The Canonization - John Donne Revision Guide

Student Revision Guide
This Revision Guide offers 7 clear sections: Overview; Form and Structure; Close Analysis; Key Themes; Context; Critical Perspectives; Study Questions and Extension Activities.
The Close Analysis section follows five nine-line stanzas: the exasperated opening that invites the listener to mock palsy, gout, five grey hairs or ruined fortune, so long as he lets the speaker love; the mock-Petrarchan defence that no man’s ship was drowned by these sighs; the fly, the taper, the eagle and the dove, and the phoenix riddle; the well-wrought urn and the pretty rooms of sonnets; and the final invocation in which the lovers become saints of love. Form and Structure examines the stanza’s ABBACCCAA rhyme, the short closing line and the return to ‘love’ at the end of every stanza. Context covers the secret marriage to Ann More in 1601 and its cost to Donne’s career, Jacobean court patronage and the Catholic process of canonisation. Critical Perspectives asks whether the poem’s religious language elevates love or plays with blasphemy.

Quotation Quilt
A selection of key quotations from ‘The Canonization’, arranged to support the themes and concepts an essay on this poem is most likely to need.
Quotations are grouped by hold your tongue and let me love; the catalogue of worldly advancement; who’s injured by my love?; the fly, the taper, the eagle and the dove; the phoenix riddle; the well-wrought urn and pretty rooms; and the lovers invoked as saints.