Writing Assignments

“The Flea”

In order to seduce a young woman, an adolescent male will say anything, which is clearly illustrated in John Donne’s “The Flea” (rpt. in Thomas R. Arp and Greg Johnson, Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, 8th ed. [Fort Worth: Harcourt, 2002] 890-891). Donne was quite the womanizer himself, before he became a preacher in 1615. Through experience, the poet knows that young men will persistently say anything to get young women to yield to them, much like the speaker in his poem “The Flea.”

With only three stanzas, “The Flea” presents the arguments of a would-be lover as he attempts to seduce a young woman. In the first stanza the speaker makes his pleas. In the second he persists but is denied. In the third he resolves to continue trying. Throughout the poem, the speaker consistently refers to a flea in his arguments even as the young woman threatens to end the insect’s life.

In the first stanza, the speaker pleads for the woman to give up her virginity to him. Showing that a young man will say anything to seduce a woman, the speaker chooses a flea as the basis of his opening arguments and so establishes a seductive tone in the first stanza. His arguments also include the Renaissance belief that the blood of people mixes when they make love. The speaker opens his first argument by observing the flea “suck’d me first, and now sucks thee, / And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.” To fleas, the activity of sucking blood comes naturally because it is their sustenance; thus, it is not “A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead.” So, in keeping with this stanza’s seductive tone, giving in to the man would be just as natural as what the flea does, but the speaker knows that making love with the woman “is more than [they] would do.”

Though knowing he is again denied, the speaker persists in his seduction. Both the flea and religious imagery support his arguments this time around, establishing a tone of pseudo-reverence. Within the flea, their blood has mixed together in a union, which makes the couple “more than married”; in fact, the flea constitutes their “marriage bed, and marriage temple.” Illustrating this stanza’s tone of reverence, the speaker makes the act of making love seem sanctioned by God, and even says they are “cloistered” within the flea, calling their love a religious seclusion. The tone is pseudo-reverent because though the speaker shows his love as sanctioned even by God, it is hypocritical to revere seduction and sex. To quell the persistent speaker, the woman decides she will kill the flea, but the speaker argues that it would be “sacrilege, three sins in killing three.” If the flea were killed, the speaker would be killed, which is murder, the woman would be killed, which is suicide, and the “temple” would be destroyed, a sacrilege.

Though the young woman kills the flea, the speaker persists in the third stanza, which reverts back to a tone of seduction. In killing the flea, the woman has found “that [she] finds not [herself] nor [the speaker] the weaker now.” Yielding, the speaker admits that killing fleas is a “false fear,” and is as easy and painless as it would be for the woman to succumb to his desires. When the lover claims “Just so much honour, when thou yield’st to me,/Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee,” he essentially asserts that giving in to him will hurt the woman only as much as killing the flea has hurt her. Therefore, the speaker still tries to seduce the woman even though she has killed his previous argument for seduction, the flea.

The speaker of the poem illustrates that a young man will say anything in order to seduce a woman. Though he is able to represent any young man trying to win over a woman, the speaker is not Donne during the time of the poem’s writing. The main supporting factor of this argument is the irony contained within the second stanza. By claiming that God sanctions seduction in referring to the flea as their holy wedding bed and temple, the speaker directly contradicts God’s dogma concerning marriage. Through irony, Donne ridicules the speaker. He shows that he does not share the same view as the speaker and so, by default, is not the speaker.