John Donne: The Canonization
bookburn
at http://cs1.mcm.edu/~rayb/donne.htm. There is also a site
with commentary at http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng211/john_donne.htm.
A searchable works site is at http://www.online-literature.com/donne/.
Poems and Sonnets
Air and Angels
The Bait
Break of Day
The Broken Heart
The Canonization
For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love,
Or chide my palsy, or my gout,
My five grey hairs, or ruin'd fortune flout,
With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his Honour, or his Grace,
Or the King's real, or his stamped face
Contemplate, what you will, approve,
So you will let me love.
Alas, alas, who's injur'd by my love?
What merchant's ships have my sighs drown'd?
Who says my tears have overflow'd 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.
Call us what you will, we are made such by love;
Call her one, me another fly,
We'are tapers too, and at our own cost die,
And we in us find the'eagle and the dove.
The phoenix 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.
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 canoniz'd for love;
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!"
Commentary by Prof. Goucher.
(quote)
"The Canonization"--9-line stanzas in varying numbers of iambs (and a
couple of other kinds of feet!), rhyming abbacccaa. This is a tougher
variant on the rhyme scheme of "The Indifferent" because the "a" rhyme
returns in each stanza's concluding couplet, and tougher still because
the
"a" rhyme (--ove) is the same in all five stanzas. This is perhaps one
of the
most famous and identifiable of Donne's poems, a shocking outburst
that
mocks the old Petrarchan conceits and shifts to a series of shocking
comparisons, ending in the claim that future ages will make saints of
the
speaker and his beloved who will "build in sonnets pretty rooms" (32).
The
next line's comparison of the poet's "hymns" to "a well-wrought urn"
formed
the thesis for Cleanthe Brooks' famous New Critical study of poetic
structure, which used the latter phrase for its title (821.9 B873
c.2).
Note that the poem's furious development of its rejection of the
world's
interference keep on going into the "worshipers"' address to the
"saints"
(speaker and Beloved) "Who did the whole world's soul contract
[shrink],
and drove / Into the glasses of your eyes / [. . . ] Countries, towns
courts"--the universe becomes compact enough to see reflected in one's
lover's eye. Oh, and those future worshipers will beg the recipe for
that
love. It's a wild ride. What kinds of neoclassical and medieval poetic
conventions does Donne mock here?
(unquote)
bookburn
(quote)
This is perhaps one of the most famous and identifiable of Donne's
poems, a shocking outburst that mocks the old Petrarchan conceits and
shifts to a series of shocking comparisons, ending in the claim that
future ages will make saints of the speaker and his beloved who will
"build in sonnets pretty rooms" (32). The next line's comparison of
the poet's "hymns" to "a well-wrought urn" formed the thesis for
Cleanthe Brooks' famous New Critical study of poetic structure, which
used the latter phrase for its title (821.9 B873c.2).
(unquote)
It seems that Donne's imagery in "The Canonization"--especially:
'We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;/ As well a well-wrought urn
becomes . . . ' --is something of an icon in the world of literary
criticism, divided between New Critics, who look at poems as objects,
and Personalists, who intend to see poetry through the artist.
The following commentary found at someone's home page (a treasure
trove of essays in literary criticism), at:
http://homepages.udayton.edu/~youngkbr/Art1950.htm,
reviews the on-going argument in terms of a critical essay that
followed publication of Brooks' *The Well-Wrought Urn*.
(quote)
In this article ["The Jinee in The Well-Wrought Urn"], [Walter] Ong
contemplates why, in a time when critics have firmly separated works
of art from the artists who created them, the urge to know about
artists still remains. Why is it that people want to let the "jinnee"
out of the "well-wrought urn"? Clarifying that he does not advocate
this "personalist" approach, Ong states that he does want to explore
why this desire is so strong.
Ong begins his exploration of the topic by listing a number of
"footholds" on the art object to which the personalist approach can
attach itself, including autobiographical elements in fiction and the
ease of grouping literary and artistic works together by author rather
than by larger categories, such as historical periods. While these
footholds provide convenient points of attachment for the personalist
approach, there is something even more profound in a work of art that
encourages the desire to know about the artist: the inspiration for
art nearly always comes from human relationships, and that inspiration
is symbolized by the human Muses.
When people look at a work of art, Ong argues, their contemplation of
that object can be satisfying only to a certain degree, precisely
because the work of art is only an object and not a person. To really
love something, people need their love to be returned, so a work of
art cannot, as a mere object, fulfill desire the way another person
can; hence, the "threat," as Ong refers to it, of a personalist
approach to art. Still, even when a personalist approach to art is
applied, the obstacles of time and context between the viewer and the
artist prevent the viewer from being fully satisfied.
Ong further shows how in earlier cultures, people personalized natural
objects instead of art objects, as people do in the twentieth century.
This shift from personalizing nature to personalizing art, Ong
believes, began during the Renaissance and has been exacerbated by
three developments: the development of rhetorical and aesthetic
theory (we can now talk about art in a more complex manner), the idea
of the artist as "martyr" (which has "blurred" the distinctions
between artists and their works), and the development of current
aesthetic theory which focuses on the work itself (the work now "bears
the weight" of religion, making the attention paid a work of art much
more serious than it once was).
In essence, Ong says, people now treat the work as though it is a
person, to the point that we convince ourselves that the work can cut
itself off from the rest of the world, just as a person can. If we
convince ourselves of that, Ong concludes, we can simultaneously look
at the object and look for other people's responses to the object, and
then the "jinnee" will stay safely inside the "well-wrought urn."
(snip rest)
(unquote)