Today’s Donne is particularly interesting, as it combines great dramatic urgency with considerable complexity. Its diction is rough, tender, hyperbolic, minutely observant. Its sentiments are both inflated and moving. “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love”–a very strange beginning for a love poem, more a line for the stage than the outset of a lyric poem.

My post-poem ramble does little to unpack the philosophical argument at the center of the poem, one that includes the implausible assertion (more like wishful thinking) that male post-coital depression has been overcome in the fiery intensity of this love. I do try to get at one of the more confusing parts of the poem, the final stanza in which the voice shifts from the poet to the voices he imagines will petition him and his lover after their deaths to intercede with God to allow their love to become a paradigm for all succeeding lovers. The scandalous, even blasphemous assertions in the poem are blunted by our secular sensibilities, but they were notorious among Donnes’ coterie in his own time. This poem, like most of Donne’s work, was not printed for widespread reading until after his death. During his life, they circulated in manuscript.

Here’s “The Canonization.”

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