Write an essay showing the effects of paradoxes and conceits though contradictory in revealing the meaning of John Donne’s poem “Canonization”.

On the surface, a paradox is a statement that seems to be self-contradictory or oxymoronic, but for many critics, the best kind of poetry is paradoxical.  Be it a verbal paradox such as in ‘die / rise’, ‘peace / rage or a paradox of situation in a way that how could a lover drowned in sensuality and physicality be compared to a saint – the most spiritual being; it is an apparent contradiction which nevertheless is true and cannot be resolved. The contradiction has a chocking value on the reader and carries a big part of the meaning. According to Brook, “paradox is the language appropriate and inevitable to poetry.  It is the scientist whose truth requires a language purged of every trace of paradox; apparently, the truth which the poet utters can be approached only in terms of paradox”. In one of his essays, he analyzes John Donne’s “Canonization” as a good example of paradox in poetry in revealing its meaning.

At first, the title and the content imply a central paradox since the title suggests the canonization of a saint while the content suggests sexuality. The answer is that paradox solves the problem. One type of sainthood is that of love. Sexuality would not contradict with sainthood but leads to it. Love makes them saints in a sense that they can both unite physically and spiritually. The speaker asks his addressee to be quiet, and let him love. 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. 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 Honor, or his Grace, / or the King's real, or his stamped face / Contemplate.") The speaker does not care what the addressee says or does, as long as he lets him love. The speaker has turned his back to all materialistic things and worldly concerns in life; he has in fact renounced the world of such concerns, just such as a Saint does. The 1^st stanza shows the 1^st side of a conceit that is to be a saint.

There is an exhibition of courtly love conventions by way of ridiculing them by cynical attitude achieved through exaggeration. 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. Soldiers still find wars and lawyers still find litigious men, regardless of the emotions of the speaker and his lover.

The speaker tells his addressee to "Call us what you will," for it is love that makes them so. He says that the addressee can "Call her one, me another fly," and that they are also like candles ("tapers") [far fetched conceits], which burn by feeding upon their own selves ("and at our own cost die") and in both cases we are attracted to each other just as a fly, is attracted by lights. We die and rise the same. In each other, the lovers find the eagle and the dove [far fetched conceit] for in each of them there is the eagle and the dove. When one is on strong passion and desire and upon consummation becomes a dove [Love when not consumed is a strong passion and rage and when consumed it is like a dove and peace → paradox], and together ("we two being one") they illuminate the riddle of the phoenix [far fetched conceits], for they die and rise the same [paradox]," just as the phoenix does-though unlike the phoenix, it is love that slays and resurrects them. Just like the phoenix the two lovers fall in the heat of their passion, and they are mingled together to seem as one body, so there are no different sexes but neutral. Any passion rise to a climax (love making) after which it starts to cool down (die is a pun for sexual orgasm) then becomes stable. After the consumption of love, passion is reborn once again (rise).

This love shows that they are holy and they make miracles. The lover drowned in sensuality is compared to a saint – the most spiritual being [far fetched conceit]. 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." 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. The speaker doesn’t mind about the destiny of his body, but he minds about his love. He doesn’t care of having half-acre tombs, but if their bodies are burned and the ashes put in a vase, this will fit them too. Ashes of saints are only preserved.

All those who hear their story will invoke the lovers, saying that countries, towns and courts "beg from above / A pattern of your love!" In this way they become canonized for love, because they are rising from the dead (miracle) being the model for perfect love. Saints are supposed to turn their backs for any material delight and this is what happens to him in the first stanza that puts him in the common qualities of saints. This is an emersion in the absolute physicality and sexuality. They both live in one else’s body. Love has made their bodies a hermitage of one another (paradox). How could they speak of such a holy place for sexual acts? This is an example of paradox when it is utmost sexual; it becomes spiritual. To make a lover describe the act of love with this sensuality to a saint is then a far-fetched conceit where the two terms of the comparison are yoked by violence. This is to make themselves self sufficient in the knowledge of the world that everything in the world is to be found in each of them for they are each the world. You are the whole world that shrinks in your eyes and image. The eyes are the mirror that reflects the whole world with their shape and are like spies that reject the world to see all that they desire [mirror that reflects & spies that hides constitute a paradox]. Ask God to give the lovers a model of our love so that others may love as we did – for we are saints now.

The innumerable paradoxes in Donne’s “Canonization” between physical and spiritual love did not contradict but presented another dimension of one another. However, the paradox between the lovers’ world and the outside world created the tension that led to the climax in the poem. Moreover, such literary critical analysis – the close reading of the general structure of the poem as adopted by the New Critics is an efficient technique to reveal its meaning. 

Consider Donne’s “The Canonization” as a unique love poem/ metaphysical love poem.

Considering the love poetry of Donne , the basic traits ,for which Donne is famous ,are dramatic quality in place of simple lyricism ,passionate attribution to the flesh in place of Platonic dissociation from the flesh and most of all the subtle use of the paradoxes and metaphysical conceits . If in his The Sunnne Rising he can speak : She’s all states ,and all princes I/Nothing else is ”or in A Valediction : “We shall be one and one another’s all” ,it is in his The Canonization in which he says : “And by these hymns ,all shall approve/ Us canonized for love;”.The uniqueness of his love poetry ,apart from the variegated features ,is that Donne can express subtle play of emotion through intellect by the use of metaphysical conceits which in Dr. Johnson’s term is “A kind of discordia concors” utilizing such binaries that can never be corresponded to each other. The admixture of spirituality and sensuality , is fervently replicated in his celebrated poem The Canonization in which the title itself implies that amorous love is akin to divine love ,and to prove this Donne , il miglior fabbro, crafted in consecutive five stanzas the essential five qualities of canonization as declared by John Clare.

 Donne’s poem raises the curtain dramatically in a very colloquial diction: “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love;” ; not only the beginning but also the entire poem is dramatic-five stanzas reverberating the five acts of a classical play. As a play demonstrates in its first act the exposition, this poem is also revealing the background in its first stanza where an intruder or Donne’s friend restrains him from lovemaking. The intruder is anxious lest Donne has abandoned all his worldly ambitions and activities due to his obsession with love .Donne’s reply is that he should rebuke him for his palsie, his gout ,his grey hair or even lament his fall from fortune ,but he should not rebuke him for his lovemaking .The friend’s argument is that Donne should strive to advance his position by praising the king or by pursuing the wealth-the term which Donne uses for it is “his stamped face”. As John Clare declares that the first criteria to be canonized is the “proof of personal sanctity”, here the first stanza reveals the first step of the process of Canonization. For the poet the physiological barrier is not the obstruction in getting the spiritual love.

Denying the Petrarchan fashion of love poetry, the action of the poem mounts in the succeeding stanzas; Donne negates the tradition of exaggeration of the beloveds by the poets .He mocks their descriptions by inscribing that his sighs have not drowned any merchant ships, or his tears have not created any crop-destroying flood, or the heat of his passion has caused one more entry to the weekly list of ‘plague bill’. He mocks at the external operations of everyday world; he thinks that the activities of the soldiers or the lawyers are only pseudo-heroisms, they are false, only their love is beyond everything .So the external world has no ground for criticizing their world. In accordance with John Clare’s notion, as to Canonization, being “proof of heroic virtue”, the second stanza of this poem embodies this virtue too.

The third stanza achieves a complete tonal shift, which is denoted by the witty and religious quality of the metaphysical conceits described in the first four lines :

Call’s what you will,  we are made such by love;

Cal her one, me another fly,

We’re tapers together, and at our own cost die,

And we in us find th’ Eagle and the dove.

This use of such imagery and erudition led Dr Johnson to criticize Donne for yoking the dissimilar together. Donne achieves compression or brevity and richness of thoughts as well through such images. Donne successively  three images of the flies, the Eagle and the Dove, the Phoenix. Thus he uses the metaphor of what being called “The Great Chain of Being” for the creatures. At the lowest level is the fly for it falls so passionately in love with the flame as to burn itself to death. The case of the lovers is similar , albeit at a more conscious level ,for they will immolate themselves for love, knowingly and willingly ,but they are also like the Eagle and the Dove, creatures superior than the fly. The Dove is a symbol of conjugal love since it is the familiar of Venus. The Eagle epitomizes strength as well as the ability to regenerate itself, thus making the lover and the beloved not only a union of strength and gentleness as in Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”, but also capable of producing new progeny. We find a similar comparison in George Herbert’s poem “The Sacrifice”: “But who does hawk at eagle with a dove? ” The highest creature is the Phoenix, the unique mythological bird which is consumed by its own funeral fire and gets rebirth from the ashes. The sexual metaphor implied in this image is that while traditionally sexual union was believed to gradually cause death, here the union leads to a resurrection. The biblical metaphor also implies that they have attained the state of being ‘one flesh’. At an even higher level the Phoenix is a metaphor for Christ since like the phoenix Christ too underwent a resurrection.

In the penultimate stanza, the poet expresses that they can die for their love, in which the couple is mentally and physically devoted to each other. They may not have the greatness like St. Paul ,or St. Xavier, so their corpse may not be carried in a hearse or there will be no monument erected upon their grave. But they will be remembered as their sacrifice for their love will be inscribed in their sonnets. As a well-wrought urn, a finely designed cute artifact, befits the great men’s ashes or a half-acre tomb embodies the grave of a great personality, likewise by their love songs, which describes the sacrifice of the lovers for their love, the later generation will pronounce them as canonized They have attained Divinity through carnality. John Keats wrote “ I’ve been astonished men could die martyrs for religion. I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more. I could be shuddered by my religion and love is my religion . And I could die for that.” John Clare’s fourth proposition as to be canonized , ‘proof of relic and writing’ , is also proved from this stanza as the lover speaks about it.

In the last stanza the poet thinks that the later generation will invoke them as the epitome of divine love. This couple is so devoted to each other that the readers will totally be bewildered to imagine how the lovers had turned their respective souls into a “hermitage”; their love was peace, but to the new generation love is in the fury of lustfulness.  The lovers had brought the whole world into their eyes, a kind of microcosmic world made by them, from the whole macrocosm. In this regard,one can think of “ The Sun Rising” : ‘In that the world’s contracted thus;

Ø  Becket’s Waiting for Godot  as a play on Existentialism.

“We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?”

- Estragon in Waiting for Godot

 Existentialism is a movement in twentieth-century philosophy and literature that centres on the individual and his or her relationship to the universe or God. One of the leading exponents of existentialist thought was the  French novelist and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. His philosophy is articulated in his novels, such as No Exit and Nausea. Among the most famous and influential existentialist propositions is Sartre’s dictum, “existence precedes and rules essence,” which is generally taken to mean that there is no pre-defined essence to humanity except that which we make for ourselves. “Nothing to be done”-with this line Samuel Beckett introduces the strange world of Waiting for Godot ; the two tramps ,Vladimir and Estragon, have nothing significant to do with their lives other than waiting for the inscrutable Godot. This sets the tone for his frequent cynicism and suggests a sort of primordial intuition about his actual plight of being mired in nothingness.

     

The play has two acts, the first which spans a day and the second which is the next day.The characters in “Waiting for Godot” and their location represent human suffering from Albert Camus’ concept of nostalgia. (The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus in Basic Writings of Existentialism edited by Gordon Marino) The setting that Beckett creates for the characters is simple and desolate, and could be seen as man’s struggle to find distinct place or existence full of meaning and sense. The waiting at least gives the men something to do and without it,they are even more lost within a sea of meaninglessness. This is why the only options that seem available to the men are waiting or suicide. Vladamir and Estragon are struggling with Nihilism . For Nietzsche, a nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who abandons belief in this world in favor of another world that is idealized, fictitious, and the product of the mechanisms of “ressentiment”(‘ On the Genealogy of Morals’, Third Essay,by Nietzsche) .  . Most beliefs and views of reality that one holds are illusions. Reality as one knows it and all of the comfort that it gives is nonexistent. After ‘ The Death of God’ life loses all meaning. This is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s claim that “Any meaning is better than none at all.” Despite their sense that human life is nothing more than a brief and absurd interlude between the “thrownness” of birth and the “darkness” of death, the tramps cling to the notion that the mysterious and messianic figure of Godot will save them and give their lives significance.

In attempting to unravel the themes of the play, interpreters have extracted a wide variety of  symbolism from the Godot's name. Some, taking an obvious hint, have proposed that Godot represents God and that the play is centered on religious symbolism. Others have taken the name as deriving from the French word for a boot, “ godillot”. Still, others have suggested a connection between Godot and Godeau, a character who never appears in Honore de Balzac's “Mercadet; Ou, le faiseur”. Through all these efforts, there is still no definitive answer as to whom or what Godot represents, and the writer has denied that Godot represents a specific thing, despite a certain ambiguity in the name. Upon study, however, one realizes that this ambiguity in meaning is the exact meaning of Godot. Though he seems to create greater symbolism and significance in the name Godot, Beckett actually rejects the notion of truth in language through the insignificance of the title character's name. By creating a false impression of religious symbolism in the name Godot Beckett leads the interpreter to a dead end where Vladimir and Estragon donot lament for their vain waiting, rather take the unmitigated decision to be apart from each other and commit suicide at last if Godot,  who is partly a epitome of hope when He turns up and partly not if He does not ,does not appear on the last day.

Pozzo and Lucky appear as circus like figures , with the former as the ring master and the latter as the performing animal. The circus may be intended as a metaphor for life itself .Just as the circus presents an unreal charade of excitement , daring and accomplishment, so life is essentially a deceptive charade .Though the relationship is grotesque ,it does serve to give some meaning to their existence. The relationship might be said to be productive in that limited way .But when Pozzo and Lucky reappear in Act Two ,all semblance of meaning has gone, for the distinctivenesss of their roles has vanished. Lucky becomes dumb just as Pozzo becomes blind .This is extremely surprising because Lucky had been an exceptionally loquacious person in the first act .So the dumbness signifies two things : the first is that man’s life is invariably a process of degeneration and the second is that in this absurd universe there is not only nothing to communicate but also nothing with which to communicate. Both blind Pozzo and dumb Lucky end up threshing helplessly upon the ground , and they depart, stumbling hopelessly. Thus, their relationship also proved sterile.

The Existentialists regard human life as absurd .They think that no “ism”, no philosophy  , no system ,no order , even no “Avatar” can eliminate man’s suffering. In literature they have highlighted man’s alienation, loneliness , seclusion ,pointlessness, absurdity of existence. Estragon and Vladimir  , Pozzo and Lucky’s wearing of bowler hat like Sir Charlie Chaplin ,Estragon’s  vain effort to take off his boot are something relating to the clownish elements of the play-which invariably relates to the meaningless apprearance and activities of human beings on this earth and that is the core “Mantra” of the Existentialists. The treatment of time is also Existentialistic . Doubts about Time make the tramp doubt about their existence and also of their identity. Existence and identity are open to question.

Finally Becket’s Waiting for Godot is a dramatic vacuum . It is a search for reality that lies behind mere reasoning in conceptual terms as a modern man is faced with a world in which he can no longer rely on the traditional “props” to his existence  :  society is non-existent ; brotherhood is meaningless ; and religion brings no fulfilment . And so he does  all  that he can .He passes time and hopes for something new, though the hope is dispirited and lifeless. He simply waits. What it is he awaits, he is not sure, but he feels compelled to wait. So, starting with the undeniable fact of human suffering , he concludes that not all is right with the world and asks what kind of God could have created it or even permitted it.