The poetry of John Donne particularly his early poetry generally portrays love and religion as

its basic concerns. An attempt to juxtapose physical love with the sacredness of religion
through a series of occult resemblances makes his poetry distinct and divergent from the
conventional love poetry that dominated the preceding Elizabethan age. His poetry is not
approved by his peers because of his deliberate departure from the traditional norms and
expectations that cannot accept the possibility of a close proximity between the holy and
the unholy, between the sacred and the profane, between the mundane and the spiritual.
All these issues in Donne’s poetry lead to certain circumstances that may be outwardly
contradictory or even paradoxical, but it is the heterogeneous juxtaposition that enriches
Donne’s poetry and sometimes anticipates certain important characteristics of modern
poetry. Donne’s uniqueness as a poet in handling the theme of love in most unfamiliar way
is obvious in his mostly discussed three poems “The Flea”, The Good Morrow” and “The
.”Canonization

The Canonization” is more explicit in its treatment of love and religion. The title of
the poem itself suggests that the theme of the poem might be somewhat theological.
But as the poet tries to establish a relationship between love and religious faith and
gives a central focus of how lovers are canonized as saints, the entire debate is
problematized. It seems paradoxical when a sacred ritual like canonization is equated
with the act of love-making.  Physical love has no place in the scriptures of Christian
theology that never permits to be involved in any kind of conjugal relationship. 
Rather sex is repressed and treated as a taboo – an act of profanity. So when the
speaker of the poem, often merges with the poetic persona, invites the readers to
justify his arguments that he puts forward in favour of  his views of love that appear
very odd and unconventional as the theme of traditional love poetry. But the speaker
has emblematically established the possibility of a co-existence between love and
religion that deconstructs man’s understanding of the concept of love and religion.
The poem, in its unorthodox treatment, is truly a representative of metaphysical
poetry and sometimes goes beyond any such classification.

It appears that the speaker addresses another person who is virtually present and
perhaps do not approve his love affair: “For God’s sake, hold your tongue and let me
love” (1). The poem is a kind of impassioned monologue through which the speaker
defends his act of love against the outsider’s objection. The speaker asks him to keep
quiet and not to interfere in the matter of his love. But the poem from its very
beginning becomes provocative as the mention of “For God’s sake” refers to ironic
overtones for the speaker’s intention to defend his love. He can allow him to comment
in some other things that are insignificant when compared to love like his palsy, his
gout, his five grey hairs and even his ruined fortune. The speaker advises him to
pursue his own ambitions or improve his mind by studying arts. Instead of showing
interest on other’s personal affairs, he should concentrate his own choices as the
speaker suggests him “Take you a course, get you a place / Observe his honor, or his
grace /Or the king’s real, or his stampèd face/ Contemplate; what you will, approve”
(5-8). He may choose anything he likes and the speaker doesn’t care whatever he opts.
The speaker asserts that the addressee should restrict himself to his own matters and
therefore let him love without further interference. Besides the poem as a form of
monologue, the presence of an interlocutor, a mixture of lyricism with drama and
many other features is often suggested as an earlier form of ‘dramatic monologue’ and
Donne is sometimes called a Jacobean Browning.

In the next stanza he goes to defend his amorous life that doesn’t affect the outside
world: “Alas, alas, who’s injured by my love? (10). The irony goes deeper in the
second stanza where the harmless gestures of the lover – sighs, colds, heats and so on
are sarcastically pitted against a bleak, contaminated and exploitive world. The
tendency to show his feeling of love in hyperboles also suggests a satirical dig
towards the familiar courtly tradition of love:

What merchant’s ships have my sighs drowned?

Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?

When did my colds a forward spring remove?

When did the heats which my veins fill

Add one more to the plaguy bill?

Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still

Litigious men, which quarrels move,

Though she and I do love. (11-18)

While in the stanza two the speaker intends to silence the implied listener through a
series of hyperbolic clichés, he remains bold for his love in the third stanza trying to
manipulate the situation with his use of certain emblematic metaphors that are very
heterogeneous in nature. The speaker claims that he doesn’t bother what others think
of them, even if they “Call her one, me another fly” (20). People can try to belittle
him by considering him a small and insignificant like a fly, but he knows that they are
also tapers who at their own cost consume themselves. They are not worried what
others say or think rather they can make their own estimation as they find themselves
as both “the eagle and the dove” (22). They possess the qualities of both the
innocence and softness of a dove as well as the fierceness and force of an eagle. In
their dedication and commitment towards love they have such mysterious power that
can illuminate the legendary phoenix riddle – by their perfect union to “one neutral
both sexes fit” (25).  The speaker claims that as the lovers rise again after they die,
they possess something miraculous, mysterious about themselves that will justify the
lovers as canon of sainthood – the central argument of the poem. And through their
resurrection out of the ashes of love, their amorous relationship becomes a paradox.

The fourth stanza opens with the celebration of the legacy of the love that is in no way
inferior to become a legendary as the speaker feels “We can die by it, if not live by
love” (28). If their love is found unfit for tombs or hearse to be commemorated, it will
definitely find a place in verse. And even if there will be no historical record of their
love in chronicles, the emotional impulse of their love will encourage the poets to
compose sonnets where they will find “pretty rooms” (32). Here the “rooms” is used
as pun that not only means a place but refers to Italian stanzas. Their love is so self-
contained that it will be like the ashes of some greatest person preserved in a “well-
wrought urn” (33). The urn by keeping the ashes does a justice to the memory of a
dead man in the same way a tomb does spreading over half-acre land. The hymns
written in the honour of their love will finally approve them as canonized for love.

This is the central idea of the poem that intends to establish the theme of love to be
equated with the canonization. The poetic process completes as it proffers several
arguments until the lovers are raised to the level of martyrs. In order to show that
lovers are equally saintly figures with their dedications and sacrifices the poem
creates paradoxical situations that are very complex and sometimes obscure. But such
paradoxes are very natural to the core of the poem that obviously bears certain
contradictory elements. Donne’s poetry for its paradoxes has greatly influenced the
so-called New Criticism – a modern school of literary criticism. Several new critics
like F. R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks and many others took their interest in the
metaphysical poets especially John Donne. Brooks in his collection of critical essays
The Well-Wrought Urn (1947) – the title taken from Donne’s poem “The
Canonization” – upholds the view that paradox is the most fundamental to a great
work of art or poetry. He asserts that the language of poetry should be the language of
paradox which is an extension of the language, never a deterrent or limitation to it. He
analyses the poem “The Canonization” from the view point of paradoxes and
sometimes compares Donne’s complex symbolic imageries to that of Shakespeare,
W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot.  In his book Brooks has also generalised that it is the
“heresy” that actually works underneath to give the meaning through its various
tensions. In the poem of our discussion has also an inherent, subtle form of heresy that
leads the poem towards its blasphemous and self-approbatory climax – “canonized for
Love” (36).

The final stanza gives the denouement with such powers of love that encompass the
entire world. The speaker feels that as their amorous life is canonized, all those who
hear their story will invoke them because they have “made one another’s hermitage”
(38). Everybody would remember them with reverence as the saints of love who by
their divine power can make the whole universe contracted and converged into the
eyes of their lovers. So the eyes of the lover and beloved will reflect an image of the
outside world. Their world of love will sufficiently epitomize a full panorama of the
macrocosm. It becomes an inspiration to the people who will follow the paths shown
by the saintly figures of love. They will be the very model of the kind of love
everybody aspires: “Countries, towns, courts: beg from above /A pattern of your love!
(44-45). They will set an example to the people indiscriminately and the canonization
of their love will be indoctrinated as a pattern that the whole world can follow.