Book 1 Part 2
Preparing for A150 before the course starts:Reading poetry
From Book 2, Tradition and Dissent, Chapter 2 Reading
Poetry: The Faber Book of Beasts ed. Paul Muldoon, pages 48-51.
John Donne, ‘The Flea’
Now we’re going to turn to John Donne’s poem ‘The
Flea’. Donne was a contemporary of Christopher Marlowe, so you may find his
language slightly unusual at first.
Activity
Turn
to ‘The Flea’ by John Donne (Muldoon, 1997, pp. 93–4). [Or follow this link to read
‘The Flea’ online. Follow this link for Blake’s
poem ‘The Fly’.] ... Again, read the poem several times before continuing
with this activity. Then think about these questions:
- How do Donne’s rhymes differ from Blake’s?
- Do you think Donne uses the flea in the same way as Blake uses the fly?
- How do you react to the poem?
I hope that in your initial reaction to ‘The
Flea’ you registered how different it is from ‘The Fly’. In place of Blake’s
simple idiom, short lines and stanzas, Donne’s form and syntax
(sentence construction) are much knottier and more involved. The rhyme scheme
is an elaborate AABBCCDDD, so that each stanza ends with a rhyming triplet.
These triplets give an impression of emphaticness, as though the speaker is
vigorously underlining his point, stressing to the reader – or listener – what
he’s driving at.
Consider the final triplet:
|
’Tis true, then learn how false, fears be; Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me, Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee .
(Muldoon, 1997, p. 94)
|
The speaker is attempting to cajole his listener
in an almost hectoring manner. Each rhyme stresses his argument: the listener
must ‘learn how false, fears be’, must persuade herself that when she yields
‘to me’ she will lose as ‘much honor’ as ‘this flea’s death took life from
thee’– that final line, indeed, rams the point home by the internal rhyme of
‘flea’ with ‘thee’. The poem concludes with a flurry of rhymes which attempt to
bind the listener to the speaker’s will. Rather than just being verbal
ornamentation, Donne’s rhymes are more like poetic weaponry through which his
speaker bullies himself a hearing.
The way I’ve described the rhymes implies that
‘The Flea’ is a poem of persuasion. Unlike ‘The Fly’, which centres on the
analogy between the man and the beast, Donne uses the flea as an elaborate,
flexible metaphor through which his speaker attempts to persuade a female
listener to sleep with him on the basis of a dubious analogy between being
bitten by fleas and having sex. In the course of the poem, the speaker shifts
from using the flea as a metaphor for sexual consummation – ‘this/Our marriage
bed, and marriage temple is’– to construing its death as a further argument in
favour of sex: the woman will lose only as much ‘honor’ as they each lost
‘life’ when she killed the flea which contained their mingled bloods. The flea
is the poetic peg on which he hangs a plea for sex. I would say that although
its focus is almost entirely dissimilar from that of ‘The Fly’, both poems use
their insects metaphorically.
Donne uses the flea as a conceit;
that is, a deliberately far-fetched and ingenious comparison. Conceits were
fashionable during Donne’s lifetime; they are often called metaphysical
conceits to convey the amalgam of the intellectual with the sensuous which
underpins poems of this kind. Conceits are also at work in poems such as Robert
Herrick’s ‘The Captiv’d Bee’and Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Mower to the Glowworms’
(Muldoon, 1997, pp. 49, 159). Donne is one of the first English poets to deploy
comparisons of this kind. Where Blake responds to the tradition of nursery
rhymes, Donne inaugurates a tradition of extravagant poetic conceits.
Your response to Donne’s poem will depend on a
number of factors. It is, I think, knowingly sleazy, with its numerous double
entendres, as when the flea ‘pamper’d swells with one blood made of two’.
Yet the poem’s tone is not wholly serious, which makes it difficult to read
without smiling. Think about the conversational directness of the poem’s
opening: ‘Mark but this flea, and mark in this,/How little that which thou
deny’st me is’. The tone is immediate, veering from the pseudo-educational
(‘Mark ... mark’) to the self-consciously preposterous. And though the speaker
is insistent to the point of desperation, the fact that his plea to spare the
flea is ignored means that the poem is more than just an elaborate chat-up
line. The woman’s implied involvement in the conversation means that Donne
presents the reader with a condensed comedy of manners: ‘The Flea’ shows us a
flirtation in action, which doesn’t endorse the speaker in any unqualified way.
You don’t have to like the poem, but we should acknowledge that it is more than
just a piece of Elizabethan smut. Donne provides an original twist on the old
theme of seduction which brings something of the smack of real life into love
poetry.
In this context, it’s worth knowing that Donne’s
society held strict views about sex outside of marriage. In the poem, the
speaker tries to circumvent both religious objections (which viewed
extramarital sex as ‘A sin’ ) and social conventions. It’s something that
‘parents grudge’, because a daughter’s ‘maidenhead’ (virginity) was a valuable
commodity, not something to be thrown away on the first chancer with a good
line in fleas. This raises the broader question of the relationship between the
poem and literary convention. ‘The Flea’ is a witty variant on traditional love
poetry, in which usually male speakers idolise and idealise unobtainable women.
Instead of these clichés, Donne audaciously shows a man in the process of
trying to seduce a woman. Oddly enough, poems about fleas weren’t that unusual:
‘many poets had already pined to be fleas, hoping to be laid on the bosoms of
their beloved and even ... slapped to death’ (Patrides in Donne, 1985, p. 23).
Donne varies this tradition: his speaker doesn’t want to be a flea, but he
deploys the insect as a vehicle for seduction. Remember MacNeice’s argument
that in order to be worth recognising, a poem must be something new. In its
vivid combination of sexual innuendo, conversational English and what feels
like a genuine exchange between plausible figures, ‘The Flea’ does indeed still
sound like ‘something new’.
Before we leave ‘The Flea’, I want to think a
little further about the extent to which it is an anthropomorphic poem. I have
argued that what connects it with ‘The Fly’ is its metaphorical use of its
subject. Yet Donne is much more concerned with the realities of animal
behaviour than Blake. He provides accurate information about the behaviour of
fleas (‘It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee’), alongside a strikingly visual
description of the insect: the characters’ blood is ‘cloister’d in these living
walls of jet’. Jet is a form of brown coal or lignite often used for jewellery.
Donne’s poem ‘A Jeat Ring sent’ centres on a jet ring as a cheap love token which
metaphorically expresses the fragility of a failed love affair. Donne throws
his despairing voice into the ring: ‘I am cheap, and nought but fashion, throw
me away’ (Donne, 1985, p. 116). In ‘The Flea’, jet economically conveys the
insect’s colouring . Though we’re perhaps reluctant to see fleas as being in
any way beautiful, this phrase shows that Donne had looked carefully at these
tiny creatures. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, intellectuals
began to take a scientific interest in the natural world. Plate 2.2.5 reflects
this trend. It shows a hugely magnified engraving of a flea, taken from Robert
Hooke’s Micrographia (1665). Roughly contemporaneous with this,
Donne’s flea is simultaneously both a conceited metaphor and a living creature
accurately described.
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