Claire Bouvier

100072247

Dr. R. Cunningham

ENGL 2283 X2

January 30, 2006

 

“Let Me Love”  

 

 “The Canonization” by John Donne is a poem, in which the speaker demands that he, be allowed to love: “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love[1].” The rest of this stanza, the speaker requests that the reader condemn him of everything else except loving. “Or chide my palsy, or my gout;[2]” suggests that the speaker prefers the reader to first critique problems of “palsy” and “gout” which is defined as “paralysis” and “arthritis”.[3] He also asks the reader to critique “My five gray hairs, or ruin’d fortune flout;[4]” which is understood by the reader as old age and ruined fortune. The rest of the stanza the speaker scolds the reader to look to his own mind and wealth, while keeping in mind the positions of the upper class:

With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve;

 Take you a course, get you a place,

 Observe his Honour, or his Grace;                                                                  

Or the king’s real, or his stamp’d face

Contemplate, what you will, approve [5].”

 

Essentially, the speaker in the end of the stanza is requesting that the reader will let him simply love, “So you will let me love[6].”

The second stanza begins with the speaker asking, “Alas! Alas! Who’s injured by my love? [7]” The speaker’s tone suggests that he needs no reply, for it is the speaker himself who responds by saying that his sighs have not drowned ships, his tears have not flooded the earth, his colds have not destroyed spring and the heat of his veins have not killed anyone during the plague.[8] The next two lines of “The Canonization” is an illustration of how men will inevitably find wars to fight and lawyers will seek debatable men and likewise, the speaker will find love.[9]

In stanza two the speaker justifies how love is simply unavoidable. In stanza three he uses metaphors to explain the powerful and enticing emotions of love. He says, “Call’s what you will, we are made such by love” [10] and lists metaphorical images of love:

Call her one, me another fly,

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

And we in us find th’eagle and the dove

The phoenix riddle hath more with

By us; we two being one, are it;

The speaker suggests that he is like a butterfly or moth fluttering round a taper (candle)[11], attaching himself to his lover as if it were a means of survival: “at our own cost die”[12]. It may be suggested that they will even risk dying because of their love, like that of a burning candle. Following this, the speaker says:

            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[13].

The myth of the phoenix is what illuminates this section of “The Canonization.” The lovers illustrate how a single creature, the mythical phoenix, can contain both sexes.[14] This myth explains how the lovers can die and rise as one, “We die, and rise the same”[15] and consequently “prove/ Mysterious by this love[16].

Following the speaker’s metaphorical images of the love, he replies, “We can die by it, if not live by love,”[17] suggesting that even if he and his lover are unable to live by love they will be able to die by it, echoing stanza three when he and his lover are like candles where at their own cost they will die.[18] John Donne writes of love as if it is an eternal meaning. Love is simply more profound than just existing during one’s lifetime. Love carries on even after our funeral, “and if unfit for tomb or hearse”[19] it will become a legend and appreciated for others in the form of poetry, “Our legend be, it will be fit for verse.”[20] The speaker also highlights that even a man put into a “well-wrought urn”[21] (defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as an ancient Greek vase that holds the cremations of a dead body[22]), is equivalent to a famous man with a large tomb, “The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs”[23] because in the end their love will be sanctified, like the canonization of a saint “And by these hymns, all shall approve/ Us canonized for love.”[24]

Continuing the speaker’s thought on the “canonization of their love”, stanza five shows how this stanza is a comparison between the lover’s canonization and that of a saint’s canonization:
            Made one another’s hermitage;

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

Who did the whole world’s soul contract, and drove

Into the glasses of your eyes;

So made such mirrors, and spies

That they did all to you epitomize-

Countries, towns courts beg from above

A pattern of your love

In the fourth stanza, the speaker has defined his love as a canonization. However, in stanza five of John Donne’s “The Canonization” the speaker discovers how he and his lover’s roles are like the saints of love, whereby lovers of the future will seek for their help[25]: “That they did all to you epitomize-/ Countries, towns, courts beg from above/ A pattern of your love.”[26] Here the speaker concludes by saying that after others read of the speaker’s love many will try to attain the love that the speaker illustrates throughout John Donne’s “The Canonization.”

Bibliography

 

 

"gout." The Oxford English Dictionary 2nd ed. 1989. 16 February 2006. http://dictionary.oed.com

 

Hunt, Clay. Donne's Poetry - Essays in Literary Analysis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954.

 

Kermode, Frank. The Oxford Authors John Donne. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

 

"palsy." The Oxford English Dictionary 2nd ed. 1989. 16 February 2006. http://dictionary.oed.com