By: Nasrullah Mambrol
Critics basically agree to divide John Donne’s writing into two
groups related to his life stages, his romantic, or love, poetry in the stage
dating prior to 1615, and the spiritual poetry emanating from the time of his
ordination in 1615 to the year of his death, 1631. However, most scholars also
agree that much of his romantic poetry reflects his grounding since childhood
in the Catholic faith, seen often in the figurative language he adopts to write
of love and its erotic aspects. This combination proved unseemly to many in
cultures that followed Donne’s own, and for that reason his poetry did not gain
popularity until the 20th century. That era proved more open to the
exaggeration and surprising comparisons of metaphysical poets and poetry that
had so scandalized earlier readers. Donne’s focus on the theme of union, both
physical and spiritual, dominates his work. Supported by the logical precision
in which Donne excelled, his writing emphasizes balance in relationships and
between themes. In “The Canonization,” he uses the relationship between the
spiritual and the erotic as framework to emphasize the close ties between
spiritual and physical love.
By titling his poem The Canonization, (1633) Donne prepares his
readers for a religious poem but delivers something entirely different. He
often utilized that technique, as in A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning, among
others. Canonization in the Catholic Church occurs when individuals have proved
themselves practitioners of “heroic virtue.” A person labeled as heroic is
believed to have acted in an exceptional manner that ranks him above the common
man, while one who practices virtue possesses a soul already redeemed by
Christ, enabling him to reject things material in favor of things spiritual.
Canonization preceded the granting of sainthood, and those deemed saints could
be called upon by humans for intervention with God in important matters.
Donne’s choice of canonization as suggesting role models and intercessors
proves vital to the meaning of his poem.
Gender Matters: The Women in Donne’s Poems
The speaker begins with a dramatic address suitable to the stage,
crying to an unseen provoker, “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me
love.” In a few words Donne sets a scene in which his audience understands that
the “hero” of his poem has been attacked through words, probably gossip, due to
the hero’s manner of loving. The speaker is concerned that because of the
provoker’s judgment, he will not be allowed to continue his love. He next
offers the antagonist substitute targets for his slander, including the
obviously aged speaker’s physical attributes, such as his “palsy,” “gout,” and
“five gray hairs.” Donne chooses the verb chide to make clear that the
speaker’s nemesis seems a nag with so little to do, he must select an innocent
person to rebuke. His next lines further allow his speaker to belittle the
antagonist. Not only might the antagonist attack him simply for his age, which
amounts to petty cruelty, but he might also criticize the speaker’s lack of
material goods and social position, saying the attacker might his “ruined
fortune flout.” Again Donne’s word choice proves imperative for its
connotation. A person who suffers “ruin” is generally reduced by an outside
attack of some kind, not by profligate actions of his own. The use of
alliteration emphasizes that the attacker does not simply whisper about the
speaker’s problems but flaunts them, suggesting he shows contempt for the debt,
defying laws of decency. The speaker orders his assailant, “Take you a course,
get you a place,” suggesting situations that at first glance seem to have high
status, serving “his hounour, or his grace,” or a “King.” But Donne makes clear
that these positions of “service” equate to simple toadyism, contemplating, for
instance, the king’s “real, or his stamped face,” with “stamped face” probably
meaning that which appeared on currency of the realm.
The speaker does not care what other occupations the antagonist
chooses, as long as he will “let me love.” He concludes the first of his five
nine-line stanzas having established himself as an innocent, set upon by
undesirables who have no loves of their own.
The second stanza continues the speaker’s application of logic, as
he questions how his love injures or harms others. He contrasts small actions,
such as a lover’s sigh or tears shed, with grand events, such as the sinking of
a “merchant’s ships” and the floods that caused that sinking. The results
escalate to the level of the absurd, with the speaker questioning,
When did my colds a forward spring remove?
When did the heats which my veins fill
Add one more to the plaguy bill?
His love has not altered the seasons or killed anyone with
infection; nor has it, he adds, affected soldiers or lawyers who will continue
with their normal actions even “Though she and I do love.” Having reduced his
attacker to the level of fool, the speaker moves into the next stanza inviting
others to label him and his lover whatever they wish; labels do not alter the
reality of their love:
Call us what you will, we are made such by love;
Call her one, me another fly,
We’re tapers too, and at our own cost die.
The taper metaphor invokes thoughts of burning candles, which
eventually disappear, as he and his lover might eventually die, consumed by
their passion.
Donne next compares the lovers to “the eagle and the dove,”
alluding to the Renaissance idea of the Ptolemaic theory of the universe as
concentric circles. Within those circles various creatures moved. While the
eagle flew in the sublunar space, that of the sky above earth, doves ascended
and descended to and from the upper heavens, according to biblical passages
such as the one in which the Holy Spirit descends from heaven during the
baptism of Christ by John the Baptist. Donne extends the metaphor of fire by
using the phoenix, a mythological bird that recreated itself every 500 years,
and suggesting its constant renewal as a riddle. The speaker proposes that the
heat of passion may keep him young, despite his advancing age. The stanza
concludes with an allusion to the Platonic notion that two lovers could join to
form a perfect whole: “We die and rise the same, and prove / Mysterious by this
love.”
Donne carries the idea of love and death into the penultimate
stanza, his first line reading, “We can die by it, if not live by love,”
suggesting that once dead, the lovers will become the subject of legend and
chronicle, their story preserved as an example to others. If their story is not
told in history, it will certainly be presented through art:
We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a well wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs.
His suggestion of the small urn’s equality to the most lavish of
tombs was made famous in the title of the 20th-century formalist critic Cleanth
Brooks’s seminal book The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry.
But Donne saves his most dramatic comparison for the final two lines of this
stanza, writing, “And by these hymns, all shall approve / Us Canonized for
love.” Here he broaches the blasphemous suggestion that his physical love bears
an importance equal to that of the canonized saints. Not only do they provide
an example, their names may be called upon in order to intercede with requests
that their own passion be increased.
This suggestion supports the final stanza, in which the brazen
speaker claims that the very antagonists attacking him, and others of his ilk,
will call upon the speaker’s love as a model for their own. Those for whom
“love was peace that now is rage” once valued a quiet method for romance but
now crave a far more passionate approach, signified by rage. Donne incorporates
various words suggesting religion, including invoke and reverend, that would
have scandalized Victorian readers. The speaker states that the You he
addresses made the homes, or “hermitage,” of others their own through their
intrusion or spying. Donne writes,
Who did the whole world’s soul extract, and drove,
Into the glasses of your eyes,
So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize,
Countries, towns, courts; beg from above
A pattern of your love!
The speaker feels that those who spied upon others did so for
vicarious needs and internalized what they observed. In the penultimate line,
Donne adapts his frequent method for emphasis of an idea, expanding the
individual concern or state to universal proportions.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
“Beatification and Canonization.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol.
2.
Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning. “The Meaning of ‘Rage’ in ‘The
Canonization.’ ” American Notes and Queries. 14, no. 2 (April 2001): 3.
Flynn, Denis. John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
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