The Canonization

"The Canonization" is a poem by English metaphysical poet John Donne. First published in 1633, the poem exemplifies Donne's wit and irony. It is addressed to one friend from another, but concerns itself with the complexities of romantic love: the speaker presents love as so all-consuming that lovers forgo other pursuits to spend time together. In this sense, love is asceticism, a major conceit in the poem. The poem's title serves a dual purpose: while the speaker argues that his love will canonise him into a kind of sainthood, the poem itself functions as a canonisation of the pair of lovers.

New Critic Cleanth Brooks used the poem, along with Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Man" and William Wordsworth's "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802", to illustrate his argument for paradox as central to poetry.

The speaker begs his friend not to disparage him for loving, but to insult him for other reasons instead, or to focus on other matters entirely. He supports his plea by asking whether any harm has been done by his love.The speaker describes how dramatically love affects him and his lover, claiming that their love will live on in legend, even if they die. They have been "canonized by Love".

The poem features images typical of the Petrarchan sonnet, yet they are more than the "threadbare Petrarchan conventionalities". In critic Clay Hunt's view, the entire poem gives "a new twist to one of the most worn conventions of Elizabethan love poetry" by expanding "the lover–saint conceit to full and precise definition", a comparison that is "seriously meant". In the third stanza, the speaker likens himself and his lover to candles, an eagle and dove, a phoenix, saints, and the dead. A reference to the Renaissance idea in which the eagle flies in the sky above the earth while the dove transcends the skies to reach heaven. Cleanth Brooks argues that the phoenix, which means rebirth, is a particularly apt analogy, since it combines the imagery of birds and of burning candles, and adequately expresses the power of love to preserve, though passion consumes.

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