The Canonization - John Donne

John Donne (1572-1631)

John Donne was born in 1572 in London, England. He is known as the founder of the Metaphysical Poets, a term created by Samuel Johnson, an eighteenth-century English essayist, poet, and philosopher. The loosely associated group also includes George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, and John Cleveland. The Metaphysical Poets are known for their ability to startle the reader and coax new perspective through paradoxical images, subtle argument, inventive syntax, and imagery from art, philosophy, and religion using an extended metaphor known as a conceit. Donne reached beyond the rational and hierarchical structures of the seventeenth century with his exacting and ingenious conceits, advancing the exploratory spirit of his time.

Donne entered the world during a period of theological and political unrest for both England and France; a Protestant massacre occurred on Saint Bartholomew’s day in France; while in England, the Catholics were the persecuted minority. Born into a Roman Catholic family, Donne’s personal relationship with religion was tumultuous and passionate, and at the center of much of his poetry. He studied at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities in his early teen years. He did not take a degree at either school, because to do so would have meant subscribing to the Thirty-nine Articles, the doctrine that defined Anglicanism. At age twenty he studied law at Lincoln’s Inn. Two years later he succumbed to religious pressure and joined the Anglican Church after his younger brother, convicted for his Catholic loyalties, died in prison. Donne wrote most of his love lyrics, erotic verse, and some sacred poems in the 1590s, creating two major volumes of work: Satires and Songs and Sonnets.

In 1598, after returning from a two-year naval expedition against Spain, Donne was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton. While sitting in Queen Elizabeth’s last Parliament in 1601, Donne secretly married Anne More, the sixteen-year-old niece of Lady Egerton. Donne’s father-in-law disapproved of the marriage. As punishment, he did not provide a dowry for the couple and had Donne briefly imprisoned.

This left the couple isolated and dependent on friends, relatives, and patrons. Donne suffered social and financial instability in the years following his marriage, exacerbated by the birth of many children. He continued to write and published the Divine Poems in 1607. In Pseudo-Martyr, published in 1610, Donne displayed his extensive knowledge of the laws of the Church and state, arguing that Roman Catholics could support James I without compromising their faith. In 1615, James I pressured him to enter the Anglican Ministry by declaring that Donne could not be employed outside of the Church. He was appointed Royal Chaplain later that year. His wife died in 1617 at thirty-three years old shortly after giving birth to their twelfth child, who was stillborn. The Holy Sonnets are also attributed to this phase of his life.

In 1621, he became dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral. In his later years, Donne’s writing reflected his fear of his inevitable death. He wrote his private prayers, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, during a period of severe illness and published them in 1624. His learned, charismatic, and inventive preaching made him a highly influential presence in London. Best known for his vivacious, compelling style and thorough examination of mortal paradox, John Donne died in London on March 31, 1631.

Poetry
Satires (1593)
Songs and Sonnets (1601)
Divine Poems (1607)
Psevdo-Martyr (1610)
An Anatomy of the World (1611)
Ignatius his Conclaue (1611)
The Second Anniuersarie. Of The Progres of the Soule(1611)
An Anatomie of the World (1612)
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624)
Deaths Dvell (1632)
Ivvenilia (1633)
Poems (1633)
Sapientia Clamitans (1638)
Wisdome crying out to Sinners (1639)

The Canonization

The Canonization was written by Donne in the 1590s. It was originally published in 1633 in the first edition of Songs and Sonnets. The poem’s speaker uses religious terms to attempt to prove that his love affair is an elevated bond that approaches saintliness. In the poem, Donne makes able use of paradox, ambiguity, and wordplay.

The five stanzas of the poem—which feature the rhyme scheme of abbacccaa—thematically correspond to the steps of Christian canonization. The speaker begins his defense with the words “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love.” He then proceeds to justify the holiness of his love affair, concluding with the hope that his saintly relationship will become a model for others.

The Canonization - 

BY JOHN DONNE

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, 

         With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve, 

                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, 

         So you will let me love. 

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? 

Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still 

         Litigious men, which quarrels move, 

         Though she and I do love. 

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. 

                The phœnix 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.

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;

                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.

And thus invoke us: "You, whom reverend love

         Made one another's hermitage;

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

         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: beg from above

         A pattern of your love!"