Critical Appreciation of Canonization/ Canonization as a Metaphysical Poem:
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.
The poem is written again in a defiant and frustrating tone. He starts the poem
aggressively with imperative sentence, “For God’s sake hold your tongue and let
us live.” The poem is written in first person plural pronoun. But the speaker
remains only the lover; beloved hardly utters a word in the whole poem. The
poem is written in monologue form. The first stanza makes the tempo and it
seems that the whole poem needs to be finished in one breathe.
The poem is 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.
The metaphysical conceits are again used freely by Donne in this poem, he
compares himself and his beloved with fly and says that they are parasites to, for
they are made so by their 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.” This
stanza makes 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.
Fusion of emotion and intellect is another important feature of the poem. The
fusion is observed in the comparison of the lovers to the mysterious phoenix and
the divine saints. The speaker assumes that like the phoenix, the lovers would 'die
and rise at the same time' and prove 'mysterious by their love'. Reference to this
mythical being well sums up Donne's theory of sexual metaphysics; a real and
complete relation between a man and a woman fuses their soul into one whole.
The poet is both sensuous and realistic in his treatment of love. The romantic
affair and the moral status of the worldly lovers are compared to the ascetic life of
unworldly saints. Thus, 'canonization' is in many ways a typical metaphysical poem
where the complexity of substance is expressed with simplicity of expression. The
general argument and its development are clear like its dramatic situations. The
allusions are sometimes too forced, but that is a part of such poetry.
The poem is written in five stanzas, metered in iambic lines ranging from
trimeter to pentameter; in each of the nine-line stanzas, the first, third, fourth, and
seventh lines are in pentameter, the second, fifth, sixth, and eighth in tetrameter,
and the ninth in trimeter. (The stress pattern in each stanza is 545544543.) The
rhyme scheme in each stanza is ABBACCCDD.