Where It All Goes Down
Like a turducken (a turkey stuffed with a chicken, which happens to be stuffed with a duck), "The Canonization" offers up settings within settings for a tasty—well, at least interesting—effect. Let's dive in, shall we?
The first setting is really just a conversation between the speaker and, well, someone. We never learn to whom he's talking, only that this person must be annoying because the speaker starts off in an exasperated tone: "For God's sake hold your tongue" (1). This setting also has the added effect of allowing the speaker to address us as the readers, just as he's addressing this other person.
Things would all be pretty straightforward if the speaker stopped there, but he doesn't. He moves on to describe several settings for his relationship with his lover. In stanza 2, for example, he describes the earthly setting, in which nobody around him is (or should be) particularly troubled by the couple's love—do-blah-dee, life goes on. In the third stanza, we move into a more abstract, more metaphorical setting, as the speaker likens himself and his lover to a series of symbolic birds.
When we get to stanza 4, though, the speaker gets even more abstract. Now he's discussing his relationship in terms of a literary setting, as the couple will be remembered in poems ("sonnets") that, when people read them, will somehow obtain a religious significance and be seen as "hymns" (35). The fifth and final stanza, then, puts forth the setting of heaven. Heaven is where the speaker and his lover have ascended to become lover-saints, who now look down at all of us back here on Earth—who could really use some advice on how to love properly.
Five stanzas, five settings—it's a pretty neat trick, right? At the same time, it also suggests a kind of progression, from interpersonal to earthly to metaphorical to literary to heavenly. In that way, as many critics have pointed out, the progression of these settings is similar to the progression somebody goes through in order to become an actual saint. Our speaker and his lover start on Earth, then ascend into heaven by the end of the poem. They start low and end high—like any saint should do.