The Canonization and A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

1. Alas, alas, who's injured by my love?

         What merchant's ships have my sighs drowned?

Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?

Answer: These line have been taken from the poem “The Canonization” by John Donne. The Canonization By John Donne is a metaphysical poet where the poet tags himself as a lover.

 The lovers are not making any war or spreading diseases in the society. They respect others property. The poet wants to say that his love injures nobody. It’s harmless. The lover is tactful, full of emotion and witty.

He says, her sights are not responsible for the drowning of the ship. His tears are not responsible for the flood or floating off the ground. Spring won’t go away due to his coldness. Nature has its own natural course and the lovers are not harming it. The heat in his veins has not increased the number of the people who die of plague. His love is harmless.

The lover says that the soldiers are doing their duty by going to wars and the lawyers by fighting cases in the court. But what the lover wants is to love his partner.

 2. The phœnix riddle hath more wit

                By us; we two being one, are it.

Answer:  These line have been taken from the poem “The Canonization” by John Donne. The Canonization By John Donne is a metaphysical poet where the poet tags himself as a lover.

     The lovers think of themselves as something a bit nobler than a fly, like an eagle or a dove. Or, the speaker reasons, maybe a phoenix is a more appropriate metaphor for these crazy kids.

The phoenix was a kind of immortal bird which, when it died, had a new version of itself rise from its dead body. This set-up seems to remind the speaker of his relationship with his lover. The two of them are really merged into one in his view, regardless of their genders.

According to the lover, the riddle of Phoenix is there in their existence. They have two bodies, but they are one.  Like the Phoenix, they die and they rise from their ashes.

3. We can die by it, if not live by love,   

  And if unfit for tomb or hearse   

  Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;

Answer:  These line have been taken from the poem “The Canonization” by John Donne. The Canonization By John Donne is a metaphysical poet where the poet tags himself as a lover.

In the third stanza, the speaker reacts to apparent name-calling on the part of the outsider, insisting that he and his beloved are “flies” (in the diction of his age, moths or butterflies) or “tapers” (candles), which gain fullness of life even as they consume themselves. (Renaissance English poets commonly employed the word “die” as a sexual pun, based on the folk belief that each orgasm shortened one’s life by a day.) Likening the physically and spiritually united lovers to the phoenix, a mythical bird that was thought to erupt into flame and then be resurrected from its own ashes, the speaker claims that they are proven “mysterious” (in the spiritual sense) by this ideal love. This constitutes the climax or turning point of this small drama.

4. So let us melt, and make no noise,

    No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;

   'Twere profanation of our joys

    To tell the laity our love.

Answer: These line have been taken from the poem “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” by John Donne.  Forbidding Mourning” begins with an image of death and mourning. In the poem  of second stanza use of the word “melt” in the first line evokes an image of warmth and of gradual motion rather than the more explosive “tear-floods” and “sigh-tempests”. These comparisons both take two things often related to mourning and sadness (tears and sighs) and turn them into stormy, grandiose expressions which seem unrealistic when examined through the lens of what a normal human can accomplish. No human can create a flood with their eyes or a storm with their breath. The following two lines, “’Twere profanation of our joys/To tell the laity of our love” use several words which begin the process of elevating the speaker’s love to sacredness. The speaker uses the word profanation, a word which typically means the desecration of something sacred or the degradation of anything worthy of veneration. In this case, their “joys” are the thing which would be defiled, a sentiment which elevates their love beyond the human sphere. The speaker also uses “laity”, which refers to anyone who is not a clergyman. In this way, it would be defilement of their joys to speak of their love as anything but holy.