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John Donne's Poem, 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 than he would have them do for they would certainly not wish anyone to "swell" up in this way with the product of their combined blood, i.e., become pregnant.

In the second stanza he implores her not to destroy the flea for it now contains three lives -- his, hers, and the flea's. In this flea their blood is joined and in this they are "more than" married. Thus the flea now represents their joining together and has become their "marriage temple." No matter h...

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John Donne's Poem, The Flea. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 18:25, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1693838.html