The Canonization - Stanzas 1 & 2
Rhetorical Technique and Petrarchan Conceits in John Donne's Poem
Oct 10, 2007
“The Canonization” by John Donne deliberately turns away from the hyperbole and conceits of Petrarchan love poetry, staking his love’s claims to spiritual rather than earthly dominion.
For God’s Sake Hold Your Tongue...
In the first stanza, beginning memorably “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love”, Donne distances that love from worldly affairs and earthly power. He dismisses whomever the exclamation is directed to, instructing them to concentrate of criticising his physical flaws, or to go and make a career by cultivating a nobleman or Bishop, visiting the King’s court, or making money.
This is worth comparing to the opening of “The Sun Rising”, in which Donne instructs the sun to go about its business:
go chide
Late schoolboys and sour prentices
Tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices
Later in that poem, however, Donne claims that the love he shares with his mistress is worth all the wealth, honour and glory that diamond mines, princes and states can account for. In “The Canonization”, Donne specifically avoids such comparisons, and this stanza begins the process of setting his love apart from the world. (The world, of course, which Donne was quite eager to enjoy, and in which writing poetry was a fashionable skill for a young man in search of advancement.)
Petrarchan conceits
In the second stanza, Donne underlines this separation of love from the world by denying the traditional Pertrarchan imagery of love. When he asks:
Alas, alas, who’s injured by my love?
What merchant ships have my sighs drowned?
Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?
he is invoking the old cliché of “tear-floods” and “sigh-tempests” from Italian Elizabethan love poetry. He mocks the hyperbolic conceits by pretending to take them literally, and demanding proof that his romantic excesses have caused measurable damage to someone else’s property. Both war and the law continue to claim victims, he points out, without being materially affected by his love.
This is a bold move, considering that elsewhere he adapts such conceits to his own purpose in poems like “A Fever” and “The Legacy”. It would even be hypocritical, if we read Donne’s poems as arguments, resting on established grounds and proceeding to logical conclusions. But it is one of Donne’s attractions that he’ll use any argument and any rhetorical riff which comes to hand to bolster the point he is trying to make at the time. Having used Petrarchan images elsewhere, Donne finds that he can use them to better effect by turning them inside out – and does so.
