The Flea

John Donne is and is not a Renaissance poet. That makes Donne’s historical context problematic. After all, the Renaissance did not happen over a weekend. What contemporary historians term the Renaissance was in fact an evolutionary transition within European culture from a theocentric civilization to a broad secular civilization, a movement away from the logic and assumptions of a culture that collectively positioned the Christian God at its center and one more intrigued by the complexities of humanity itself and the mysteries of nature itself, informed but not limited by assumptions about a Creator.

Donne’s historical context is his position now as one of the foremost poetic voices of the Elizabethan Era, important not so much because of how he embodied that historical era as by how his poetry, particularly his love poetry, anticipated its ultimate collapse. “The Flea” suggests exactly this historical positioning. The poem both summarizes the love poetry of Donne’s historical era—as part of the sea-change brought about by nearly two centuries of evolutionary thought and radical challenges to more than a millennium of theocentric writing—and explores a decidedly secular kind of love. The two lovers, disputing whether to have sex, represent something other than sacred love.