John Donne’s “The Flea”: A Logical Farce

John Donne’s “The Flea”: A Logical Farce

        John Donne’s “The Flea” is one of the most famous seventeenth century seduction poems.  This poem showcases John Donne’s ingenious metaphysical conceit – his use of seemingly irrelevant objects/beings to assert similitude/analogy.  His hyperbolic comparison of trifling fleas to women’s chastity, however, is so outlandish and unrelated that his attempt to devalue women’s virginity for his witty sexual purpose, while entertaining, is fallacious in reasoning.  This false reasoning is so obvious to the addressee, the lady in the poem, that she completely disregards his argument; she kills it.  However witty and logical the speaker may be, the fact that she ultimately pays no heed to his imperative urgings cast the lady (the addressee of the poem) as the person in control of their relationship.  In other words, the speaker’s hyperbolic analogy between the flea’s paltriness to that of women’s sexual purity proves ineffectual, not only because the similitude between the two is outright impertinent, but because the speaker’s attempt to sexually dominate the lady fails.  Thus, John Donne’s “The Flea,” though highly comical and engaging, is a logical farce to the unconvinced lady. 

        The poem’s formality and consistency correspond with the speaker’s both civil decorum and persistence in his unrequited courtship. “The Flea” is a one-sided conversation with the poet’s lady.  The poet rationally explores his irrational sexual desires in a playful diction.  It is made of three nine-line stanzas, identical in form, and is predominantly iambic in rhythm.  While the first six lines have alternating pentameter and tetrameter, the seventh line is a tetrameter and the eighth and ninth, pentameter, with the rhyming scheme of aabbccddd.  The alternating meter scheme between the pentameter and tetrameter throughout the poem seems to project the speaker’s character – his deceitful linguistic duality.  Thus, the poem’s upright structure that allows alternation in the meter scheme, correlate with the poet’s ostensible formality that disguises his duplicitous motive.

        Although the overall tone of the poem is deceptively casual, the poet’s argument becomes complex and convoluted by the interlacement of religious and matrimonial imagery.  The speaker’s seductive persona lurks behind his religious and authoritative rhetoric.  For instance, the speaker’s opening trochee followed by a strong spondee, “Mark but this flea” (1), assumes an authoritative voice.  However, his power of voice owes much to his linguistic exploitation of the religious ethos prevalent during his era, namely the Christian’s guilty conscience.  For example, he employs words that are associated with profound religious misconduct, such as “sin” (6), “sacrilege” (18), or “blood of innocence” (20).  Also, the speaker’s matrimonial diction interfuses with the religious undertone, adding weight to and complicating his seductive voice.  For instance, the speaker’s courtly colloquy that “This flea is you and I, and this / Our marriage bed and marriage temple is; / Though parents grudge, and you, we are met,” (12-14) falsely suggests that the immoral act he has in mind is really religious in nature.  The lustful speaker—equipped in holy eloquence—also warns that though she has a “use” (16) or habit of killing the flea or thwarting his desires, she must not unwittingly commit a “sin” (6) of suicide by annihilating the flea which contains her blood.  Indeed, destroying the flea, according to the speaker, would be a “sacrilege” (18) of not one but “three sins” (18).  Thus the poet’s interwoven, religious and matrimonial diction give a false sense of poetic elevation/sophistication when in truth his wooing of the lady is base and libidinous in nature.

The religious and matrimonial imagery are further conflated with the speaker’s ingenious triple-extension of the implications of the flea’s existence by prefixing the word “three” before a central word.  For instance, the word “three,” which is a countable modifier in both “three lives” (10) and “three sins,” ultimately tantamount to “killing three” (18) – him, her, and the flea, holding the murderess accountable for the three lives (emphasis added).  Likewise, the speaker amplifies the quantitative epithet of the flea, “three lives” (10), into qualitative extensions.  First, “three lives” symbolically embody the threefold corporeality—him, her, and the flea.  Secondly, “three lives” alludes to the holy trinity that is emblematized in the flea’s body, which the lady symbolically desecrates by killing it. The speaker’s amplification of the flea’s significance is thus both technically and semantically tripartite.  Yet, in terms of his much sought-after courtship, the lady remains unaffected by the speaker’s sophisticated triple-amplified arguments.

What’s more, in his desperate desire to win the lady’s body, the speaker repeats certain key words to gain the lady’s undivided attention.  For instance, the opening line begins with an abruptly trochaic, imperative clause: “Mark but this flea” (1), introducing the annoying, uninvited flea as an object/guest of special consideration.  Then the same imperative command takes an anaphoric turn as it is reiterated as “mark in this” (1, emphasis added) to ascertain the lady’s sustained attention.  At other times, to augment his argument, the speaker’s repetition involves one central word with the variant adjuncts attached to it.  For example, the central idea is “marriage” in both “marriage bed” and “marriage temple,” and the “bed” and “temple” are adjuncts to the central word to increment the meaning of “marriage” (13, emphasis added).  If initially, their marriage via flea’s mingling of their blood is deemed physiological/sexual as what “bed” suggests, the future reality of their bodily union nevertheless will transcend into something holy/spiritual as what “temple” implies (13).  Moreover, the repetitive variation of the flea’s appellation – initially addressed as “this flea” (1) which then turns to “one flea” (10) with three lives – ultimately culminates to “this flea’s death” (27), charting with each address the approximate point of the flea’s fate.  However, irrespective of the speaker’s repetitive amplification about the connection/significance of the flea to that of his much-desired courtship, the fact that the flea’s death is not preventable illustrates how the speaker’s verbal redundancy is unimpressive to the lady.

In addition to the speaker’s repetitiveness, his metaphysical conceit – comparing the life of a flea to that of women’s chastity – hyperbolically devalues the ramifications of premarital sex.  For instance, the speaker attempts to oversimplify premarital sex as natural as “our two bloods mingled be” (4), and even she should “know’st that this cannot be said / A sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead” (5-6).  He says, therefore, they should take the sexual issues lightly and “enjoy…before it woo” (7).  If the lady becomes impregnated like the flea that “swells with one blood made of two” (8), he thinks that they would simply “cloister…in th[o]se living walls of jet” (in the body of the flea) (15).  Unaffected by the speaker’s impassionate, hyperbolic reasoning and pleading, the fact that the lady nonetheless kills the flea, renders the speaker’s arduous defense against the flea’s life useless, if not logically dubious.

  The speaker’s hyperbolic appeals turn to hyperbolic condemnation as he fails to gain the lady’s sympathy: “Cruel and sudden, has thou since / Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence? / Wherein could this flea guilty be,” (19-21).  Here, the overwhelmingly disruptive trochees and spondees ubiquitous in these lines (three trochees and six spondees) seem to reflect his vehement mood.  What’s more, the speaker’s indictment of the murderess – who has “Purpled [her] nail in blood of innocence” (20) – implicitly alludes to the biblical figure, Herod, who had mass-murdered innocent infants.  Thus the “innocent[t]” (20) flea, whose death marks the “sacrilege [for] three sins” (18), is likened to a Christ-like victim who dies innocently.  As the unruly, metrical scheme (of the lines 19-20) suggests, the speaker’s emotional turbulence works against his initial courtly decorum; it exposes his linguistic desperation without control, attesting to the lady’s undeterred control over her sexuality—his romantic enterprise.

        Despite the speaker’s deployment of various impressive rhetorical devises, the insubstantiality of the speaker’s seductive-logic causes his sexual fantasy with the lady to collapse.  The speaker’s initial intention was to use the flea to show his lady how small a sexual favor he is asking of her.  However, while the poet is logically arguing, the lady evidently attacks the flea, for he begs her to “spare” (10) its life.  He argues that since its body now contains not only the blood of the flea but also his and hers, killing the flea would be a “self-murder” (17) of all three.  Still, the lady is unmoved by his plea.  Although it is clever, the speaker’s postulation in alliterative antimetabole – that “Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee” (3), therefore they are symbolically already “marri[ed]” (13) – is, to the lady, a logical fallacy.  Despite his many warnings and pleadings, in the end, she kills it.  In fact, the lady proudly admits to her act of insecticide; with a “triumph[ant]” (23) demeanor, she remarks that she feels no “weaker” (24) since the flea’s death, rendering the speaker’s ingenious dialectics utterly futile. 

Perturbed by his obvious, complete failure, the speaker is unable to restrain his cynicism.  Left with no alternative, the clever speaker shifts his strategy.  He first agrees with the lady: “Tis true;” (25).  Then he draws a cynical, moral conclusion from the experience: that it just shows how “false” (25) her “fears” (25) and apprehensions are.  The alliteration of “false fears” (25) resonates not only that his “fears” (25) were foolish, but that hers are just as silly.  Thus, he exhorts, “then learn how…Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me, / will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee” (25-27).  This closing argument (the closing triplet) with the exceeding presence of spondees (five from lines 25-27), not only seem to exhibit the speaker’s frustration over his failed courtship, but more importantly, traces his dialectic detour to the original argument – that flea is indeed trivial.  For example, the speaker insinuates that her losing a little “honor, when [she] yield’st to [him]” (26) is as inconsequential as the life of a now dead flea.  Just as he did in the beginning, the speaker is, in effect, reasserting that the sexual favors his lady denied him are indeed paltry matters.  Nonetheless, the fact that the speaker’s closing and opening arguments are of the same claims (the flea’s trifling nature) signify that he is returned to the very first site of his courtly endeavor without success. 

The fact that the speaker fails to engage in unsanctioned premarital sex with his lady not only marks his sexually charged arguments inept/indecent, but also manifests who is in control of the courtship.  In John Donne’s “The Flea,” the speaker, with the seductive persona, attempts to devalue female chastity with logically incorporated humor.  Though she may be amused by the speaker’s eloquence and wit, she nonetheless ignores his pleadings.  She, in effect, without words (since the poem is a one-sided conversation), pains him by her action (insecticide).  The poet’s metaphysical conceit of comparing the flea’s triviality to women’s virginity is poetically innovative and profusely entertaining, but it proves fruitless for the sexually charged speaker.  Thus, the lady’s ultimate act of killing the flea, not only quells the speaker’s hope of sexual intercourse with her, but seals her dominance in the relationship.