For God sake hold your tongue, and let me love.

This line opens John Donne’s early love poem commonly titled “The Canonization,” written in the 1590s and first published posthumously in the 1633 edition of Poems. Donne, then a young man moving in the Inns of Court milieu, often wrote witty, argumentative lyrics that stage a speaker defending erotic love against social censure. Here the speaker addresses a critic—someone who would scold him for loving—and brusquely demands silence. The poem proceeds as a mock-legal and mock-religious defense, claiming that if the lovers cannot be saints in life, they can be “canonized” in verse, their love preserved and revered through poetry.

The speaker’s command—“hold your tongue”—is less a plea than a rhetorical opening gambit: it frames love as a private vocation that needs no external permission. By invoking “For God sake,” Donne mixes sacred language with erotic insistence, a characteristic Donnean strategy that elevates passionate attachment while also parodying solemn moral judgment. The line sets up the poem’s central argument: love harms no one and should be allowed to flourish, even if it appears socially unproductive. Ultimately, the poem suggests that love can generate its own kind of immortality—through story, song, and poetic “canonization”—turning personal desire into a lasting cultural artifact.

For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love,
Or chide my palsy, or my gout,
My five gray hairs, or ruin’d fortune flout,
With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his honour, or his grace,
Or the king’s real, or his stamp’d face
Contemplate; what you will, approve,
So you will let me love.

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