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;