The Flea: An Explication

“The Flea” by John Donne is a poem replete with beautiful imagery and word play. Donne portrays a flea in an erotic manner giving it a persona of something every man wants; sex. Donne, explicitly, never mentions sex in the whole poem but the way he get his message across through his usage of the imagery of the flea, blood and its perish at the end provides a humorous view on sex and the trouble one has to go through to get it. The Poem alternates between an iambic pentameter and iambic tetrameter. The rhyming scheme in each stanza is regular and similar with the final line rhyming with the final couplet: AABBCCDD.

In the first stanza, the speaker tells his beloved to “mark” the flea and to observe and understand that as little and small as the flea is the thing, even the thing which she denies him is “little”. The speaker says that the flea has sucked blood from the both of them and it now contains their “mingled” blood. This amalgamation of their bloods, according to the speaker, is neither “a sin, nor shame” because it does not merit as a loss of her “maidenhead” or virginity. The flea has become a container where the walls enclose their blood and that it has done its part by doing something which they cannot.

The second stanza is a plea by the speaker to his beloved to not kill the flea. He tells his beloved to “stay” her hand and not crush the flea because it is an embodiment of their union. He says that in the flea, the mingling of their blood has sanctified them in a communion of marriage if nothing more. The flea, according to the speaker, is the symbol of their marriage when he says that it’s their “marriage bed and marriage temple”. Although her parents don’t approve of their romance and that she won’t have sex with him, the speaker still believes that the two of them are “cloistered” in the flea. He says that she can easily kill the flea and if she decides to do so, he warns her that she will be committing “self – murder” and also the guilt of taking three lives of herself, the speaker and the flea would fall upon her. He condemns the killing by telling his beloved that it would be a sin and sacrilegious.

In the third stanze the speaker’s beloved has killed the flea for which the speaker calls her as “cruel and sudden”. He tells her that she has bloodied herself with the killing of an innocent flea who’s only fault was that it their blood flowing in it. He questions his beloved by asking what made the flea “guilty” save for the fact that it had sucked on their blood. She replies that not even the death of the flea has weakened any of them and the speaker agrees with the truth of her answer. Just as he believes that her answer was legitimate, he says that it warrants her “false fears’. He tells her that she would lose no more honour than she lost while bringing about the “flea’s death” if she had “yielded” to his proposal for sex. .

The poem has been divided into three stanzas and each stanza brings out a different and vibrant picture. In the first stanza, the speaker is pointing to the flea that had jumped on her after sucking on his blood. In the second stanza, the woman is hunting the flea while the speaker is trying to dissuade her from this quest. The third stanza depicts the beloved disregarding the speaker’s plea and going ahead with her execution of the flea.1 “The Flea” is a poem which manifests in itself the marriage of many vague and intangible things such as lovers, fleas, marriage and a temple. The beauty of the whole poem is that a flea becomes a valid symbol for a logical argument between two persons each struggling to assert themselves and their wishes over the other.2 Accoding to Bethell, this poem is very powerful because it employs many metaphors together with the mystery of sexual union and supernatural mystery of the institution of marriage.3 The flea in itself is a small creature yet in this poem, it becomes an all encompassing creature. It is portrayed as innocent and fragile yet a bastion for the speaker through which he can coax his beloved into consenting for sex.

References

Legouis, Pierre. “The Dramatic Element in Donne’s Poetry” John Donne; A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Helen Gardner. Englewood Cliifs, N. J.: Prentice – Hall, Inc, 1962. Milton Quarterly 16 (1982): 94-97.

Bethell, S. L. “The Nature of Metaphysical Wit” Discussions of John Donne. Ed. Frank Kermode. Boston: D. C. Heath and Company, 1962.