The Canonization
Somebody has been lecturing the speaker about his affair, and the first line tells them to hold their tongue and go take a course, get a place, observe a lord — his love has drowned no merchant ship, flooded no ground and added nobody to the plague bills. The defence then climbs: the two are the eagle and the dove, the phoenix riddle, a pair who die and rise the same, and if they cannot live by love they can be built into sonnets like well-wrought urns and invoked afterwards by everyone who could not manage it. Cleanth Brooks took his title from those urns and made the poem the test case for reading a lyric's paradoxes as its meaning rather than its ornament.
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