The Phoenix riddle hath more wit
By us, we two being one, are it.
So to one neutral thing both sexes fit,
We die and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.

These lines come from John Donne’s metaphysical love poem “The Canonization,” written in the early 17th century and circulated in manuscript before appearing posthumously in the 1633 edition of Poems. In the poem, the speaker rebukes a critic of his love affair and argues that their love is harmless to the world and worthy of being “canonized” (made saintly) in verse. Near the close, Donne turns to emblematic, paradoxical imagery—especially the phoenix—to describe a love so complete that it fuses two lovers into a single, self-renewing entity that can be memorialized as an example for others.

Donne uses the phoenix—an emblem of death and rebirth—to express a paradox central to the poem: love annihilates ordinary individuality (“we two being one”) yet produces a higher, enduring unity. Calling it a “riddle” emphasizes that such union defies conventional logic, including the binary of male and female; their merged identity becomes a “neutral thing” in which “both sexes fit.” The lovers “die and rise the same,” suggesting that passion consumes them but also recreates them without loss, as if love is both martyrdom and resurrection. The passage elevates erotic love into a quasi-religious mystery, aligning private desire with sacred transformation.