Donne's Cannonization, Richards' Four Types of Meaning

The poem creates an imaginary scene: a husband repels hordes of merchants and solitary, proselytizing monks in order to love his wife in privacy. INTENTION: By constructing this scene, Donne criticizes money-mongers and religious fanatics for canonizing objects of desire in the name of True Love. At the same time, he asserts that this True Love is spiritual in its carnality and artistry.

TONE: Each mini-stanza addresses a different group in the imaginary scene.

The first mini-stanzas address hordes of cosmopolitans. They judge the speaker for his earthly poverties and for rabble rousing poetically amongst a status quo. The speaker encourages them to judge his physical state yet leave his poetry alone (hold your tongue, and let me love/ Or chide my palsie, or my gout); they can turn to distractions like finance and fine arts (With wealth your state), but they cannot say that his poetry upsets their order (what merchants ships have my sights drowned), nor can they say that poets are less educated or influential than they (We’re Tapers too…And wee in us finde the’Eagle [Evil] and the Dove [Good]). Poets take risks to live on poetry (We can dye by it, if not live by love), and no, they may not be able to afford the hearse and tomb like the moneyed. Finally, the speaker gets angry: how dare the masses invoke the poets when they drive each other into isolation, fight wars over mercantile matters, and put contracts on their very souls.

The couplets slyly shoo away the monks, and their form connotes childish admonition. The speaker sees them as brainwashed automatons that can be moved around through ad hoc spiritual musing. Donne places the couplets off to the side, as if these zombie-monks need only to be whispered-to so that they may turn and go take a course, get [a] place [to] Observe his honor, or his grace. Donne leaves ‘his’ un-capitalized to show a form of disrespect to Christianity. While he shows rebellious disrespect to the merchants, here the disrespect is more cerebral: The Phoenix ridle hath more with/ By us, we two being one, are it. The speaker says to the monks: the Resurrection is too complex a way to preach about Love; this love here between my wife and I is much more appropriate.

The three line mini-stanzas represent a personal address to the speaker’s wife. They take the tone of the speaker shaking his head and smiling with a loved one after a hard day’s work of fortifying the fortress (and sanctuary) against the seas of ignorance. Sometimes, he entreats the wife to let it all go so that they can love in peace: Contemplate, what you will, approve,/So you will let me love. Sometimes, the words are frozen in third-person love poems: Soldiers find warres, and Lawyers find out still…Though she and I do love.

FEELING: The poem’s feeling is created through dynamics among the coordinated mini-stanzas and within the five larger stanzas. Each mini-stanza addressed to the masses gets angrier and angrier, until the poet finally shouts them down in the last stanza. Conversely, the speaker gets less snotty with the monks, and by the fourth stanza, they are gone. In their absence, the speaker prays carnally, spiritually, and artistically to his wife through the couplets.