"The Flea"

“The Flea” shows once again Donne’s metaphysical love poem mode, his ability for turning even the least likely images into elaborate symbols of love and romance. This poem uses the image of a flea that has just bitten the man and his beloved to show a funny conflict over whether the two will engage in intercourse or not. The man wants to, but the woman does not, so the man uses the flea in whose body his blood mixes with the woman, to show how harmless such mixing can be. He says that if mixing in the flea is so safe, intercourse would be equally safe, for they are really the same thing. By the second verse, the speaker is trying to save the flea’s life, saying that it is “our marriage bed and marriage temple.” When the woman kills the flea, despite the speaker’s argument, he turns his argument around and says that despite the fair ideals he has just been begging, killing the flea did not really question the woman’s honor. Despite the fair ideals she has raised in refusing to sleep with him, doing so would not challenge her honor either. The man is basically trying to do whatever it takes to get the woman to sleep with him. Even though the poem was written well before our time, it still has today’s stereotypical view of a man.