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Ayushi Jain

Thinkal Hansan

B.A. (Hons) English [2018ENG1064]

29 Oct, 2020

Demonstration of The Language of Paradox through Brooks’ reading of Donne’s “The

Canonization”

In The Language of Paradox Cleanth Brooks assumes the language of

poetry, expressing that at its heart, poetry is the language of paradox,

“Paradox is the language appropriate and inevitable to poetry.” Paradox, as

usually comprehended, is a play on logic; it initially summons contradictions

and afterward undermines them by the power of reason to at long last

disintegrate them altogether. In the end, the rationale endures a genuine

challenge but ultimately prevails. At least this is the means by which two

contemporary rhetoricians, Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor, describe the

system of paradox in literary analysis. Distinguished as one of the six

principle topoi in rhetoric, the paradox topos is utilized by critics to “show

how contradictory elements can be unified via creative interpretation.” If “all

good literature commonly expresses a paradoxical view of life” and “the

techniques of literature are in themselves interestingly paradoxical,” as

Harvey Birenbaum writes in his joyful book The Happy Critic, at that point,
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we would need to consider finding and fathoming paradoxes a highlight in

the maze of literary interpretation.

Paradox contends all the while the contrary sides of a question and

play with contradictory pairs such as likeness and unlikeness, being and non-

being perpetually. The reason is to figure out how to get to the truth, and

truth is appeared to live in a paradoxical state. Brooks accepts that the

intensity of the poem consists in the “paradoxical situation out of which the

poem arises.”

The Language of Paradox is totally normal for New Criticism in

seeking a formula or class with which to distinguish the extraordinary

classification of literary language. It is additionally looked to protect artistic

language's status as a mode of exceptional significance, not available to

science and referential discourse. For Brooks, art establishes a site where the

denotative and the connotative degrees of language interlock with one

another, “It is a language in which the connotations play as great a part as

the denotations.” All the speculations are made out of a close analysis of

lyric poetry. New Critical close reading is at the core of each type of poetic

analysis and becomes the foundation of all forms of literary criticism. True

to the soul of New Criticism, it is a transcendental poem (John Donne's The

Canonization) that has been most extravagantly scrutinized by Brooks. The

approach of art can never be immediate; it is always aberrant. However, the

strategy of art, as Brooks affirms, is an “extension of the normal language of

poetry, not a perversion of it”. All writing is revered in language, and

language is advanced by writing. As an illustrative presentation of his

contention, Brooks takes up John Donne's "Canonization".

In "The Canonization," he utilizes the connection between the

otherworldly and the erogenous love as structure to underline the close ties

among profound and physical love:

The canonization is not that of a pair of holy anchorites who have

renounced the world and the flesh. The hermitage of each is the other’s

body; but they do renounce the world, and so their title to sainthood is

cunningly argued.

Brooks points out that it is by the righteousness of paradox as a

genuine explanatory device that Donne can combine love and religion.

Brooks focuses additionally on subsidiary paradoxes in the poem: the

concurrent duality and singleness of affection, and the twofold and

conflicting implications of "die" in Metaphysical poetry (utilized here as

both sexual association and literal demise). He asserts that these few

implications are difficult to pass on at the correct profundity and feeling in

any language but that of paradox.

Brooks weaves different segments of the poem with a string of

paradoxes. The poem opens drastically, crying to an inconspicuous

antagonist, “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love.” The 'you',

whom the speaker addresses in a tone of irritation, is unidentified. It tends to

be perceived that the 'you' is deemed to be the part of the outside, common

world which the lovers have denied, the world which views love as a

senseless gesture. Brooks remarks that Donne, in protecting his love, in his

next lines further permits his speaker to trivialize the antagonist, utilizing

various correlations, pictures, and tropes.

The New Critic carefully follows the manners in which Donne

safeguards his affection against the outside world of reality. Brooks says that

Donne has introduced two worlds which are opposing to one another. He

comments that in the primary stanza, the writer legitimizes the sacredness of

his adoration on such grounds as “approaching old age, ruined fortune, etc.”

In the first world, he encourages the addressee to look at his own self and his

own wealth and honor and says to develop his own court and gaze at the

king there or on the stamped coins. He finishes up the first stanza having set

up himself as an honest, set upon by nuisances who have no loves of their

own. The speaker couldn't care less what different occupations the

antagonist does, as long as he will "let me love."

As indicated by Brooks, the subsequent stanza is a continuation of the

contention between this present reality of the world and the lovers who are

caught up in the realm of love. In contrast to this real world, in the second

world, the tortures of doting are significant and important for the lovers –

“What merchants ships have my sighs drown’d?” The second stanza

proceeds with the speaker's utilization of rationale. The very ludicrousness

of the lovers' language fortifies the poet's opinion - their fondness, anyway

absurd, will do no harm to the world. The world goes on uninterrupted by

the love world of the poet. He contrasts little activities, using

conventionalized figures of the Petrarchan tradition such as, “wind of lovers’

sighs, the flood of lovers’ tears, with stupendous functions, for example, the

sinking of a “merchant’s ships” and the floods that caused that sinking.

Now, Brooks alludes to the words “chronicle” and “sonnet” of the fourth

verse: the previous proposes “the secular history with its pomp and

magnificence” while the latter “trivial and precious intricacy”.

The speaker moves on to the third verse, keeping up the tone of the

satire of the second stanza, welcoming others to name him and his lover

whatever they wish; as in truth, names won't alter the truth of their affection:
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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.

So the figures in the third stanza are not, at this point the continuation

of Petrarchan idiocies; they are sharp and fuel our feelings too. Donne strays

from absurdities to comparisons so that he can feature the status of the

lovers, how they change by affection starting with one phase onto the next

one as tapers by consuming themselves to one another, from eagle and dove

to finally becoming one by joining themselves in spiritual world. The

renunciation of the world is represented by burning themselves as candles.

The burning of their fire causes their own downfall, and he knows it. In spite

of the obvious technicality of the correlations, “the likening of the lovers to

a phoenix is fully serious, and with it, the tone has shifted from ironic banter

into a defiant but controlled tenderness.” He further proceeds to contrast

themselves with a phoenix, broadening the metaphor of fire. Similarly as the

Phoenix dies and afterward be reborn, they can beat all hindrances and

return to each other. Brooks further remarks that the phoenix burns, not like

the taper at its own cost, but to live once more. In the prior correlations of

eagle and dove, they were two in body, yet now from the picture of phoenix,

they become one both truly and intellectually. They go into the

transcendental world with new life. The stanza finishes up with a suggestion
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to the Platonic idea that two beloved could join to shape an ideal whole:

“We die and rise the same, and prove / Mysterious by this love.”

Donne conveys the idea of love and death into the penultimate verse,

his first line perusing: “We can die by it, if not live by love,” here an end

turns into the start of a new life, its death is life, proposing that once dead,

the beloved will turn into the subject of legend and chronicle. Love is to live

only; love represents living; the lovers are prepared to die in the event that

they can't live by affection; they die; by dying they surrender this world, the

world of abundance and power. Brooks at last, affirms that death is the

culmination of life however the paradox of phoenix carries the possibility of

death alongside life. This eternal life is a more extreme one and Brooks cites

as the poet is stating, “one death is really a more intense life”, we can stand

to exchange life (the world) for death (love) for that death is the fulfillment

of life, “After all one does not expect to live by love one expects and wants

to die by it”. It is wonderful to cause to notice how Brooks remarks on pretty

much every word and elucidates its shrouded association with different

words, lines or stanzas.

The lovers are willing to forgo the ponderous and stately chronicle and

accept the trifling and insubstantial ‘sonnet’ instead.” With the phrase

"half-acre tombs" being used, the world the lovers reject becomes vulgar
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and gross. Their legend, their story, will gain them canonization, and

approved as love’s saint, other lovers will invoke them.

Donne spares his most emotional correlation for the last two lines of

this stanza, expressing, “And by these hymns, all shall approve / Us

Canonized for love.” Here he proposes the blasphemous suggestion that his

physical love bears a significance equivalent to that of the sanctified holy

people. He even incorporates various words suggesting religion,

including invoke and reverend. This proposal underpins the last stanza, as

the picture of the lovers as the holy saints, as God's competitors,

paradoxically empowers them to accomplish what they previously

repudiated in the principal verse of the poem—the “Countries, Towns”, and

“Courts”.

As per Brooks, this contention shows up again in the closing verse,

possibly to be settled when the “unworldly lovers achieve a more intense

world.” In the last stanza, the phoenix metaphor is totally understood; the

lovers will win a more extraordinary world by dismissing this one. The

figure of the phoenix is critical in understanding the culminating paradox.

Subsequently, this is their title to canonization; “their love is like the

phoenix.”
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Brooks presumes that Donne is able to utilize the dissonant picture of

two lovers surrendering the actual world for their endearment and through

their penance accomplishing sainthood simply because of the paradox that

the symbolism of their love and that of their religion creates. The New Critic

insinuates such proclamations as “He who would save his life must lose it”

and “The last shall be the first” in order to show the vital noteworthiness of

the language of paradox. “We must be prepared to accept the paradox of the

imagination itself” else “we shall end with the essential cinders, for all our

pains.” Some other direct technique would have enfeebled and twisted

information that was argued. Denied of the traits of paradox with its twin

backups of irony and marvel, the matter of Donne's poem would have

unwound in to simply 'facts'. His lovers, dispossessed of the advantages of

the extraordinary that Donne gives on them, turns less incredible, less

unworldly.

Paradox, in any case, is fundamental to the structure and being of the

poem. Paradox makes verse an auto telic. In The Language of Paradox (The

Well-Wrought Urn) Brooks shows that paradox was so fundamental to

literary significance that it becomes practically indistinguishable from

poetry. As indicated by individual New Critic Leroy Searle, Brooks'

utilization of paradox emphasized the lines between form and content. “The
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form of the poem uniquely embodies its meaning” and the language of the

poem “affects the reconciliation of opposites or contraries.” While irony

capacities inside the poem, paradox regularly alludes to the significance and

structure of the poem and is in this way comprehensive of irony. This

presence of alternate extremes or contraries and the harmonization thereof, is

the essence of poetry as well as the importance and meaning of it.

Works cited:

Cleanth Brooks: The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947) “The

Language of Paradox”

Hazem Kamel Abd al Janabi: The Impact of The Anglo-American School of New

Criticism on Cleanth Brooks’ The Well-Wrought Urn

Sucheta Sankar: Cleanth Brooks and The Language of Paradox

Nasrullah Mambrol: Cleanth Brooks’ concept of Language of Paradox (2016)

Nasrullah Mambrol: Analysis of John Donne’s The Canonization (2020)

Dr. S. Udhaya Kumar: Paradox, The making of poetry (2017)

 
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