The Flea

The Flea

John Donne’s poems are similar in their content. They usually point out at same topics like love, lust, sex and religion; only they are dissimilar in the feelings they express. These subjects reflect the different stages of his life: the lust of his youth, the love of his married middle age, and the piety of the latter part of his life. His poem,’ The Flea’ represents the restless feeling of lust during his youthful days but it comes together with a true respect for women through the metaphysical conceit of the flea as a church in the rhythm of the sexual act.

The speaker in “The Flea” is a restless, would-be lover who is trying to convince his beloved to give her virginity to him. Therefore, to convince his lover, the speaker employs a flea that is buzzing around the two to form three arguments. The first stanza compares sexual intercourse to two people being bitten by the same flea. Both are connected by “two bloods mingled (Donne 1081)”; and the act of sex is defined by the mixing of fluids, not an act of love or lust. Yet the tone of the passage is one of playful curiosity, which suggests the smile on the face of the speaker as he envisions achieving his lusty goal. We can see the playfulness in his selection and treatment of the subject. A flea is not a normal object held in the light of love; in raising this conceit, we can see the unconventional way the speaker tries to sell his argument. He acts jealous of the flea because it received her blood “before it woo (1081).” The argument is not intense or angry; it ends with a mock sigh: “And this, alas, is more than we would do (1081).” The playful conceit of the first stanza lays the ground for the more outlandish claims of the second and third.

The speaker next takes a more impassioned tone as he seeks to save the flea’s life and embellishes his original conceit. As in the other stanzas, this arranges its four supporting arguments into three couplets and a triplet by rhyme. However, whereas the first stanza loosely held the ideas to couplets, the second shows more organization in thought. This further structure is necessary to support the conceit of the flea as a holy church. The support for this idea is arranged into the following four sub-argument: one, do not kill the flea, because we have conceived within it; two, thus, the flea is like a “marriage bed,” and by extension, a “marriage temple”; three, despite your parents’ and your concerns, that’s the way it is; and four, if you kill the flea, you commit three sins вЂ" killing me, killing yourself, and sacrilege by violating the sanctity of the marriage temple. Note that Donne does present an argument to seduce his beloved in this stanza. His words are filled solely with reverence and concern for the flea. Through this, we can see the earnestness and seriousness of the passion he has for his beloved: the sanctity of their relationship вЂ" even their surrogate relationship within the flea вЂ" is sacred to him.

Finally, the woman kills the flea, and the speaker uses this event to hammer home his final argument. He backs off the more intense tone of the second stanza and returns to the playful sentiment with mock indignation, protesting the flea’s innocence to the crime for which he has been squashed. Finally, he returns the flea to its status as a bug, and tries once more for his would-be lover by asking for only the same blood that the flea has taken, quite painlessly. Thus, we can see the three stages of “The Flea,” separated by stanzas, as the speaker expresses his desire through the bug.

The rhythm of “The Flea” mirrors that of sexual intercourse. We must define sexual rhythm before we begin the comparison; for simplicity’s sake, assume that sex begins with foreplay, raises in intensity, climaxes, and then relaxes in its own enjoyment. This rhythm is most obvious (and mirrored) in the life of the flea. It buzzes around, sucks some blood (foreplay), then the woman starts batting at it while the man protects it (intensity), and she finally kills it (climax). Robert Evans explained that the verb “’kill’ alludes to the common Renaissance idea that sexual orgasm was a kind of metaphorical death. This idea was so common that the verb "to die" often meant вЂ?to experience orgasm (Evans 1).вЂ™Ð²Ð‚Ñœ Then they discuss the life and death of the flea (relaxation). We can also see the rhythm in the tone of “The Flea.” As discussed above, the first stanza is playful, the second increases in seriousness, the death of the flea occurs before the third stanza, and finally, he returns, in part, to the playfulness of the first stanza while discussing it all again. Note that this is feeling, not just factual. In employing arguments instead of merely descriptive language, we can see how Donne is a “metaphysical” poet. This is the feeling of lust, expressed through the mind of the speaker. As T.S. Eliot says, in his essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” “A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility (Eliot 213).” This is why the rhythm of

...