The Flea: A Poem by John Donne

 

The Flea

The flea is one of the representative poems of John Donne because:

·         It is argumentative.

·         It is colloquial.

·         It has heterogeneous ideas which seemed to be yoked together by force.

·         It is erotic.

·         It is somewhat difficult to understand because of it describes something complex about human relationship.

·         It is scholastic.

·         It takes readers by surprise and stuns us.

·         It has a great deal of exaggeration in its main body.

·         It uses science and logic to put forward its argument.

·         It has mockery and wit in it.

The speaker of this poem has been asking a favor from his mistress who has been denying out of guilt, shame, or loss of maidenhood. Of course, it is not difficult to understand that favor involves some sort of breach of accepted standard of morality.

The speaker draws his mistress ‘attention to a flea. He argues that the flea has sucked the blood of both of them and their blood has already mixed inside the stomach of the flea. In this way, what she feared has already happened. As when lovers meet, this very thing happens: their bloods mingle and a condition called pregnancy happens. Jokingly, the speaker tells his mistress that he never intended to make her pregnant, though this same thing has happened through a third party?

Isn’t this ridiculous and witty?

The argument continues through the second stanza of the poem.

When the mistress tries to kill the flea, the speaker stops her from doing so. He tells her that now the flea carries three of them: she, the flea and the speaker. Killing the flea will tantamount to taking three lives.

Stunning and shocking! Isn’t it?

Now flea becomes their marriage bed and marriage temple before they get the permission of their parents to get married in a regular way. What an argument! Very fresh and frustrating for audience and readers even today! How Elizabethan and post Elizabethans might have reacted to this is not difficult to imagine! Ponder over the last three lines of this stanza and argument there becomes even more stunning and shock. The speaker says that if his mistress tries to kill the flea, she will become responsible of taking her own life which is a great sin: taking one’s own life; committing suicide. How on earth killing a flea can be equal to committing homicide and suicide! Only Donne could make such hyperbolic claims.

Third stanza of this sonnet takes the argument to another ludicrous and hyperbolic level. After the mistress has perhaps killed the flea, the speaker declares her to be cruel as she has taken life of an innocent creature which did nothing but only sucked some blood from each of them, all what happened later was not the fault of the flea at all—it was something natural and inevitable. The flea did not commit any crime as they—the mistress and the speaker—have not become weaker after the flea has sucked their blood. Finally, the speaker tells his mistress that her fears have no foundation. So, she should not hesitate to give him what he is demanding. Now reader can understand what he was demanding, and to what extent he has succeeded in his purpose.

The most remarkable thing about Donne’s poetry is fusion of thought and feelings—the very things Eliot lauds in John Donne. Besides, this poem has everything pointed out by Samuel John with respect to Donne’s poetry. It is metaphysical, not in sense that it discusses matters related to human spirit, soul, existence, but it discusses human experiences in quite unique and new way.