Q1.

We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms; As well a well-wrought urn becomes, the greatest ashes, as
half-acre tombs," Explain the paradox of these lines.

In The Language of Paradox, Brooks says that title of the poem The Canonization by John Donne
itself is a paradox. That is the underlying metaphor of the poem. Donne treats the theme of love in
his poem but the title suggests a saintly thing. When we have a close reading of the poem, we realize
the theme of love is treated as sainthood. Donne compares lovers renounce the world as saints do;
and renounce the bodies as saints do; lovers do for the sake of love and saints do for the sake of
God. Brooks tries to prove that Donne takes both love and religion seriously. The lover is absorbed in
the world of love. The torments of love are obvious to him but the world is unaffected by that. The
conflict between the lover’s world and the real world run through the poem.

They are dedicated, they are not immature but confident. The lover’s renunciation of the world
similar to the confident resolution of the saint. Their love story will not be the subject of a tea time
talk. The ‘’pretty rooms’’ of sonnets is sufficient for them. The well-wrought urn will provide ‘’a finer
memorial’’ for the ashes than a ‘’pompous and grotesque monument’’ ,’’half-acre tombs’’, a
phrase that shows the grossness and vulgarity of the world left behind by the lovers. Their
legend, their story, will gain them canonization. Approved as lover’s saints, other lovers will invoke
them. By rejecting life, the lovers get ‘’the most intense life’’. This paradox has been hinted at
earlier in the phoenix metaphor, which revolves around the fact that their love will fight through
everything and will rise and reborn from the ash. Here it receives a powerful dramatization. The
lovers in becoming hermits find that they have not lost the world, but have gained the world in each
other, now a more intense, more meaningful world. The poem ends on a tone of ‘’triumphant
achievement’’, The comparison of the lovers to the phoenix is connected to other comparisons of
them to burning tapers and the eagle and the dove. The phoenix bird burns like the tapers. In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to die means to experience the consummation of the act of
love. The lovers after the act are the same. Their love is not exhausted in mere lust. This is their title
to canonization. Their love is like the phoenix. In addition, the cocoon of their love is the resting
place, an urn, a legend about their love, where they can lay their troubles outside from which they
have fought for their love and can appreciate their saintly love for each other.