which poem of john donne is cited by cleanth brooks as a sufficiently extreme instanceof paradox
Paradox (literature) Brooks ends his essay with a reading of John Donne's poem The Canonization, which uses a paradox as its underlying metaphor. Using a charged religious term to describe the speaker's physical love as saintly, Donne effectively argues that in rejecting the material world and withdrawing to a world of each other, the two lovers are appropriate candidates for canonization. This seems to parody both love and religion, but in fact it combines them, pairing unlikely circumstances and demonstrating their resulting complex meaning. Brooks points also to secondary paradoxes in the poem: the simultaneous duality and singleness of love, and the double and contradictory meanings of "die" in Metaphysical poetry (used here as both sexual union and literal death). He contends that these several meanings are impossible to convey at the right depth and emotion in any language but that of paradox. A similar paradox is used in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, when Juliet says, "For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch and palm to palm is holy palmer's kiss."