In “The Canonization,” John Donne seems to separate his love from politics, wealth, court life, and earthly life in general to align it with sainthood. He also uses his wits to mock commonly accepted poetic conventions, only to replace them with his own. He creates a pattern that places love in the context of birth, death, resurrection, and homage, which leads the speaker to explore the possibility of a fantastical and metaphorical canonization in the sanctity of lovers. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay "The Canonization" consists of five stanzas with nine lines each. Each stanza serves to gradually raise the speaker's position of love until he reaches a canonized bliss. The rhyme scheme is baccacciato, each verse ends with the word "love". This is a deliberate demonstration of how love transcends every previous position and transforms every time it is mentioned. As a metaphysical poet, Donne uses peculiar and whimsical metaphors to show his intensity and wit, such as "We'll make sonnets rather rooms" (32). In the opening stanza, the speaker addresses an anonymous love cynic, and in detail of the speaker's love story. It seems that the addressee is rebuking how intensely the speaker has fallen. The lover urges the skeptic to find other thoughts to occupy his mind, even if it is about his physical defects: " ... my paralysis, or my gout, / My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune mocks" (2-3). He then decides that it is irrelevant what the addressee contemplates (the king, the arts, wealth, etc.), as long as it allows him to love without complaint. The contrast between the political and property-obsessed courtier, the interlocutor, serves as a valuable contrast to these eternal and pious lovers. Donne is also likely to use the presence of the interlocutor as a sounding board for the sublime potential of his love, considering that the interlocutor seems to disappear after the first verse. Donne uses the second stanza to humorously manipulate and exaggerate the hyperbolic qualities of Petrarchan poetry. To parallel common Petrarchan conventions, "seas of tears" and "my sighs are storms," ​​Donne asks, "What merchant ships have drowned my sighs? / Who says my tears have overflowed onto this ground?" (11-12). To push back against common Petrarchan fire/freeze metaphors, Donne provokes: “When have my colds disappeared with an early spring?/When the heats that my veins have filled/Add another to the plague's toll?” (13-15). He then claims that his love is harmless and isolated, neither influenced nor subject to the natural world. Humanity also seems to advance inexorably, insensitive to his love: “Soldiers find wars, and lawyers still discover/Argumentative men, whom arguments stir up,/Though she and I love” (16-18). Just as a saint renounces the world for a heavenly calling, Donne renounces humanity and the natural world for a transcendent love. In the playful parody of the second stanza there is also the implication that perhaps Petrarchan conventions have exhausted themselves and are now generic. After undercutting these conventions, Donne uses the next stanza to create his own fresh and imaginative metaphors about love. This verse parallels the immensity of his love with the progression of birth, death, and resurrection: He will fulfill all these purposes and beyond. In birth and creation, he states, "... we are made so by love" (19). In death he and his lover become insects attracted and incinerated by the flame of love: “Call herone, I another fly” (20). He and his lover then become this flame, like two candles burning zealously to the end, “We too are candles, and die at our own expense” (21). Donne's resurrection metaphors take a bizarre twist on the genre. He uses three birds, the male eagle, the female dove, and the gender-neutral phoenix, to convey how he and his lover, separated in life by sex, merge in the resurrection as the same creature, "...we two being one we are./So both sexes adapt to a neutral thing" (24-25). Although the lover has no agency or voice in this poem, Donne seems to equate her with this metaphor, creating a neutral sex in which "We die and rise equal, and prove/Mysterious by this love" ( 26-27 ). The poetry and values ​​of the time included the idea that women were inferior versions of men, later moving on to men and women with separate natures. Therefore, this metaphor of the fusion of the sexes in identity is unique and radically different from Donne's usual depictions of women lacking agency and equality. Despite this impressive gift of equality, however, Donne once again fails to give voice to his lover. His heart and personality are not committed. Much like the speaker in the first stanza, he serves as a reflection of Donne's wit. As the poem progresses, Donne's metaphorical statements increase until they reach their pinnacle: sainthood. The fourth stanza imagines that if the lovers' devotion is too great for life, only in death can its apparent limitlessness be satiated. But Donne continues to rise, because it is possible that this love is “unsuited” to the morbid confines of “graves and hearse” (29). The culmination of the expression of their love will be through poetry written posthumously: “Our legend…will be fit for verse” (30). The poem comes full circle as it dreams itself. The “beautiful rooms” constructed through poetry will popularize the lovers, and the world that once despised them will now acclaim them. The speaker's love expands until the only possible understanding of it will be the verses in praise of these lovers, which will inadvertently lead to their induction into a fictitious sanctity of love: "And by these hymns all will approve/We canonized for love" (36). The second stanza of this piece attempts to convey the ineffectiveness of the speaker's love as a defense against those who claim it is a disorder. However, Donne seems to eliminate that argument in only about 15 lines, as the penultimate stanza assumes that they will be canonized through the verses. Furthermore, the last stanza states that future lovers will one day call upon them for help, seeing them as omnipresent and omniscient: "Thou, for whom love was peace, that now is anger;/Who contracted the soul of the world whole..." (39-40). The speaker's vision is that of wise, holy lovers, who know how to simultaneously see and reflect the world and are therefore able to give adequate and informed help: "...and stuck into the lenses of your eyes/(So did such mirrors and such spies,/Who have done all to you embody)” (40-43). In the first stanza, the lover seems to renounce the world and its frivolous pursuits, such as politics, wars and quarrels. This rejection of worldly concerns exemplifies his love as unworldly. However, once the lovers become saints, it returns to the public sphere. He goes from referring to his love as private and mild to monumental and exemplified: "Countries, cities, courts: supplication from above / A model of your love!" (45). Please note: this is just an example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a custom essay The Juxtaposition of Love and Religion in.