Flea by John Donne
In the 1500's, Europe was a very dirty place, and fleas were a major problem. It was, in fact, fleas that were responsible for the Black Death, or Plague, that had ravaged Europe since the 1300's. However, in the late 1500's, a flea landed on the breast of a certain lady in French Society by the name of Madame Des Roches, a writer of some fame, and this sparked off an obsession with the flea as the subject of literature. Whole books were devoted to the flea, and the flea became a subject for comedy, romance, poetry, and all sorts of artistic expression. Around this time an English poet, named John Donne, wrote a poem entitled The Flea, in which he metaphorically compares a flea to the act of sex.
Structurally, The Flea is a poem that alternates its meter between lines of iambic tetrameter, and lines of iambic pentameter, a four stress line followed by a five stress line. Each stanza is then closed by three pentameter lines, creating the rhyming pattern AABBCCDDD. Overall there are three stanzas of nine lines each. In terms of content, the poem is told through the voice of a young man who is attempting to seduce a young woman. When she notices a flea, and is about to get rid of it, he begins to speak to her about the flea, and how it is much like the love he has for her. Each stanza deals with a separate part of the young man's argument...
The flea is also an
allegory, or a physical representation of an intangible idea: love. When the poet begins the poem with the phrase "Mark but this flea, mark in this, how little which thou deniest me is" he is asking the woman to look at the flea and see the little amount of
blood it has taken from her. It is obvious that this is a love poem as she is denying him, but what she is denying him is the blood that comes from having
sex with a virgin. The term "maidenhead" is an archaic name for a girl's hymen. He tells her that his blood was already inside the flea when it bit her, and therefore mixed her blood with his. And if this mixing of the blood in the flea is not considered a
sin, then why would the mixing of their blood in
reproduction be any more of a sin. At that time, premarital sex was considered to be a sin, but the poet argues that if the flea can partake in the girls blood, and it is not considered a sin, then why can the young man not do the same. And as the flea enjoys his feast of blood from the two of them, swelling, denoting sexual excitement, she still denies him: "and this alas, is more than we would do."
The poet's argument in the first stanza, that the flea has already mixed their blood and so why should they not do the same, has not worked on the young lady, so in stanza…
