Donne Canonisation

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SY NEY STU I S

A Pattern for Love - The Structure ofDonne s TheCanonization

A P. RIEMER

The witty brilliance of The Canonization has ensured it

a place among the most widely admired of Donne s Songs and

Sonets seems to illustrate supremely well the modern beliefthat the best poetry of the Renaissance engages in the task oftrying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind andfeeling . But, as Rosemond Tuve warned many years ago, thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries would not have found quiteso admirable poetry which describes single moments of consciousness, single mental experiences seized and carefully represented for their own interestingness, inducing extremely delicateand precise recording of sensuous impressions involved in theexperience .2 Such criteria, we are now beginning to realize,would have aroused suspicions of intellectual incoherence inDonne s lifetime.

Yet TheCanonization lacks objective, externally determinedtruth-content; its sole unifying factor seems to be its speaker sflamboyant and spirited defence of love. The poem gives theappearance of a sustained argument, but, on closer examination,this proves to be a tissue of unsubstantiated and insubstantialassertions, false trails, deductions drawn from a play on words,abuse instead of demonstration - in short, a species of suggestiofalsi and suppressio veri against which the Renaissance, of allcultures, claimed most to be on guard.

There is no absolute requirement, of course, for a poem todemonstrate the rigidity of syllogistic proof, but many of Donne spoems ( The Extasie , for instance) reveal tightly-knit argumentative structures, once their fantastical premisses are allowed asvalid. In TheExtasie , the progression from the lovers recumbenton the bank of violets in the opening lines to the assertion ofthe propriety of carnal love at the end, via the elaborate Platonicdoctrine of the middle section, is logical and sequential, even ifwe feel that logic and argument are put into the service of ajesting recommendation of promiscuity. TheCanonization pre-

T. S. Eliot, The Metaphysical Poets , in Selected Essays London1951, p. 289.

2 R Tuve, Elizabethan n Metaphysical Imagery Chicago 1961,(Phoenix Edition), p. 14.

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sents a different case: here, the structures of argument dissolve;all that remains is the stance or the pretence of a logical method.

h anonization

or Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love,Or chide my palsie, or my gout,

My five gray haires, or ruin d fortune flout,With wealth your state, your minde with Arts improve,

Take you a course, get you a place, 5Observe his honour, or his grace,

Or the Kings realI, or his stamped faceContemplate, what you will, approve,So you will let me love.

Alas, alas, who s injur d by my love? 10What merchants ships have my sighs drown d?

Who saies my teares have overflow d his ground?When did my colds a forward spring remove?

When did the heats which my veines fillAdde one more to the plaguie Bill? 5

Soldiers finde warres, and Lawyers finde out stillLitigious men, which quarrels move,Though she and I do love.

Call us what you will, wee are made such by love;Call her one, mee another flye, 20

We are Tapers too, and at our owne cost die, nd wee in us finde the Eagle and the Dove.

The Phoenix ridle hath more witBy us, we two being one, are it.

So to one neutrall thing both sexes fit 25Wee dye and rise the same, and proveMysterious by this love.

Wee can dye by it, if not live by love, nd if unfit for tombes and hearse

Our legend bee, it will be fit for verse; 30 nd if no peece of Chronicle wee prove,

We ll build in sonnets pretty roomes;As well a well wrought urne becomes

The greatest ashes, as halfe-acre tombes, nd by these hymnes, all shall approve 35Us anoniz dfor Love:

And thus invoke us; You whom reverend loveMade one anothers hermitage;

You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage;

Who did the whole worlds soule contract, and drove 40Into the glasses of your eyesSo made such mirrors, and such spies,

That they did all to you epitomize,Countries, Townes, Courts: Beg from aboveA patterne of your love 45



SY N Y STU I S

The first stanza, with its arresting admonition to the anonymouscritic of the speaker s love, draws on that group of rhetorical

figures which deal with the abuse of an opponent by belittling hisarguments with ridiculous comparisons. This stanza could havebeen classified by the rhetoricians of the time under the headingof Diasyrmos Elevatio, lrriso, Vexatio against which Peachamin particular warned as being unseemly in grave disputations.3

Palsy and gout, despite the speaker s protestations, are hardlynegligible complaints; a ruined fortune and the onset of age, too,might be regarded as calamities by people other than the personaddressed, whose attitudes are made to appear so grudging and

ungenerous, and whose judgement is made to seem, by implication,so unfair. The advice in the second part of the stanza that thisperson should engage in a variety of mundane pursuits but leavethe lover and his mistress in peace might, moreover, be consideredan instance of pleonasm - the employment of an overabundanceof words to express a simple proposition.

There are, consequently, several worrying things about theargument at the beginning of the poem. The second stanzaelaborates the exclusion of all worldly concerns and pursuits from

the lovers existence. Having told his opponent, in violently forthright terms, to mind his own business, the speaker stresses theisolation of his love from the rest of the world by claiming thatit does not impinge at all on the world s problems and preoccupations. Once more, the procedure adopted arouses severalsuspicions.

As most commentators have noted, the catalogue of disastersin this stanza is a witty employment of cliches used by the courtlysonneteer when describing the sufferings of unrequited love and

the frustrations of scorned lovers. The speaker, by mocking thesehyperboles, asserts that his love is essentially harmless, having noeffect on anyone or on anything but on the lovers themselves.But the argument seems sophistical, as Tuve noted in hercomment on the stanza:

onne piles up questions using t he conventional things adjoinedto the lover - his sighs, his tears, his coldness, his heats. But sincehe wishes to use the figure to argue mockingly against love sunprofitableness, addressing those dolts who would rather improve

their worldly position than be love s saints, he attaches to eachadjunct another subject w hich literally is accompanied by strong

3 L. A. Sonnino, A ndbook to Sixteenth Century Rhetoric, ondon

1968, p. 84 unde r Elevatio .



SY N Y STU I S

winds, floods of water, low temperatures and fever . . . such an

image cannot remain simple. has too much to do.

This admirable account of the stanza s complex and jestingorganization fails to register an essential feature of its argument- its total inappropriateness to the context. The ri e oeur

Alas, alas, who s injur d by my love? refers, presumably, tothe complaints of the person addressed in the opening lines. Butwould such a person, the representative, apparently, of materialistic values, seriously entertain the possibility that the harmfulnessof love would manifest itself in these fanciful states? The lastthree lines of the stanza are more pertinent, perhaps, to the

attitudes such an adversary would adopt, but their effect is minorwhen compared with the jesting emphases of the earlier section. t s difficult to escape the feeling that this speaker s throwinga veil of obfuscation over precisely those ill-effects of his lovewhich are dismissed with such derision in the first stanza-disease, decrepitude and poverty.

t the beginning of the third stanza, the terms of the previousdisputation are abruptly abandoned: Call us what you will, weeare made such by love . What follows s an elaborate string of

paradoxes, an attempt to define the essentially indefinable natureof love. This s by far the most complex and the most metaphysical of the stanzas: it plays on antitheses and impossibilities,on the simultaneous presence in the lovers of states which, inquotidian experience, are exclusive of each other. These loversare both the moths which are attracted to the candle s fatalalluring flame, and also the candle (that which consumes themand itself, too). They are both predator and victim, male andfemale at the same time, possessing gender, yet neutral, plural

and singular. t the end of the stanza, with reference to thefrequently encountered sexual pun on dying, the ground s prepared for the fourth stanza which, playfully at least, presents thelovers as the sainted dead.

They are canonized, as we have seen, by means of a jest on

the semantics of sexuality. A witty description of coitus and ofpost-coital fatigue s now taken literally, just as the conventionaldisasters of the Petrarchan tradition are treated literally inthe second stanza. This, in turn, leads to the elaborate com

memoration of the lovers in legends (the appropriate vehiclefor recording a saint s miraculous deeds) and - by way of alearned pun on the Italian word for a room - their celebration

4 Tuve, p. 313.



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in love poems, as well. The last stanza follows, significantlyperhaps, without a grammatical break. The sainted lovers receive

the invocations and prayers of adoring worshippers, and, wemay notice in passing, they have come to epitomize all that wasapparently excluded from their state while alive.

is difficult, perhaps impossible, to know how these peculiarities stand in relation to Donne s intentions in The Canonization . The poem may be one of his failures - a flamboyantexercise which overreaches itself, a bravura performance in whichthe poet s brilliance militates against the intended and necessarycoherence of argument. But the evidence of Donne s other poems

suggests that he was far too good a rhetorician and much toowell versed in logical techniques to produce such an obviouslysophistical argument containing so many dubious procedures.Nor is the poem likely to be a mere jeu d esprit an elaboratejest, for such poems of the period are usually less complex andthe point of their joking is usually much more readily apparent.

is better, on the whole, to presume a seriousness ofintent in the poem and a coherence of achievement, and thesequalities become available if the poem s complex structure isconsidered. The Canonization is one of the most obviouslysymmetrical of the Songs and Sonets: its symmetry is difficultto perceive at first because the poem s superficial brilliance deflectsattention from it, and because it is a symmetry of contrasts asmuch as a symmetry of similitude.

The first and the last stanzas of the poem mirror each otherin the manner of reversed images. The first is sarcastic andabusive in tone, the last is reverential and adoring. With a

grandiloquent gesture, the speaker, at the beginning of the poem,excludes the lovers and their love from all worldly pursuits:

With wealth your state, your minde with Arts improve,Take you a course, get you a place,Observe his honour, or his grace,

Or the Kings realI, or his stamped faceContemplate, what you will, approve,So you will let me love.

The mode of address in the last stanza is the opposite of this: asingle voice insulting another has been replaced, at least in thespeaker s fancy, by the humble voices of the community of loversinvoking these saints of love; an oath gives way to prayer. But,in addition to this, the world which has been so rigorouslyexcluded from the experience of the lovers in the first stanza



S Y N E Y S T U I E S

comes, in the last, to be incorporated in their whole existence:

You,to whom

love was peace,that

now is rage;Who did the whole worlds soule contract, and droveInto the glasses of your eyesSo made such mirrors, and such spies,

That they did all to you epitomize,Countries, Townes, Courts

The contrast is obvious, the similarity less so; but there is,nevertheless, a similarity between the excessive stance adoptedin each stanza. Standing at the extremities of the poem, theyincorporate its most hyperbolical statements.

This s the structural principle on which The Canonizations built. The pressure s borne, so to speak, by the centralstanza, the keystone of the structure, the other stanzas exertequal but antithetical forces on this unifying element. The analogymay seem too mechanical, yet such s the manner in which thepoem is constructed. Accordingly, the second and fourth stanzasstand in less marked contrast to each other, while their similarity,though jesting and obscure, s more readily apparent once theirbasic conceit is recognized.

Ostensibly, each deals with a type of disaster: the secondcontains a mock-catalogue of social calamities; the fourth, concerned as it s with burial and entombment, records the personaland emotional disaster of death. But clearly, neither stanza s

at all seriously engaged with the disaster it catalogues; each s

hypothetical and, to a degree, fanciful and jesting. What holdsthem together s that the conceit in each s drawn from the artof poetry. No sensitive reader of our time, and certainly noneof Donne s audience, would fail to recognize the literary refer

ence of the calamities in the second stanza, while the fourthstanza s filled with images drawn from literature itself. Legends,of course, are not merely accounts of fabulous adventures (andoften the miraculous deeds of saints, as in The olden Legendthey are also inscriptions of the sort to be found on tombstones.The reference to the chronicles is self-explanatory, and the line We ll build in sonnets pretty roomes depends, in all probability,on the dual meaning of the Italian word stanza - a room orchamber, and a strophe.

o the poem presses inwards towards its third stanza, andthere, too, we find a replica in miniature of the shape of thepoem as a whole. Each stanza of The Canonization containsnine lines, the fifth line of each is, in consequence, the centralline. The central lines of the first two stanzas do not seem to

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possess in either case any particularly striking features. But thecentral line of the third (and middle) stanza contains theimportant reference to the Phoenix, and it highly appropriatethat this mythical creature, charged with symbolic significances,should stand at the dead-centre of the poem. The riddle ofthe Phoenix - which, according to the speaker, clarified inmeaning by the paradoxical state of the lovers who consumethemselves and rise again, who are compounded of disparateelements, yet forge a new entity - provides the turning-point ofthe entire poem. Up to this point, it has dealt, initially insarcastic and derisory terms, with exclusion and diaster, and, in

the opening lincs of the third stanza, with the predatory natureof love. But no sooner the paradox of ndwee in us findethe Eagle and the Dove stated than the central line arrives, andthe poem takes on a markedly different tendency and direction:

The Phoenix ridle hath more witBy us, we two being one, are it.

So to one neutrall thing both sexes fit,Wee dye and rise the same, and proveMysterious by this love.

After this, the poem moves upwards - towards peace, celebration,and towards the final litany addressed to the saints of love.We find, accordingly, that the last stanzas also stress their centrallines - these are, respectively, We ll build in sonnets prettyroomes and Into the glasses of your eyes , both images suggestive of the containment of material in a small, focal place,and both important achievements in the terms of each stanza sargument, unlike the fifth lines of the first two stanzas ( Takeyou a course, get you a place and When did the heats whichmy veines fill ) which are merely details in extended and con

tinuing catalogues.

Those familiar with the currently fashionable theories concerningthe numerological organization of much Renaissance poetry willrecognize here a structure cognate with some of those describedby Alastair Fowler in Triumphal Forms and elsewhere.5 Thepoint to stress, though, about the numerological scheme in The Canonization that it relatively simple, and that it based on assumptions that one may easily encounter in many

places throughout the period, unlike some of the schemes suggestedfor various Renaissance poems where the researcher s fancy and

5 Cambridge 1970. See also Fowler s Spenser nd the umbers of

Time London 1964 and onceitfuZ Thought Edinburgh 1975.



SY N Y STU I S

the sophistication of his calculating-machine often seem to bedetermining factors.

There no doubt whatever that Renaissance culture placedspecial emphasis - in poetry, music, architecture and in theatricaltableaux - on the central point of a structure. Such stressingof the centre carried obvious hierarchical and ritualistic overtones.6 We find, therefore, ample evidence of such activity bothin simple lyrics and in the stressing of the centre in a structureas elaborate and as extended as Paradise Lost 7 The Phoenix,the rarest of creatures, possessing miraculous powers of regeneration, the conventional symbol of resurrection, mysterious rebirthand of propagation without sexuality, is obviously a fittingoccupant of the position of honour in the poem.

This stressing of the centre in The Canonization occurs ina structure compounded of five elements, and the number five

was widely recognized in Donne s time as the symbol of marriageand of chaste love. 8 There are many marriage odes, epithalamia,sections of marriage masques and so on which, one way or

another, play elegant variations on this number. A particularlystriking example (in the matter of explicit reference) may be foundin Ben Jonson s masque Hymenaei of 1606, written to celebratethe ultimately disastrous marriage of the Earl of Essex to LadyFrances Howard. Reason, the presiding genius of this entertainment, which incorporates a learned replica of the Romanmarriage-ceremony, explains the symbolism of the bridal-procession and of the five lighted tapers carried by page-boys intothe masquing-hall, in the following manner:

And lastly, these flue waxen lightsImply perfection in the rites; or fiue the speciall number is,Whence halIow d VNION claymes her blisse.As being all the summe, that growes rom the vnited strengths, of thoseWhich male and female numbers weeDoe style, and are first two and threeWhich, ioyned thus, you cannot seuerIn equall parts, but one will euerRemaine as common; so we see

6 Fowler, Triumphal Forms p. 62ft7 The central point of the 1667 (ten book) edition occurred at 1. 762of Book VI, where Christ in glory has just Ascended; at his righthand Victorie This is not the central point of 1674 (twelvebook) edition which incorporates several additional lines of verse.

8 Fowler, Triumphal Forms p. 148ft

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The binding force of VnitieFor which alone, the peacefull godsIn number, alwaies, loue the oddes;

And euen parts as much despise,Since out of them all discords rise.

The particular mathematical lore behind this passage had

wide currency during the Renaissance. Pythagorean mathematics,which was linear and spatial, rather than numerical, regardedtwo and three as the first true numbers (because the numberone, represented by a dot, was neither linear nor spatial). Evennumbers, as Jonson states, are discordant and unstable sincethey are capable of being broken into two equal parts. Odd

numbers, on the other hand, are stable and harmonious: if theyare divided into two equal parts, there is always the remainderof one to bind their elements together. For obvious reasons,then, the first real number, two, came to be regarded as thefemale number, and the first of the odd numbers, three, cameto be associated with masculinity. Five, the sum of these numbers,is the marriage-number wherein the instability of the bride ischecked through the addition of the male principle of the bridegroom.

This curious belief is mirrored in the structure of The Canonization . Its five stanzas are capable of being divided in twoways, each way reflecting the consequences of the symbolisminherent in the number five. In the first instance, the iv stanzasmay be divided into two two-stanza sections (the first and thefifth, and the second and the fourth) with the all-important thirdstanza providing the unifying factor. As noted above, the stanzason either side of this spectacular stanza are in sharp contrast- the first two dealing with the world s hostility to and separateness from the lovers, the last two celebrating the loversfame, stability and excellence as they pass into the world ofdeath. Each section, on its own, seems fantastic, hyperbolicaland exaggerated. But the middle stanza, with its insistence on

the paradoxical and mystical nature of love, provides, it seems,the link and the transition which permits the situation in theopening stanzas to be reconciled to the claims of the closingones. The numerological conceit of five as the marriage-numberis, in this stanza, given a complex embodiment in the three lineswhich cluster around the poem s central line. Here, metaphori-

9 Ben Jonson, Hymenaei 196-211 in Works ed. C. H Herford and

P. and E. Simpson, Vol. VII, Oxford 1941, p. 216.



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cally, the sharp antitheses are welded into a firm unity:

ndwee in us finde the Eagle and the Dove.The Phoenix ridle hath more witBy us, we two being one, are it.

Moreover, the reference to Tapers in line 2 seems to pickup the connection between the number five and the symbolismof marriage-rites in much the same way as the extract from ymen ei insists on the connection.

The other way of dividing the poem s five stanzas leads to

similar suggestions. t may be apportioned into a section consisting of the first two stanzas and a section consisting of thelast three. In this scheme, the turbulent opening stanzas, dealingwith the world s hostility to the lovers, represent the instabilityof the number two as well as its discordant characteristics (asin the interval of the second). The last three, beginning withthe sharp break in the argument ( Call us what you will . . . )and dealing, on the whole, with transcendence and with thestability that the lovers discover in their sainthood, stand forthe masculine, stable connotations of the number three, as wellas for the harmonious nature of the interval of the third. Butthe union of the two sections, resulting in the mystical marriage-number, and echoing the interval of the fifth, the basis ofall harmony,lO endows the structure with a greater stability, onein which its disparate elements find their fullest expression.

Both these schemes lead, consequently, to a view of The

Canonization as a celebration of married love, and the relationship between its rhetorical surface and its structural frameworkmay be seen in terms of Platonic transcendence. we take theactual words of the poem as representing the phenomenal world- that is to say, that part of the poem which is capable of beingapprehended by the senses - it is reasonable (given the Platonicnature of much Renaissance thought) to find there the possibilitiesof incoherence noted at the beginning of this essay. This is sobecause the world of the senses, the material world, is incomplete,confusing and liable to mislead. But supporting this world thereis the pure, abstract world of forms - the poem s five-stanzastructure - and thus, since this world does not depend on local,

partial and potentially ambiguous words,but on

stableand

Since numerological doctrine drew heavily on Pythagorean teaching,an attempt was often made to import the properties of purely musicalharmony into abstract or poetic notions of a harmonious state, concordin personal relationships, etc.

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universally valid mathematical relationships, we may regard thisstructure as the proof of the assertions contained in the poem.

The guarantee of its validity is that its seemingly wild and incoherent material is capable of being contained within a stableform. is to this that the speaker refers in the closing lines ofthe poem as he recounts the litany invoked by the lovers of theworld to love's newly canonized saints:

You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage;Who did the whole worlds soule contract, and drove

Into the glasses of your eyesSo made such mirrors, and such spies,

That they did all to you epitomize,Countries, Townes, Courts: Beg from aboveA patterne of your love

The Canonization is precisely this: the pattern itself.

But, as so often in Donne's poetry, these idealistic and transcendental suggestions are incorporated in a poem which containssome teasingly ambiguous material as well. Here, the reader'stact is called upon in deciding which possibility to allow asvalid and which to discard as insignificant. We may note, for

instance, that the firstand

last lines of each stanza both endwith the word love , giving us, therefore, ten solemn, ceremonialinvocations of the key-word of the poem placed in significantpositions throughout its structure. Ten represents perfection, theharmonious quaternion,l1 the closing of the decimal system ofcomputation where numerical progression returns, as it were, toits inception. The significance of the number ten in this contextis reinforced by the poem's being cast in nine-line stanzas, fornine is the number of heavenly perfection and immortality.12But there is another instance of the word love buried in thepoem l ine39 reads You, to whom love was peace, that nowis rage , and eleven, as numerologists argued, contained severalsinister possibilities. is the number of transgression - thatwhich goes beyond the perfect wholeness of ten. In consequence,it may be taken as a symbol of overweening pride, of an improperattempt to transgress the bounds of the permitted. But it is alsothe number of death, and thus the eleven instances of the word

So called because it is the sum of the first four numbers +2-1-3+4=10 .

2 There is some confusion in Renaissance cosmology about the actualnumber of spheres, but the ninth was almost always regarded as thecelestial sphere of immutability.

3 Fowler, Triumphal orms p. 7n and p. 189n.

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love in the poem may not, after all, be an indication of theimpropriety of the arguments contained in it, but a pointer tothe location - in death - of its scheme of values. The poemgives us no directive about which, either, of these alternativeswe are required to stress, but what we know of the ingenuity ofRenaissance numerologists makes it probable that this facet ofthe poem would not have passed unnoticed.

The most elaborate, witty and recherche possibility containedin the numerical organization of the poem is to be found in thefact that it contains forty-five lines. The more perceptive and

numerologically sophisticated of Donne s audience, apart fromrecognizing that this triangular or pyramidal 14 number is

most appropriate in a poem commemorating the sainted dead(as in A Nocturnall upon S Lucies day ), noticed, perhaps,an elegant flourish or grace-note in this. February 14, St Valentine s Day, is the forty-fifth day of the year, we take January1 as the beginning of the year - which many, though by nomeans all, of Donne s contemporaries would have done.15 Thereis the possibility, therefore, that this poem celebrating sainted

lovers is a fantastical gift commemorating the feast-day of thesaint of love. Such a possibility is not without an analogue inDonne s poetry: An Epithalamion, Or mariage Song on theLady Elizabeth, and Count Palatine being married on St. Valentine s day contains elaborate play on the saint of love, ontapers and on the w phoenixes - the chaste royal bride andher princely bridegroom.

The structure of The Canonization reveals, therefore, agreater degree of coherence than a purely rhetorical analysis

able to indicate. But the seriousness of intent in the poem,suggested by the philosophical possibilities inherent in its struc-

So called because 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9=45. This could berepresented by a system of dots as a pyramid (the shape of manyfuneral monuments) with nine dots at its base and one at its apex.

5 is impossible to be sure how an individual in the early seventeenthcentury would have reckoned the beginning of the year: in additionto 1 January, 25 March (Lady Day) was frequently employed as thecommencement of the year.

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tural symmetry, is, perhaps, invalidated by the amount of incidental and - to modern readers - indecorous detail that an

investigation of its structure uncovers. Thisis

precisely theproblem we encounter with so much of Donne s poetry - thenagging sense that what appears so idealized and so high-mindedmay be no more than an elaborate conceit. To think in suchterms, however, is, perhaps, to import criteria into the poetryof the Renaissance which are alien to the age. Here is poetrywhich is simultaneously serious and flippant, dedicated andjesting, and entirely free of that essentially Romantic convictionthat a work of art cannot (and should not) embrace both polarities

at the same time. The evidence of the poetry of Donne s agesuggests that his contemporaries encountered no such difficultywhen contemplating the brilliantly multi-faceted world of TheCanonization .

Donne Canonisation

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