The Canonization - Stanzas 4 & 5
Immortality Through Art in Donne's Love Poem
John Donne's poem "The Canonization" deploys some striking rhetorical turns, a bilingual pun, and some memorable images to praise immortality achieved through art.
Having eschewed comparisons between his love and worldly wealth or power in the first two stanzas, Donne continues “The Canonization,” describing the forms of immortality which he and his mistress will find.
Donne’s third stanza in “The Canonization” begins intriguingly: “Call us what you will, we are made such by love.” He makes comparisons between the lovers and two flies, two tapers, the eagle and the dove – these are all familiar tropes for love poetry, if not so stale as the Petrarchan conceits which he mocks in the first two stanzas.
Imagery and Definition
Donne suggests that he and his beloved are completely defined by their love, that their essence has somehow been fixed by their affection. However, by expressing it in poetic images which the reader will know have been previously used, he links that essence with the terms used to describe them in the poem. (He’ll develop this rather vague association more precisely in a later stanza.)
Rhetorical Twist
In a classic piece of Donne’s egotism and flair, he then turns around the concept of an image itself. Though images such as the tapers or the eagle and the dove are usually used to lend weight to the description of an individual couple, Donne suggests that applying them to his love bolsters the image, not the relationship: “The Phoenix riddle hath more wit/ By us.”
Immortality in Art
After his disassociation of his love from earthly glory earlier in the poem, Donne sets out his claim to higher things in the fourth stanza. His hopes for immortality rest on poetry, rather than monuments and empire. Instead of “half-acre tombs,” he’ll “build in sonnets pretty rooms.” (The term “sonnet” had recently derived from the Italian “sonnetti,” a little song, and could be applied to lyric poetry generally, rather than the specific form it later became attached to).
There’s a bilingual pun lurking in this line, since the Italian for room is “stanza,” the quibble reinforces the connection Donne’s making between poetry and architecture, as well as showing off his erudition to the cognoscenti in the process. The idea that poetry will provide immortality is not a new one – it’s something of a commonplace in Renaissance poetry, and stretches all the way back to the classical poet Horace, but the force and wit which Donne brings to expressing the old sentiment reinvigorates it.
The New Critics
In fact the stanza is such a striking statement that one of its phrases, “well wrought urn” became a slogan for the New Cricitism movement, after it was used as the title of a book by the critic Cleanth Brooks. As the New Critics’ were concerned with the internal structure of poetry, rather than external matters such as biography and historical context, this stanza of The Canonization obviously resonated with them.
