The Canonization - dramatic situation represented by John Donne

The Canonization

John Donne

Q. What is the ‘dramatic situation’ in which The Canonization unfolds?

Answer: The speaker’s words represent one side of an argument which began before the first line of the poem. The cause of his “God's sake hold your tongue”- is probably a friend’s unsolicited advice about the poet’s love for his lady. The poem begins as the speaker’s retort; he tells his friend not only to shut his mouth but to tend his own business, whether at court or in the world of commerce (“Observe. King's real, or his stamped face- stamped, that is, on coins.) Later, particularly in stanza five, he will contrast the friend’s presumed worldliness with the withdrawal of the lovers from the world, to become “one another hermitage” and celebrate the religious mysteries of love.

From the questions and imperatives of the speaker, one can deduce the kinds of objections to love which the well meaning friend has offered. He seems to view the lover’s passion as a kind of sickness or obsession which causes injury to the speaker and possibly to others around him. In reply, the speaker says you can ridicule my infirmity (“my palsy, or my gout"), my age (my five gray hairs”) or my poverty (“ruined fortune”), but leave my love alone; Although the tears and sighs, the chills and fevers of passion may destroy my world, there are no cataclysm for the rest of the world. In stanza two, he defends himself by saying he has injured no one’s profits or property, and once again his emphasis on the acquisitiveness of others prepares an implicit contrast with the lovers monastic aloofness from such concerns.

In the third stanza, the speaker alludes to insults offered by the friend, saying "Call us what you will”. The friend has apparently compared the lovers to ephemeral files, who live only for the brief present, or to candles (taper’s) consumed by fire, as the lovers “die” (consummate their sexual passion, as well as destroy themselves) by the heat of their own passion. Turning these insults into badges of honor, the speaker affirms these comparisons but adds some comparisons of his own which transforms their significance. The lovers may consume themselves like tapers, but they will rise from their own ashes, renewed and youthful, like the mythical phoenix. Since the symbol of the phoenix was often associated with the death and resurrection of Christ, its introduction here paves the way for the language of religion (or at least idolatry) in the final two stanzas.

In the course of stanza three, the friend seems to fade from view. He has provided the occasion for the speaker’s explanation of the sacred quality of his love but as a self-canonization proceeds, the immediate occasion is almost forgotten. Indifferent to worldly gain or success, devoted solely to mutual contemplation, the speaker and his mistress have become not merely hermits but ‘saints’ of love. This grandiose self-exultation flirts with sacrilege, but for Donne's English Protestant readers, this conception probably seemed to parody Roman Catholic veneration of the saints rather than their own forms of piety. Despite this hint of superstition, the impression lingers that the speaker does indeed regard his love as sanctifying, and that the extravagance of the canonization expresses at least an emotional truth.

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