Like a lot of Donne's poems, "The Canonization" revolves around a central conceit: an elaborate extended metaphor. Here, in fact, there are two conceits: poetry as a monument, and lovers as saints.
In the fourth stanza, the speaker notes that when lovers die, their love is rarely commemorated with a mighty "tomb" or a "well-wrought urn." Leaving aside the speaker's naughty joke (to "die," in Renaissance slang, was to have an orgasm—definitely the kind of event nobody builds a tomb about), there's a serious point here:
- Passionate love, in this speaker's eyes, is one of the greatest and most divine forces in the world, and lovers should be celebrated just as great heroes are.
- But love, the speaker thinks, also needs a different kind of monument than a dead hero. Instead of building a stony "urn" to commemorate his love, the speaker will therefore build a metaphorical temple out of poetry, making "pretty rooms" in "sonnets." (There's another pun implied here: the word "stanza," meaning the groups of lines out of which poems are built, actually means "room" in Italian.)
This poem itself thus becomes a kind of "well-wrought urn," a beautifully designed container that will preserve the speaker's love.
A monument like this poem, the speaker goes on, a poem that commemorates a love as deep as his, will itself become a temple worthy of a holy pilgrimage. It might even have powers a physical temple never could: a poem, after all, can travel the world and endlessly replicate in print, while a building, a tomb, or an urn stays resolutely in one place.
If the speaker writes a poem as a monument to his love, then, people everywhere will be able to visit that monument—and to worship there. In the poem's other major conceit, true lovers like the speaker and his beloved are "canonized" by their love: that is, they're made into Catholic saints. Love, this poem argues, has an awful lot in common with the Christian faith:
- Love (and sex) makes "two" separate people into "one"—in much the same way that God is said to become part of every soul.
- Love can also make people immortal, allowing them to "die" and resurrect like a phoenix—or like Christ himself.
Passion, the conceit of canonization suggests, is a near neighbor to the divine. Far from being a sinful distraction, love can raise mortal beings to the brink of heaven.