The poem argues that the poet and his beloved should be allowed to love without interference from others. It uses metaphysical conceits to defend their love, comparing themselves to various animals and objects. The poet asserts that even if their love is not suitable for traditional tombs and memorials, it will live on through the verses of poetry. The poem concludes by suggesting that after their deaths, others will revere their love and invoke them as examples of true love.

1. The Canonization
John Donne

2. Stanza 1
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.

3. Stanza 2
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.

4. Stanza 3
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.

5. Stanza 4
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.

6. Stanza 5
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!"

7. Analysis

10. • The Canonization” is one of Donne’s most famous and most written-about poems.
• Brought out an argument between formalist critics and historicist critics; the former
argue that the poem is what it seems to be, an anti-political love poem, while the
latter argue, based on events in Donne’s life at the time of the poem’s composition,
that it is actually a kind of coded, ironic rumination on the “ruined fortune” and
dashed political hopes of the first stanza.
• A passionate speech-act , a highly sophisticated defense of love against the
corrupting values of politics and privilege.

11. • The word 'Canonization' means the act or process of changing an ordinary
religious person into a saint in Catholic Christian religion. This title suggests
that the poet and his beloved will become 'saints of love' in the future: and
they will be regarded as saints of true love in the whole world in the future.
• Written in a defiant and frustrating tone.
• He starts the poem aggressively with imperative sentence .
• The poem is written in first person plural pronoun- written in monologue
form. The first stanza makes the tempo and it seems that the whole poem
needs to be finished in one breathe.

12. • A perfect example of metaphysical poetry, he makes his arguments
hyperbolically and that his sighs have not drowned any ship, nor has his tears
flooded any ground, why should people not allow them to love.
• The stanza is similar to the stanza from the poem ‘A Valediction: Forbidding
Mourning,’ the words like tears, flood, sighs and tempest are repeated in both
the stanzas.

13. • The metaphysical conceits are used freely
• compares himself and his beloved with fly and says that they are parasites to, for
they are made so by their love.
• Makes a contrasting imagery of peace and violence, Dove is an image of peace,
where as fly and eagle represent the violent imagery.
• He compares his love with legends and says even if it be not fit for canonization; it
will be fit for the verse, like those of Romeo and Juliet.
• The poet concludes the poem on a high note with a lot of optimism and says after
their death there love will be revered and they will be invoked and everybody will
like love like them.