The Canonization Summary & Analysis
by John Donne

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The Full Text of “The Canonization”

1For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love,

2         Or chide my palsy, or my gout,

3My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune, flout,

4         With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,

5                Take you a course, get you a place,

6                Observe His Honor, or His Grace,

7Or the King's real, or his stampèd face

8         Contemplate; what you will, approve,

9         So you will let me love.

10Alas, alas, who's injured by my love?

11         What merchant's ships have my sighs drowned?

12Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?

13         When did my colds a forward spring remove?

14                When did the heats which my veins fill

15                Add one more to the plaguy bill?

16Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still

17         Litigious men, which quarrels move,

18         Though she and I do love.

19Call us what you will, we are made such by love;

20         Call her one, me another fly,

21We're tapers too, and at our own cost die,

22         And we in us find the eagle and the dove.

23                The phoenix riddle hath more wit

24                By us: we two being one, are it.

25So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.

26         We die and rise the same, and prove

27         Mysterious by this love.

28We can die by it, if not live by love,

29         And if unfit for tombs and hearse

30Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;

31         And if no piece of chronicle we prove,

32                We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;

33                As well a well-wrought urn becomes

34The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,

35         And by these hymns, all shall approve

36         Us canonized for love:

37And thus invoke us: You, whom reverend love

38         Made one another's hermitage;

39You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage;

40         Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove

41                Into the glasses of your eyes

42                (So made such mirrors, and such spies,

43That they did all to you epitomize)

44         Countries, towns, courts: Beg from above

45         A pattern of your love!

  • “The Canonization” Introduction

    • John Donne's witty, punny, passionate "The Canonization" was first published in his posthumous 1633 collection, Poems. The poem's speaker, a middle-aged man who has fallen deeply in love, tells a mocking friend to leave him alone and "let him love" already. Love, this poem suggests, is timeless in more than one way: it can strike at any age, and (with a little help from poetry) it can help lovers to attain saint-like immortality.

  • “The Canonization” Summary

    • Listen: just be quiet already and let me be in love. You can go ahead and make fun of my shaky hands or my sore joints, or taunt me for my gray hair or my poverty. You can go make your fortune, or you can educate yourself in some craft; you can take up a new career, or go find a role in a fancy nobleman's retinue, following some lord or some high-up clergyman; you can serve the King, or the coins with his face printed on them; you can do whatever you like, so long as you leave me alone and let me be in love.

      Come on, now: who does my love hurt? Have my lovesick sighs sunk any ships? Have my tears flooded anyone's land? Have the times when my lover coldly ignored my advances stopped spring from coming? Did the fever of love in my veins ever add one single death to the register of plague victims? Soldiers still go to war, and lawyers still find argumentative people to sue each other, in spite of the fact that my lady and I love each other.

      Whatever you say my lady and I are like, love makes us that way. You might say we're as mortal and lustful as flies, or like shrinking candles burned up by passion. We're strong and wise as eagles and sweet and meek as doves. We embody the legend of the phoenix (the bird that burns up and then is reborn from its own ashes): the two of us together, when we have sex, make one phoenix, creating a hybrid androgynous being out of two bodies. Like the phoenix, we "die" (that is, have orgasms) and then get up again. Our love, you see, makes us into a magical creature.

      If we can't live on our love, we can certainly die from it. And even if our love story isn't exactly something you could carve on a tomb or a hearse, it'll be just the ticket for poetry. We might not make it into the history books, but we'll make a home for ourselves in the stanzas of sonnets. Just as an elegant, well-made urn or a huge, mighty tomb is the right home for the ashes of heroes, the poetry I write will be a fitting monument to us. Reading it, everyone will agree that we should be made saints for our devotion to love.

      When people want to pray to us, here's what they'll say: You two lovers, whom love made into each other's sacred, private chapel; you two, who found peace in a love that is now cause for passionate devotion; you two, who shrunk the soul of the world itself down into the reflective mirrors of your eyes, seeing in each other everything that exists, making each other into the whole wide world with its countries, cities, and noble courts: ask God to send us the pattern that you built your love upon!

  • “The Canonization” Themes

    • Theme The Power and Holiness of Love

      The Power and Holiness of Love

      “The Canonization” suggests that love isn’t just a silly game for young people to play, but a serious, lasting, and even holy force. The poem’s speaker, a middle-aged man, has fallen deeply in love, and he spends the first stanzas of the poem telling a friend of his to stop making fun of him for his later-in-life romance and just let him be in love, already. Love, he insists, is much more than an emotional storm that silly kids get caught up in. It’s a power so strong, transformative, and purifying that true lovers are “canonized” by their love. In other words, love can make people into saints, wholeheartedly devoted to a sacred task.

      Love, the poem’s speaker suggests, is often wrongly considered the purview of the young, starry-eyed, and foolish. When the speaker’s friend makes fun of him for falling in love at an age when he has “gray hairs” and creaky joints, the speaker replies that his love doesn’t do anybody any harm—and in doing so, he reveals that he’s got a pretty level-headed sense of what love is actually like. He mocks the kind of clichéd love poetry that suggests love changes the whole world, observing that his “sighs” haven’t sunk a single ship and his “tears” haven’t “overflowed” one field (and that his friend should therefore leave him alone—his love isn’t causing problems for anyone!). The speaker’s rejection of over-the-top cliché suggests he knows love well and understands what it isn’t as well as what it is.

      In fact, this mature lover knows that his love can do something much more powerful than whip up storms: it has a huge internal effect on him and his beloved. Love makes them so wrapped up in each other that they see the whole world in the magic “glasses” (or mirrors) of each other’s eyes. They’re so deeply in love that they seem to become one being: when they have sex, the speaker feels that they fuse into a “phoenix,” an immortal mythical creature that burns up, dies, and is reborn from its own ashes. (Readers might understand this allusion better if they know that “dying” is Renaissance-era slang for “having an orgasm.”) In other words, love makes them everything to each other—and even makes them into each other, turning them into a single immortal being that can “die” over and over again and still live!

      These images are passionate, but they’re also sacred. Both the idea of fusing with a beloved and the idea of death and resurrection fit right into Donne’s Christianity: the first image echoes the biblical notion that Christ literally becomes part of Christians, and the second echoes the tale of Christ’s death and resurrection. By adoring each other so completely, then, the lovers play out the Christian story in their own lives, mirroring what the passionately religious Donne saw as the order of the universe itself. In fact, they become holy through their love, treating each other’s very bodies as “hermitage[s]” (that is, private chapels for solitary holy men).

      To this speaker, then, love is a “canonization”: it makes true lovers into saints, devoted to (and made greater by) adoration. By mirroring the Christian story, the poem suggests, deep love takes people very close to the divine indeed. And if that’s true, he and his beloved aren’t twitterpated fools: they’re veritable saints, whose “pattern” later lovers should strive to follow.

    • Theme Love, Poetry, and Immortality

      Love, Poetry, and Immortality

      Love, in “The Canonization,” is a mighty and even holy force. But in spite of love’s greatness, the speaker is aware that love stories aren’t always remembered in books or monuments the way that, say, tales of war or politics are (maybe because they’re just too personal). And yet, the poem’s speaker reflects, perhaps a big stone monument wouldn’t even be the right way to honor a great love. This poem suggests that it takes poetry to build true love the monument it deserves: poetry is the only form that can rightly reflect love’s power and preserve it eternally.

      Love stories don’t always make it into the “chronicles” (or history books), the speaker observes: love is too private and too personal to be a matter of historical record. Nobody carves a love story onto the side of a “tomb” or builds a “well-wrought urn” (in other words, an elegant funerary vase) to preserve the ashes of a love affair. Monuments like these are reserved for people who performed publicly heroic acts; great warriors, leaders, and artists get memorialized in stone, but great lovers don’t get those kinds of tributes.

      The only fitting monument for his own love, the speaker concludes, is poetry. Perhaps that’s because poetry is such a good match for love: poetry “becomes” (or suits) love because it can record what love feels like (try doing that with a stone “urn”). But it also “becomes” love because, like love, it’s timeless. Great poetry can endure for centuries, making the long-dead loves it records feel alive and fresh. It can also show readers that love felt just the same to people hundreds of years ago, reminding them that love itself really is eternal: its “pattern” remains the same.

      “The Canonization” itself thus becomes the proof of its own argument: this centuries-old poem has survived, and by surviving, it has immortalized the love it describes.

  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Canonization”

    • Lines 1-3

      For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love,
               Or chide my palsy, or my gout,
      My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune, flout,

      "The Canonization" begins with an explosion of frustration. Without preamble, the speaker bursts out: "For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love." Slapped awake like this, readers are primed to figure out what on earth could have gotten the speaker so touchy.

      Some friend or other, clearly, has been teasing the speaker about being in love. So far, so normal: mocking lovers is a timeless hobby, popular for as long as lovers have existed. But the speaker's next lines hint that his friend isn't just making fun of him for being all infatuated. So long as his friend "let[s him] love," the speaker says, it doesn't bother him one bit if they want to mock him for:

      [...] my palsy, or my gout,
      My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune [...]

      With "palsy" (shaky hands), "gout" (creaky joints), and "five gray hairs" (which explain themselves), this speaker is no spring chicken. And not only is he older than he used to be, but he's poorer, too: he once had a "fortune," but it's gone now. (Perhaps he's even down on his luck in other ways: a "fortune" can mean both one's wealth and one's fate.)

      In other words, this speaker is a middle-aged man who's both down-at-heel and head-over-heels. And who's more mockable than that? Passionate love is often considered the purview of the young and silly; older people who fall hard for each other, in Donne's 17th century as much as now, are easy to accuse of midlife crises or plain foolishness.

      But this speaker stands ready to defend himself against such charges. Sure, he's old, and sure, his purse is a little lighter than it used to be—but he doesn't mind being teased about any of that, so long as he can go on being in love. Love, in other words, means he doesn't care one bit about anything else. This poem will celebrate passion, whenever and wherever passion arises.

    • Lines 4-6

               With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,
                      Take you a course, get you a place,
                      Observe His Honor, or His Grace,

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    • Lines 7-9

      Or the King's real, or his stampèd face
               Contemplate; what you will, approve,
               So you will let me love.

    • Lines 10-15

      Alas, alas, who's injured by my 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?

    • Lines 16-18

      Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still
               Litigious men, which quarrels move,
               Though she and I do love.

    • Lines 19-22

      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,
               And we in us find the eagle and the dove.

    • Lines 23-27

      The phoenix riddle hath more wit
                      By us: we two being one, are it.
      So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.
               We die and rise the same, and prove
               Mysterious by this love.

    • Lines 28-32

      We can die by it, if not live by love,
               And if unfit for tombs and hearse
      Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
               And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
                      We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;

    • Lines 33-36

                      As well a well-wrought urn becomes
      The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,
               And by these hymns, all shall approve
               Us canonized for love:

    • Lines 37-39

      And thus invoke us: You, whom reverend love
               Made one another's hermitage;
      You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage;

    • Lines 40-44

               Who did the whole world's soul contract, 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:

    • Lines 44-45

      Beg from above
               A pattern of your love!

  • “The Canonization” Symbols

    • Symbol The Phoenix

      The Phoenix

      While the speaker uses the phoenix as a metaphor in this poem, not a symbol, it's important to know about traditional phoenix symbolism to understand what the poem is doing with that metaphor.

      The phoenix was a mythical bird, said to periodically catch fire, burn to death, and then arise, reborn, from its own ashes. For obvious reasons, then, the phoenix was a symbol for rebirth, rejuvenation, and resurrection. In the Christian tradition, the phoenix also symbolized Christ himself.

      The speaker thus draws on phoenix symbolism to suggest that passionate love makes him and his lover both immortal and divine—and to make a daring joke. The two of them, he observes, can burn up in the fires of passion, "die" (or have orgasms), and then get up again, good as new!

  • “The Canonization” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

    • Conceit

      Like a lot of Donne's poems, "The Canonization" revolves around a central conceit: an elaborate extended metaphor. Here, in fact, there are two conceits: poetry as a monument, and lovers as saints.

      In the fourth stanza, the speaker notes that when lovers die, their love is rarely commemorated with a mighty "tomb" or a "well-wrought urn." Leaving aside the speaker's naughty joke (to "die," in Renaissance slang, was to have an orgasm—definitely the kind of event nobody builds a tomb about), there's a serious point here:

      • Passionate love, in this speaker's eyes, is one of the greatest and most divine forces in the world, and lovers should be celebrated just as great heroes are.
      • But love, the speaker thinks, also needs a different kind of monument than a dead hero. Instead of building a stony "urn" to commemorate his love, the speaker will therefore build a metaphorical temple out of poetry, making "pretty rooms" in "sonnets." (There's another pun implied here: the word "stanza," meaning the groups of lines out of which poems are built, actually means "room" in Italian.)

      This poem itself thus becomes a kind of "well-wrought urn," a beautifully designed container that will preserve the speaker's love.

      A monument like this poem, the speaker goes on, a poem that commemorates a love as deep as his, will itself become a temple worthy of a holy pilgrimage. It might even have powers a physical temple never could: a poem, after all, can travel the world and endlessly replicate in print, while a building, a tomb, or an urn stays resolutely in one place.

      If the speaker writes a poem as a monument to his love, then, people everywhere will be able to visit that monument—and to worship there. In the poem's other major conceit, true lovers like the speaker and his beloved are "canonized" by their love: that is, they're made into Catholic saints. Love, this poem argues, has an awful lot in common with the Christian faith:

      • Love (and sex) makes "two" separate people into "one"—in much the same way that God is said to become part of every soul.
      • Love can also make people immortal, allowing them to "die" and resurrect like a phoenix—or like Christ himself.

      Passion, the conceit of canonization suggests, is a near neighbor to the divine. Far from being a sinful distraction, love can raise mortal beings to the brink of heaven.

    • Pun

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    • Metaphor

    • Rhetorical Question

    • Parallelism

    • Repetition

    • Allusion

    • Enjambment

    • Alliteration

    • Assonance

  • “The Canonization” Vocabulary

    Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

    • Hold your tongue
    • Chide my palsy, or my gout
    • Flout
    • State
    • Arts
    • Take you a course
    • Get you a place
    • His stampèd face
    • What you will, approve
    • A forward spring
    • The plaguy bill
    • Litigious men
    • Quarrels
    • What you will
    • Fly
    • Tapers
    • Die
    • The eagle and the dove
    • The phoenix riddle
    • Hath
    • Neutral
    • Unfit
    • If no piece of chronicle we prove
    • We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms
    • Well-wrought urn
    • Canonized
    • Invoke
    • Reverend
    • Hermitage
    • Rage
    • Contract
    • Glasses
    • Epitomize
    • A pattern of your love
    Hold your tongue
    • Shut up, be quiet.

  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Canonization”

    • Form

      "The Canonization," like a lot of John Donne's poems, uses a brand-new form of Donne's own invention. The poem is built from five nine-line stanzas, and all those stanzas have something in common: their first and last lines end with the word "love." The poem, like the speaker, thus returns and returns to the same preoccupation.

      No matter how much people tease the speaker for his late-in-life love affair, this form suggests, he's unruffled. While he's old and wise enough to know that passion can't really have much effect on ships (no matter what Christopher Marlowe says), he also believes that, memorialized in verse, love has immortal power. This very poem is the proof.

    • Meter

      This poem's fluid, tricksy meter shifts its shape line by line but repeats stanza by stanza. In other words, while each stanza is built from many different kinds of lines, those lines always fall in roughly the same pattern.

      While most of the lines here are iambic—that is, they're built from iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm—they switch between pentameter (five iambs per line), tetrameter (four iambs per line), and trimeter (three iambs per line). Here's an example from the first three lines:

      For God's | sake hold | your tongue, | and let | me love,
      Or chide | my pal- | sy, or | my gout,
      My five | gray hairs, | or ru- | ined for- | tune, flout,

      Here, the meter moves from pentameter to tetrameter and back again. The last line of each stanza, meanwhile, is always in iambic trimeter, as in line 18:

      Though she | and I | do love.

      Those shorter lines add extra punch to the speaker's repeated reflections on love.

      A lot of iambic poetry throws in some different rhythms for flavor, and this poem is no exception: the speaker has a few tricks up his sleeve. For example, readers might hear a spondee (DUM-DUM) on the second foot of line 1 ("sake hold"), adding some forceful oomph to the speaker's demand that his listener be quiet. And listen to the hammering rhythm of line 5:

      Take you | a course, | get you | a place,

      The first and third feet of this tetrameter line aren't iambs, but trochees, the opposite foot, with a DUM-da rhythm. Those up-front stresses mirror the speaker's exasperation with his disapproving friend.

      Overall, the poem's meter feels flexible, playful, and musical. The combination of shifting lines and steady stanzas might mimic the speaker's own situation: love, to him, feels both as constant and as ever-changing as a flaming phoenix.

    • Rhyme Scheme

      Each nine-line stanza of "The Canonization" uses the same intricate rhyme scheme:

      ABBACCCAA

      What's more, one of those rhymes is always the same across the poem: the first and last rhymes of each stanza are identical, repeating the word "love." The poem's rhymes thus keep on carrying the reader back to the main thing on the speaker's mind.

      The movement of rhymes in the first four lines of each stanza feels pretty familiar: Italian sonnets, for instance, always start with ABBA rhymes. (This Donne sonnet is a good example!) But those surprising, forceful C-rhyme triplets (like "place"/"Grace"/"face" in lines 5-7) give the second part of each stanza a gathering momentum—and sometimes a hint either of irritation or of rapturous fascination.

      Note that, to modern readers, many of the rhymes here sound slant—"prove" and "love" in lines 26-27, for instance. In Donne's 17th-century London accent, however, those rhymes would likely have felt a lot closer to perfect!

  • “The Canonization” Speaker

    • The poem's speaker is a lover—and, notably, not a young lover. With his "five gray hairs" and his "gout," he sounds like he's well into middle age. Perhaps that's why the teasing friend he shouts down at the beginning of the poem is giving him such a hard time: passionate, head-over-heels love is often considered the purview of the young. This speaker doesn't care, though: to him, a love like the one he's experiencing is timeless, deathless as a phoenix.

      Like the speaker in many of Donne's poems, this lover seems to have a lot in common with Donne himself. His brilliant wit, his passion, and his fondness for a dirty pun are all the poet's own.

  • “The Canonization” Setting

    • There's no clear setting in this poem: it all takes place in the speaker's mind and heart. But some clues help readers to understand that the poem comes from John Donne's own 17th-century English world.

      When the speaker tells the scornful person he's talking to at the beginning of the poem to "get you a place" at some nobleman's court, for instance, it's a very 17th-century way of saying "jeez, get a hobby." Many upper-class people at the time kept themselves busy by joining the retinues of the nobility, keeping great lords and ladies company in return for social connections and opportunities.

      The poem also uses a lot of classic 17th-century metaphors, like presenting the speaker and his lover as "flies" and melting "tapers" (or candles)—both traditional images of passion, lust, and death.

      And, generally speaking, mocking and praising love and lovers were popular Renaissance pastimes, as Donne (and his contemporaries) observed in many other poems of the era.

  • Literary and Historical Context of “The Canonization”

      Literary Context

      John Donne (1572-1631) is remembered as one of the foremost of the "metaphysical poets"—though he never called himself one. The later writer Samuel Johnson coined the term, using it to describe a set of 17th-century English writers who wrote witty, passionate, intricate, cerebral poetry about love and God; George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and Thomas Traherne were some others.

      Donne was the prototypical metaphysical poet: a master of elaborate conceits and complex sentences and a great writer of love poems (like this one) that mingle images of holiness with filthy puns. But during his lifetime, he was mostly a poet in private. In public life, he was an important clergyman, rising to become Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Like the vast majority of his poetry, "The Canonization" didn't appear in print until several years after his death in 1633, when his collection Poems was posthumously published.

      Donne's mixture of cynicism, passion, and mysticism fell out of literary favor after his 17th-century heyday; Johnson, for instance, a leading figure of the 18th-century Enlightenment, did not mean "metaphysical poet" as a compliment, seeing Donne and his contemporaries as obscure and irrational. But 19th-century Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge were stirred by Donne's mixture of philosophy and emotion, and their enthusiasm slowly resurrected Donne's reputation. Donne is now remembered as one of the most powerful and influential of poets, and he's inspired later writers from T.S. Eliot to Yeats to A.S. Byatt.

      Historical Context

      This poem's witty reference to a passionate "canonization"—that is, the official process by which someone becomes a saint in the Catholic church—plays on a major religious conflict in Donne's time. Donne was born during an era in which Protestantism had become the official state religion of Britain. English Catholics were often persecuted and killed. Donne himself was born into a Catholic family; his own brother went to prison for hiding a priest in his home. (The priest, not so fortunate, was tortured and executed.)

      All this violence emerged from the schism between English Catholics and Protestants that began during the reign of Henry VIII, who died about 30 years before Donne was born. Wishing to divorce his first wife and marry a second—unacceptable under Catholicism—Henry split from the Pope and founded his own national Church of England (also known as the Anglican church). This break led to generations of conflict and bloodshed between Anglican Protestants and Catholic loyalists.

      Donne himself would eventually renounce Catholicism in order to become an important Anglican clergyman under the patronage of King James I. While his surviving sermons suggest he had a sincere change of heart about his religion, his use of Catholic language hints that he didn't altogether abandon the beliefs of his youth.

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