Donne's The Flea

John Donne's "The Flea" presents the clever arguments of a man who wants a woman to become his mistress. The poem consists of a dismissal of her scruples in which the speaker rates the entire act -- as well as its moral implications and its consequences -- as having little more importance than the actions and life of a lowly flea. There are, however, layers of irony in this apparent nonsense. The speaker devotes a great deal of ingenuity to the exposition of his argument and the amount of effort he puts into it belies everything he says about the relative unimportance of her objections. In addition, however, the effort he puts into devising this facetious argument is also meant to convey the intensity of his desire for his objective and this, in itself, is supposed to be convincing. And the listening woman's own response is ironic as well. She dismisses his nonsense by the very direct, wordless, method of squashing the bloated flea, but does not take the simplest expedient -- if she truly wished to reject him entirely -- which would be to walk away.

The action of the poem and the basic arguments of the speaker are relatively simple. In the first stanza the speaker asks the woman to observe a flea that has bitten both of them and in which, therefore, their blood is mingled. The flea's action is of no consequence and no moral censure would be connected with its behavior. And, in a way, he argues, the flea, which "swells with one blood made of two," does even more th

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that are the flea's shell is humorous but the lines also point up the fact that she has already allowed him a great deal of freedom in approaching and addressing her and the underlying sense of the lines is that he hopes that this is a sign that he will be permitted a great deal more freedom with her. Read closely the lines say that even though her parents would forbid such intimacy she has allowed it. And the words "and you" are inserted there ironically. They seem to be inserted there as a formality -- a pretense that she, of course, being a properly brought up woman looks as unfavorably as her parents would on his proposition. But the insertion of the words is ironic since, unlike her parents, she has already allowed him to draw close and propose such an idea. The first of these lines ends with the words "we're met" and the meeting he refers to is not so much the fanciful blending of their blood in the flea as his sitting next to her an talking in this fashion. Thus she has given him reason to hope by the fact that she has not objected to what he is saying and simply left him. And, as the business with the flea indicates, they are in very close physical proximity. By the time the speaker has reached the point where he

Category: Literature - D