The Flea

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1633

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form

The form is both fluid and ironic, reflecting Donne’s command of flexible forms that can, in turn, undercut and even expose a poem’s argument. The form is in tension with the poem’s own argument, exposing the speaker’s contemptible coopting of Christian theology in his efforts to claim the woman’s virtue.

Much as the speaker unabashedly appropriates (actually exploits) Christian vocabulary and rhetoric to coax the woman into having premarital (that is sinful) sex, the form reflects a grounding in Christian theology, most notably the Trinity. The Trinity, that is, the perception of the perfect unity of three separate persons in a single godhead, gifts the number three with a spiritual sense of completion and ultimate fulfillment. When the speaker points out that in the flea their two bloodlines mingle, he suggests that the flea is a kind of three-in-one entity. He uses the concept of three to suggest sublimity, perfection, and spiritual elevation. His comparison is ironic, of course, given that he is referring to the blood drops the parasitic flea just sucked out of each of them. The comparison is also sacrilegious given that he is invoking the spiritual godhead and significance of the number three as a crude strategy to get the woman to sin grievously.

The number three in turn shapes the formal structure of the poem. In doing so, Donne himself does what his own speaker does, invoke the rhetoric and formal structures of Christianity to recount a narrative of the valiant pursuit of sin. There are three stanzas to the poem. In each stanza the rhyming scheme is tripartite: AA BB CC. Each stanza in turn closes with a tercet, a three-line construct with its own rhyme scheme: DDD.

Each stanza, then, has nine lines total, nine being within Christian thought the ultimate expression of spiritual perfection, ironically used here to discuss how fleas suck blood and how crucial, how urgent it is for the man and the woman to sin.

Meter

Since his rediscovery in the early decades of the 20th century, Donne has come to be regarded as one of the most accomplished and facile masters of prosody, with a particularly gifted ear for the intricate craft of metrics. “The Flea,” however, is unwieldy; it stumbles in terms of meter. The following two lines from the opening of the last stanza underscore this point: “Cruel and sudden, hast thou since / Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?” (Lines 19-20). The first line is a standard iambic tetrameter, that is, it is four tidy packets of two-beat units, the first stressed, the second unstressed. That makes eight beats per that line, which is a typical percussive rhythm for poetry. The ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum falls easily and gently on the ear.

Scan the next line, however, and it stumbles. The word “innocence” (Line 20) introduces an extra beat, really an extra two beats. In fact, the line is actually iambic pentameter, that is, it is five, not four, tidy packets of two beats.

Investigating the rest of the poem reveals the same pattern, alternating lines of four and then five beats. Even the three-line tercets maintain the same back and forth metrics. It is irregular, off-putting. It calls attention to itself. It is tensive—which is exactly what Donne wants. Donne uses this eccentric metrical patterning to suggest in meter the basic situation of the poem itself. The man and the woman are engaged in a most tensive kind of conversation, a seduction of a woman clearly resisting the temptation, the man determined to pursue it. The meter recreates that give and take, that movement back and forth, that tension. The lines themselves are at odds as they alternate their rhythmic beats.

Voice

“The Flea” is by genre a seduction poem, that is, it recounts the give and take between two adults as they consider the experience of lovemaking. What is odd about voice in “The Flea” is that, rather than being a conversation, it is a single voice trying to manipulate the other in an overwhelming demonstration of verbal dexterity and clever argumentation. In doing so, the poem is less a dialogue and more a monologue.

Because the speaker offers no context in which to understand the nature of his argument—we do not know how the two know each other, what either of the back stories are, and how the two ended up in a bedroom together—the poem is less a seduction poem (the two never make love) and more a complex investigation into the contradictory psychology of the speaker himself.

Voice, then, reveals character. The speaker is articulate, educated. He is grounded in Christian theology yet is something of a roue as apparently the woman’s parents are not fond of him. He is witty, able to think on his feet, to take advantage of any immediate opportunity—say, a flea that happens to bite him—and make that unexpected moment part of his strategy. He is goal-oriented in a way that denies the woman any sense of her humanity, any sense of her independent will. Even when she defies the momentum of his obvious, and hilarious, logic (respect the parasite because our blood mingles in him and thus is on par with matrimony itself) and squeezes the flea dead, the speaker maintains his poise and attempts to use that killing as a final strategy for coaxing the woman to bed. Is he crude? Certainly. Is he devious? Beyond a doubt. Is he juvenile? Undeniably. Yet he is also intoxicatingly provocative, wily and charismatic, a bad boy charmer able to use clever phrasing and elaborate metaphors to make him (and his endeavor) appealing. Losing your virginity, he argues in his ultimate appeal, is really no more than squishing that flea, so why not do it? That facile argument, delivered undoubtedly straight-faced, refuses to acknowledge its own audacity. In this, Donne creates the model template for what has become a classic figure in the literature of lovers from Antiquity to contemporary music and film: a cad, a Casanova, a Don Juan, a Lothario, a womanizer; in short, a player.