The Flea

Despite the tectonic sexual revolutions of the mid-20th century, the moral debate at the center of Donne’s Renaissance poem is still a conundrum within contemporary cultural mores. The man and woman in the poem are not married. The speaker refers (Line 14) to the objections her parents have about their relationship. In addition, the speaker confronts the objections the Church has to sex before marriage, or what the Church condemns as fornication. By those metrics, in attempting to seduce her, the speaker is asking the woman to put her reputation, her relationship with her family, and her very soul in peril.

To put such dire weight on such a simple (and at least for the speaker pleasurable) act, the speaker argues, with his signature lawyerly wit, is to lose perspective. In this the flea certainly helps his argument. In the flea’s bites, insignificant and more annoying than dangerous, he points out, their blood has already mingled, “cloistered in [those] living walls of jet” (Line 15), the very essence of the era’s understanding of the sexual act. Look to the flea, he says, because our sexual act has already happened and the world has not been impacted at all.