After Shakespeare, this is quite a change of mood. John Donne takes a flea bite and turns it into an argument for why a woman should sleep with him.
I started with the poem on its own. I wanted to see whether the argument would work on me before finding out what anyone else thought of it.
The poem
Text: Representative Poetry Online
Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deny’st me is;
Me it suck’d first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;
Confess it, this cannot be said
A sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead,
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper’d swells with one blood made of two;
And this, alas, is more than we would do.Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, nay more than married are:
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, we’re met,
And cloister’d in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?
In what could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?
Yet thou triumph’st, and say’st that thou
Find’st not thyself nor me the weaker now;
‘Tis true, then learn how false fears be;
Just so much honour, when thou yield’st to me,
Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.
Before I read anything about it
After the lofty ideas of love in the last few poems, this one feels more base and lustful. I wasn’t sure I followed the argument at first, but if I read it as playful teasing, I could see the humor in it.
Listening to the poem
I listened to Adam Foulds read “The Flea” for the Poetry Archive. His reading confirmed what I had suspected. The speaker is inviting a woman to bed. His excuse is that the flea has already mixed their blood, so she may as well give him what he wants, given “how little that which thou deny’st me is.”
I’m not usually prudish, but somehow this poem did not sit right with me. If anything, hearing it read aloud made it sound even more distasteful.
Still, not every poem is for everyone.
What I learned
Donne passed much of his poetry around privately and published very little verse during his lifetime, which makes individual poems difficult to date. “The Flea” first appeared in print in 1633, two years after his death.
Apparently, erotic flea poems were already a thing. There was a European tradition of poets envying the insect for its access to a woman’s body. Donne’s trick was to turn the flea into a complete argument for sex.
This sort of unlikely comparison, stretched out through an entire poem, is called a metaphysical conceit. The flea becomes proof of physical union, then a marriage bed, then a marriage temple containing three lives.
Once I understood the action between the stanzas, the poem became easier to follow. First, the flea has bitten them both and mixed their blood without sin or shame. The speaker argues that what he wants from her is equally insignificant. When she moves to kill it, he declares that the flea contains him, her and itself. Killing it would therefore be murder, suicide and sacrilege all at once.
She kills it anyway.
We hear the woman only through him, but she is not simply sitting there listening. She crushes his symbol and points out that neither of them is any weaker. He immediately turns that around too: if the flea’s death cost them nothing, then surrendering her honour to him will cost just as little.
It is clever, but it is also exactly what bothered me. Every refusal becomes material for his next argument. She disproves him and, instead of accepting the answer, he changes the terms and keeps going.
“The Flea” is a dramatic monologue, so the speaker is not necessarily Donne himself. Perhaps we are meant to laugh at him as much as admire his cleverness. That makes the poem more interesting, but it does not make the speaker more appealing.
Reading it again
I had entirely missed that she kills the flea. Somehow that makes me feel better about the poem. She does get to assert herself against what feels like an unwanted pursuit, even if he immediately turns her refusal into another argument.
What stayed with me
Honestly, I’m not convinced that this poem, or any of its lines, will stay with me.