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Essay / Holy Nature of Love in Donne's poem The Canonization
In “The Canonization,” John Donne appears to separate his love of politics, wealth, court life, and earthly life in general in order to align it with holiness. He also uses his wit to mock commonly accepted poetic conventions, only to then replace them with his own. He creates a pattern of placing love in the context of birth, death, resurrection, and homage, leading the speaker to explore the possibility of a fantastical, metaphorical canonization of holiness lovers. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay “The Canonization” consists of five stanzas of nine lines each. Each stanza serves to gradually elevate the speaker's position of love until he or she achieves canonized happiness. The rhyme scheme is abbaccd, with each stanza ending with the word "love". This is a deliberate demonstration of how love transcends each previous position and transforms each time it is mentioned. As a metaphysical poet, Donne uses peculiar and extravagant metaphors to display his intensity and wit, such as "We will construct pretty sonnets." rooms” (32). In the opening stanza, the speaker addresses an anonymous cynic of love, and particularly of the speaker's love story. It seems that the addressee is reprimanding the intensity of the speaker's fall. The lover pushes the skeptic to find other thoughts to occupy his mind, even if they are about his physical defects: “…my paralysis, or my gout,/My five gray hairs, or my ruined fortune flouted” (2-3). He then decides that what the recipient contemplates (the king, the arts, wealth, etc.) is of no importance, as long as it allows him to love without complaint. The contrast of the political courtier and obsessed with propriety, the interlocutor, constitutes a precious contrast with these pious and supernatural lovers. It is also likely that Donne uses 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 stanza. Donne uses the second stanza to humorously manipulate and exaggerate the hyperbolic qualities of Petrarchan poetry. To parallel Petrarch's common conventions of “seas of tears” and “my sighs are storms,” Donne asks: “What merchant ships have my sighs drowned?/Who said my tears overflowed on this land ? (11-12). To reject common metaphors of burning/chilling Petrarch, Donne provokes: “When was my cold removed by a spring before?/When did the heats that my veins filled/Add one more with a terrible bill? (13-15). He then claims that his love is harmless and isolated, neither affecting nor being subject to the natural world. Humanity too seems to advance inexorably, unaffected by her love: “Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find yet/Men in dispute, who advance quarrels,/Though she and I love each other.” (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 Petrarchan conventions may have been exhausted and are now generic. After downplaying these conventions, Donne uses the next stanza to create his own fresh and imaginative metaphors for love. This stanza parallels the immensity of His love with the progression of birth, death and resurrection – it will fulfill all theseobjectives and beyond. In birth and creation, he declares: “…we are made such by love” (19). In death, he and his lover become insects attracted and incinerated by the flame of love: “Call her one, me another fly” (20). He and his lover then become this flame, as two candles burn zealously to their end: “We are also candles and die at our expense” (21). Donne's resurrection metaphors take a bizarre twist on gender. He uses three birds, the masculine eagle, the feminine dove and the neuter phoenix, to express how he and his lover, separated in life by sex, merge in resurrection as the same creature, "...we two being one , we are./Thus, to a neutral thing, both sexes agree” (24-25). Although the lover has no agency or voice in this poem, Donne seems to place them on an equal plane with this metaphor, creating a gender neutral in which "We die and rise alike, and prove/Mysterious by this love" ( 26-27). The poetry and values of the time included the idea of women as lesser versions of men, eventually evolving into men and women with distinct natures. Therefore, this metaphor of the sexes merged in identity is unique and radically different from Donne's usual depictions of women lacking agency and equality. Despite this impressive gift of equality, Donne once again fails to give voice to his lover. His heart and personality are not committed. Like the speaker of the first stanza, she is a reflection of Donne's spirit. As the poem progresses, Donne's metaphorical assertions intensify until they reach their climax: holiness. The fourth stanza imagines that if the lovers' devotion is far too great for life, it is only in death that its apparent infinity can be satiated. But Donne continues to climb, for it is possible that this love is “unfit” for the morbid limits of “tombs and hearses” (29). The culmination of the expression of their love will be the poetry written posthumously: “Our legend…will be worthy of verse” (30). The poem completes a circle while dreaming of itself. The “pretty rooms” built through poetry will popularize lovers, and the world that once despised them will now greet them. The speaker's love expands until the only possible encapsulation is a verse praising these lovers, which will inadvertently lead to their introduction into a fictitious sanctity of love: "And by these hymns, all will approve / We will be 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 to be a disruption. However, Donne seems to abandon this argument in only about 15 lines, as the penultimate stanza speculates that they will be canonized by the verse. Additionally, the final stanza asserts that future lovers will one day call upon them for help, viewing them as omnipresent and omniscient: "You, for whom love was peace, now it is rage;/Who contracted the soul of the whole world…” (39-40). The speaker's vision is that of wise and holy lovers, capable simultaneously of seeing and reflecting the world and are therefore able to provide adequate and enlightened help: "...and pressed into the glasses of your eyes/(It's is like such mirrors and such spies,/What they have done to you sums it all up)” (40-43). In the first stanza, the lover seems to renounce the world and its frivolous activities, such as politics, wars and quarrels. This rejection of worldly concerns illustrates his love as supernatural. However, once the.