This week we had to read (again) John Donne's "The Canonization," in addition to some of his letters and the other text. In class last Wednesday Professor Crawford concentrated on Donne's comparison of love to the phoenix and how, among other ideas, this implies permanence, or perpetuity. Another article I noticed in rereading the poem is the mention of authority, which arises in different forms. In the first stanza, for example, Donne likens the improvement of the mind by art to the improvement of a state with wealth: "With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve." Other authoritative figures crop up throughout: there is the king and his "stamp'd face" exhibited on coins, there are soldiers, lawyers, and, in the last stanza, courts.
What do these contribute to the poem, if anything at all? Perhaps these varying representations of power embody the society that the speaker begs to, if not recognize, than to at least let live his love. This is revealed right off the bat in the first line: "For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love." Society is superior to the poet, and so the poem deals with the disparity, and the desired resolution, between the public and private life.
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