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Literary Analysis: John Donne's

"The Canonization"
Updated on April 14, 2018

Rukhaya M K more
Rukhaya MK, an award-winning writer, has published her works in national and international anthologies
and journals.
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The impulsive and dramatic opening in John Donne's "The Canonization" is characteristic of the poet. Donne
wants others to leave him alone to relish his love in peace. He describes the various ways in which his
aristocratic friends while away their time. They travel, they try to get posts in in the government by virtue of
flattery or cultivation of a king or a lord. The poem seems to be written in reaction to the critics of his love-
life. Writing, is not only aspiration for him, but one of the very activities of living, and he will be obliged to be
left uninterrupted. The poet rather prefers scorn at his palsie (disease that causes paralysis), gout
(inflammation of joints caused by constant consumption of wine and rich food) or his five grey hairs ( the
five senses that have lost their virility with the onset of age).The poet does not mind his love being
considered an infirmity, but he wishes that his friend confines his derision to bodily ailments and worldly
fortune.

The speaker ascertains that nothing has changed in the world owing to their love It has the minimum effect
of affecting two individuals. The sight of the lover has just drowned his lovers in his, but not merchant ships.
The poet's tears have not overflowed even the farmer's ground. Neither has the blissful love's coolness
removed a spring time in the life of others. The heats or his hot passions have not added to the fever of the
Plague. The poet thus mocks at his friend thrpugh hyperbole, exemplifying that the friend is an anti-romantic
who is dry and logical in his attitude to passion in general. Donne parodies the Petrarchan writers who had
exaggerated their sufferings through far-fetched conceits.

Donne asserts that they may be called whatever the world chooses to call them. The poet presents to us a
picture of martyrs as he portrays the lovers as flees who destroy themselves in order to prove their love.
They are likened to tapers that destroy themselves in order to exist. The poet also claims that they find in
each other the powerful eagle and the timid dove, the eagle usually preying upon the latter. We find a similar
comparison in George Herbert's poem "The Sacrifice": "But who does hawk at eagle with a dove." The poet
likens their union to that of the phoenix. The oneness, uniqueness and neutrality of their union to the outside
world is suggested through this comparison. LIke the phoenix, they burn themselves to be consumed by the
power of love and are regenerated. The poet does not consider physical passion to be considered the
ultimate aim of love, but only a stage of development in the process towards being canonized

The poet declares that they can die gracefully in love if not live by it. If their love is not fit to confine itself to
the expanse of the tomb, it will be eligible for versification by virtue of which it will live on eternally. They do
not mean to prove themselves historically. The poet implies that they will build a beautiful memorial with
stanzas. The poet utilizes the apt word 'sonnet' to signify something concise, precise and dedicated. The
phenomenon of contracting things is Donne's signature st.

The final stanza is in the form of an invocation: "You who did contract into yourselves the soul of the whole
world and throw it on the mirror of your eyes, making them such mirrors, that they gave you everything in
epitomy, countries, towns and courts, we your worshipers pray you to petition heaven for us to give us a
pattern, that is, a copying of your love." The poet asks to consider their love as an idealized pattern and
implores with God to grant them something similar. Prof.Grierson suggests that now they have been
canonized: now they are saints.

© 2018 Rukhaya M K