John Donne’s “ The - PowerPoint Presentation

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John Donne’s

“

The Cannonization”

Analyzin’, Comprehenden’ and Lensin’Slide2

The Poem

For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love,          Or chide my palsy, or my gout, My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune flout, 

         With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,                 Take you a course, get you a place,                 Observe his honor, or his grace, Or the king's real, or his stampèd face 

         Contemplate; what you will, approve,          So you will let me love. Alas, alas, who's injured by my love?          What merchant's ships have my sighs drowned? Who says my tears have overflowed 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're tapers too, and at our own cost die,          And we in us find the eagle and the dove.                 The phœnix 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 canonized 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!"Slide3

The Author and Context

John Donne’s standing as a great English poet, and one of the greatest writers of English prose, is now assured. However, it has been confirmed only in the early 20th century. The history of Donne’s reputation is the most remarkable of any major writer in English; no other body of great poetry has fallen so far from favor for so long and been generally condemned as inept and crude. In Donne’s own day his poetry was highly prized among the small circle of his admirers, who read it as it was circulated in manuscript, and in his later years he gained wide fame as a preacher. For some 30 years after his death successive editions of his verse stamped his powerful influence upon English poets. During the Restoration his writing went out of fashion and remained so for several centuries. Throughout the 18th century, and for much of the 19th century, he was little read and scarcely appreciated. Commentators followed 

Samuel Johnson in dismissing his work as no more than frigidly ingenious and metrically uncouth. Some scribbled notes by 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Charles Lamb‘s copy of Donne’s poems make a testimony of admiration rare in the early 19th century. Robert Browning became a known (and wondered-at) enthusiast of Donne, but it was not until the end of the 1800s that Donne’s poetry was eagerly taken up by a growing band of avant-garde readers and writers. His prose remained largely unnoticed until 1919.In the first two decades of the 20th century Donne’s poetry was decisively rehabilitated. Its extraordinary appeal to modern readers throws light on the Modernist movement, as well as on our intuitive response to our own times. Donne may no longer be the cult figure he became in the 1920s and 1930s, when T.S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats, among others, discovered in his poetry the peculiar fusion of intellect and passion and the alert contemporariness which they aspired to in their own art. He is not a poet for all tastes and times; yet for many readers Donne remains what Ben Jonson judged him: “the first poet in the world in some things.” His poems continue to engage the attention and challenge the experience of readers who come to him afresh. His high place in the pantheon of the English poets now seems secure.Donne’s love poetry was written nearly four hundred years ago; yet one reason for its appeal is that it speaks to us as directly and urgently as if we overhear a present confidence. For instance, a lover who is about to board ship for a long voyage turns back to share a last intimacy with his mistress: “Here take my picture” (Elegy 5). Two lovers who have turned their backs upon a threatening world in “The Good Morrow” celebrate their discovery of a new world in each other:Slide4

John Donne