious men” – the world carries on with its own conflicts, with or without the lovers.
• “Though she and I do love” – quiet, simple, and the first mention of the beloved.

Stanza 3 (lines 19–27)

• “Call us what you will, we are made such by love” – whatever label you give us, love is what shapes us.
• “Call her one, me another fly” – insult us as insects. A fly or moth is drawn to a flame and dies. Some readers hear a short-lived creature, others a moth, and either reading works in an essay.
• “We’re tapers too, and at our own cost die” – a taper is a thin candle. It burns itself up to give light. “Die” also carried a sexual meaning in the period, a pun that editors often point out. If you use it in an exam, present it as a possible second meaning.
• “And we in us find the eagle and the dove” – strength and gentleness, commonly read as masculine and feminine qualities, joined in the pair.
• “The phoenix riddle hath more wit / By us; we two being one, are it” – the phoenix is the legendary bird that burns and is reborn from its ashes, and the “riddle” is how one bird can be two (male and female) or die and live. The lovers solve the riddle: two people become one.
• “So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit” – the union is neither male nor female but both together.
• “We die and rise the same, and prove / Mysterious by this love” – they “die” (burn, love, and in a pun, reach climax) and “rise” again unchanged. Their love is a mystery, like a religious mystery.

Stanza 4 (lines 28–36)

• “We can die by it, if not live by love” – if the world will not let us live by love, we can die for it, like martyrs.
• “And if unfit for tombs and hearse / Our legend be, it will be fit for verse” – “legend” originally meant the story of a saint’s life. If our legend does not suit grand burial monuments, it will suit poetry.
• “And if no piece of chronicle we prove” – if we do not appear in official history.
• “We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms” – a pun, since the Italian word “stanza” means “room”. Poems become the lovers’ home.
• “As well a well-wrought urn becomes / The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs” – a small, beautifully made urn honours even the greatest person’s ashes as well as a huge tomb does.
• “And by these hymns, all shall approve / Us canonized for Love” – the verb “approve” (to confirm and accept) is the language of the Church recognising a saint.

Stanza 5 (lines 37–45)

• “And thus invoke us” – “invoke” means to call on in prayer.
• “You, whom reverend love / Made one another’s hermitage” – a hermitage is a quiet place of retreat; the lovers have turned each other into a shelter from the world.
• “You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage” – love has moved from calm to passion. Scholars have discussed what “rage” means here (passion, madness or the intensity of desire), so treat it as an interpretive choice.
• “Who did the whole world’s soul contract” – “contract” means to shrink or compress. The lovers have gathered the world’s spirit into one small place.
• “Into the glasses of your eyes” – mirrors, or lenses, formed by their eyes.
• “Countries, towns, courts” – the worlds of geography, society and politics, which the speaker rejected in stanza 1, now reflected inside the lovers.
• “A pattern of your love” – a model to imitate, the final request of the future believers.

Key terms for revision

Analysis: themes

Theme of love and religion

The central idea is that romantic love and religious devotion are comparable. The speaker defends his love by saying that it is almost holy. He compares the couple with saints who suffer for their beliefs, and the poem’s title borrows the Church’s own language. Donne is interested in how love joins body and spirit, which is typical of his metaphysical poetry.

The key question is whether Donne is being serious or playful. Different critics answer differently, and you should be ready to show both sides (see “Critical interpretations” below). A safe exam line is that the poem is playful in tone but serious in claim: it uses wit to say that love deserves respect.

Theme of immortality through poetry

The poem argues that if the world will not record the lovers’ story, poetry will. Tombs and chronicles belong to public history. Sonnets and hymns belong to art, and art, the speaker says, will keep the lovers’ memory alive. The poem therefore points to itself: by the time we reach the last stanza, we have read the very “hymn” that canonizes the lovers.

Note that the poem does not talk about children or family. Immortality here comes from art, and the poem shows no interest in descendants. Many students add a point about “remembered through children”, but the text does not support it.

Theme of social critique

Donne criticises a society that values money, status, a place at court and the king’s favour above personal love. The speaker mocks the listener’s ambitions in stanza 1. In stanza 2 he points out that the “real” harm in the world comes from soldiers, lawyers and plague, not from lovers. The poem insists that love is a private, serious experience and that public opinion matters less than the truth of that experience.

Theme: the private world and the public world

This is a theme that many notes miss. Stanza 1 is full of public things (courts, honour, coins). Stanza 5 ends with “countries, towns, courts” again, but now they are reflected in the lovers’ eyes. The public world is not simply rejected; it is absorbed into the private world. The idea that two lovers can contain the whole world also appears in “The Good-Morrow” and “The Sunne Rising”, which makes the link between the three poems in your unit.

Theme: union, mutuality and the “neutral thing”

The poem keeps joining the two lovers: “she and I”, “we two being one”, “one neutral thing both sexes fit”. The image of the phoenix suggests that a male and a female become a single creature that is neither only one nor only the other. Some readers take this to be a poetic picture of perfect union; others notice that the beloved never speaks.

Theme: parody of Petrarchan love

The poem refuses to behave like a standard love poem of its time. Instead of a suffering, silent lover who worships a distant lady, we have a lover who is loved in return and who laughs at the exaggerations of the tradition. This links the poem to the other Renaissance love poems in your syllabus. For comparison, see how Sidney’s speaker in Astrophil and Stella, Sonnet 1 struggles with love poetry that feels borrowed and forced.

Structure, conceits and form

The conceits at a glance

Some critics point out that the poem is unusual because it does not rely on one single extended conceit (like the compass in “A Valediction”). Instead it uses a chain of shorter comparisons. Other critics, such as Clay Hunt, argue that the lover–saint conceit is developed carefully across the whole poem. You can use both views in an essay.

Poetic form and metre

Every stanza has nine lines. The rhyme scheme is ABBACCCAA: lines 1, 4, 8 and 9 rhyme with each other (in stanza 1: love, improve, approve, love), lines 2 and 3 rhyme, and lines 5, 6 and 7 rhyme. You will find some guides that say ABBACCCDD, but if you check the end words of lines 8 and 9, they return to the first rhyme, so ABBACCCAA is the more accurate description.

The metre is basically iambic, but the line lengths change. SparkNotes records the stress pattern as 5-4-5-5-4-4-5-4-3 (pentameter, tetrameter, pentameter, pentameter, tetrameter, tetrameter, pentameter, tetrameter, trimeter). Scansion can vary a little from reader to reader, so in an exam say “lines of varying length, from pentameter to trimeter”.

Why does this matter? The long opening lines give room for argument, the shorter lines in the middle make punchy points, and the short last line (“So you will let me love”, “Though she and I do love”, “Mysterious by this love”, “canonized for Love”, “A pattern of your love!”) works like a closing click. Lines 1 and 9 also end with the word “love” in every stanza, so the word frames each stanza like brackets around an argument.

Donne’s inventive stanza form is common in his lyrics, though it would be too strong to say that every metaphysical poem uses irregular rhyme. A fair statement is that the form is intricate, but tightly controlled, and that the speech-like rhythm helps the poem sound like an urgent, spoken argument.

The five-stage argument

Imagery and symbolism

Religious imagery

The poem is full of religious words: canonized, hymns, legend, hermitage, invoke, reverend, pattern and the idea of rising from death. These words give the love affair the dignity of a religious life. “Hermitage” is especially striking because it describes the lovers as two people who have withdrawn from the world to devote themselves to something sacred.

Symbolism of canonization

Canonization is the process by which the Church investigates a dead person’s life and then declares them a saint. Donne borrows this idea but changes it. The lovers will be recognised not by a church committee but by the community of later lovers and by poetry. The Cambridge-published article by John A. Clair on the poem even compares Donne’s pattern with the Church’s procedure for “confessors”, saints who lived lives of devoted self-denial, rather than for martyrs. If you want to go deeper, read that article and the essay by Albert Labriola in the John Donne Journal (both linked in the publishing notes below).

A second layer is the idea that the poem itself is the act of canonization. The lovers are made “saints” by the poem’s words as we read them. So “canonization” is both what the poem talks about and what the poem does.

Language and style

Use of paradox

A paradox is a statement that seems contradictory but reveals a truth. “The Canonization” is built from paradoxes:

• “We can die by it, if not live by love”: dying for love is a way of living in memory.
• “We die and rise the same”: death and rebirth happen together in love.
• “We two being one”: two people become a single being, yet they remain two.
• “Mysterious by this love”: something ordinary (lovers) becomes a religious mystery.
• The tapers “at our own cost die”: the very thing that destroys them also gives light.
• Antitheses such as chronicles/sonnets, well-wrought urn/half-acre tombs and peace/rage, which drive the argument forward.

Tone and diction

The tone shifts as the poem moves. It begins with defiance (“hold your tongue”), becomes ironic and mocking (“Alas, alas, who’s injured by my love?”), grows bold and witty when the conceits appear, becomes confident in the discussion of poetry, and ends in a reverent, almost ritual voice. The diction mixes the everyday (gout, colds, lawyers) with the sacred (canonized, hymns, hermitage), and that mixture is one of Donne’s trademarks.

Critical interpretations

The poem is a favourite of critics because it can be read in more than one way. The summary below shows who argued what, so you can use it as a debate in an essay.

How to use this table: choose one or two readings and explain them in your own words. Brooks and the biographical reading are the easiest pair to contrast. The sources for the critics’ names are Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn; Leonard Unger, Donne’s Poetry and Modern Criticism (1950); Clay Hunt, Donne’s Poetry: Essays in Literary Analysis (1954); John Guillory, Cultural Capital (1993); and Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction (1982).

A correction to a common exam mistake

Students sometimes list “Romantic critics like Coleridge and T. S. Eliot” as a school of Donne criticism. That is misleading. Coleridge belongs to the Romantic period and Eliot to the Modernist period. Some nineteenth-century writers, Coleridge and Browning among them, valued Donne’s poetry, but Donne’s real critical revival came in the twentieth century with Eliot, the Oxford edition by H. J. C. Grierson (1912) and the New Critics in America. If you mention a critic by name, be sure you can name the work, or else describe the school (New Criticism, Historicism) and not the person.

Feminist readings

Feminist interpretations are usually presented in classroom criticism as lines of reading rather than as the work of one named critic, so in an answer say “a feminist reading may argue”.

1. The role of the female lover. The beloved appears only as “she”, “her” and “we”, and never speaks. The poem is a man’s speech about the pair, so the woman’s voice is missing. This reflects the male-centred poetry of the time.
2. Subversion of gender norms. The speaker rejects the usual male goals of wealth, status and a public career, and puts love first. Some readers see this as a challenge to ideas of masculinity.
3. Equality in union. The images of “we two being one” and “one neutral thing both sexes fit” suggest shared status. Stanza 2’s “she and I” gives her a place beside him. A counter-argument is that the equality is declared by the male speaker alone.

Psychoanalytic readings

These too are best introduced as possible readings (“a psychoanalytic reading could suggest”), since no single critic is cited here.

1. Desire and death. The poem links “dying” with loving, which a Freudian reading may connect with the idea that desire and death are intertwined. The period’s use of “die” for sexual climax makes the connection very natural.
2. Sublimation. Desire is raised to a religious and artistic level: from the body, through the candle and the phoenix, to hymns and sainthood.
3. The speaker’s self-regard. The speaker seems more interested in his own legend than in the woman’s feelings. A critical reader could say that the poem is as much about the speaker’s image as a lover and a poet as about the couple.

Comparative analysis

Comparison with other poems by Donne

The three Donne poems in your unit

Comparison with other poets

Why the poem still matters

For a DU student, the poem is useful beyond this one exam. It is a model of how metaphysical poetry mixes argument, wit and feeling. It shows how a poet can write against a literary convention (Petrarchan love) and how a poem can speak about its own power. It is also a very modern idea that a private relationship deserves respect and a public story. Because it connects love, religion, power and art, it often appears in essay topics that compare it with other poems in the paper.

How to write an exam answer on The Canonization

A simple five-part structure for a long answer:

1. Opening: name the poem, the poet, the collection (Songs and Sonnets, printed in 1633) and the central argument in one sentence.
2. Context: say briefly that it is a metaphysical love poem written when Petrarchan conventions were common, and mention that the date is uncertain.
3. Argument stanza by stanza: show the movement from anger (stanza 1) to defence (2), conceits (3), poetry as a monument (4) and invocation (5).
4. Technique: choose three devices (paradox, conceit, antithesis) and give one phrase for each.
5. Critical view and conclusion: add one critical perspective (Brooks on paradox, or the biographical reading) and end with the poem’s claim that art can confer a kind of sainthood.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Saying the poem has three stanzas (it has five).
• Calling the rhyme scheme ABBACCCDD (check the end words of lines 8 and 9; it is ABBACCCAA).
• Treating it as a religious poem (it is a love poem that uses religious language).
• Saying Eliot or Coleridge wrote about this poem as “Romantic critics” without evidence.
• Adding “remembered through children”; the poem does not say this.
• Forgetting that the beloved never speaks.

Quick revision list

• Title: the Church makes saints; the lovers are made saints by poetry.
• Speaker: a middle-aged lover addressing a critic.
• Argument: love is harmless, love is extraordinary, art will make it immortal.
• Images: fly, taper, eagle and dove, phoenix, urn, sonnets as “rooms”, hermitage, mirrors.
• Form: 5 × 9 lines, ABBACCCAA, lines 1 and 9 end in “love”.
• Debate: Brooks (paradox) versus biographical readings; Guillory and Culler as challengers.

Conclusion

“The Canonization” is a complex and entertaining poem. John Donne starts with an irritated outburst and ends with a prayer. On the way he rejects ambition and public opinion, mocks Petrarchan clichés, uses the images of tapers, flies, eagle and dove and the phoenix to show a love that burns, dies and is reborn, and concludes that poetry itself will make the lovers saints of love.

The poem’s key points are these: love is presented as sacred and private; poetry is the tomb, the chronicle and the shrine that keeps the lovers alive; the world of courts, money and power is first rejected and then absorbed into the lovers’ eyes; and the poem’s witty paradoxes are the tools by which Donne makes a serious claim. Critics still disagree about how playful or serious the poem is, and about whether the poem should be read through Donne’s life.

Donne’s legacy in English literature

Donne’s influence on later English poetry is wide. His speech-like openings, his wit, his conceits and his blending of sacred and sexual themes shaped other metaphysical poets such as George Herbert and Andrew Marvell. After a long period of neglect, his reputation was revived in the twentieth century: T. S. Eliot praised the way Donne’s thought was an experience that changed his sensibility, and the New Critics, especially Cleanth Brooks, made “The Canonization” a central text for the study of paradox. For a student of the 14th to 17th century paper, that history is a reminder that a poem’s meaning grows through the debates of its readers.

Continue Reading

Next in DSC-4, Unit 2 and related notes:

• The Sun Rising by John Donne: Summary, Analysis, Poetic Devices & PYQs: the next Donne poem in this unit.
• The Good-Morrow by John Donne: Summary, Analysis & Complete Notes (DSC-4, Unit 2): the third Donne poem in the unit.
• The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage by Walter Raleigh: another religious-minded poem from the same unit.
• Astrophil and Stella, Sonnet 1 by Philip Sidney: the Petrarchan sonnet tradition that Donne reacts against.

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