-simulation
all countries at the
Renaissance
happened in a literary salon
(a place where poets and others came to recite
poetry
and converse). The salon was run
by two ladies, and on on occassion a flea
happened to land upon one lady's
breast. The poets were amazed at the creature's
audacity, and were inspired to write
poetry about the beast. It soon became
fashionable among poets to write poems
about fleas.
In this poem, the
her to give her virginity to him. (It
could, of course, quite easily be a FEMALE
lying there, he notices a
flea, which has obviously bitten them both. Since
the 17-
century idea was of sex as a
their bloods together in its body, the
flea has done what she didn't dare to do.
Then, he argues, since the flea has
done it, why shouldn't they? To back up his
argument, he refers to the marriage
ceremony, which states that
shall be
one flesh
therefore
Not only
does that reinforce his seduction argument, but it
also provides
ammunition for him to
defend himself when the female does the next
logical thing
and moves to kill the
flea. Donne argues that by spilling his blood and
hers by
killing the flea, she is
practically committing murder. Not only that, but
by
breaking the holy bond of marriage
she is committing sacrilege!
However,
the flea finally is killed, and the poet is forced
to change tactics. There,
he argues,
killing the flea was easy, and as you say it
hasn't harmed us - well,
yielding to me
will be just as easy and painless.
This poem borrows a lot of religious
imagery, because it helps add an aburd
authority to the poem, as Donne tries
to argue that what they are about to do is not
only supported by God, but to not do it
would be heretical.
?
?
Circular
argument. The flea starts and ends as nothing.
Hijacking of marriage ceremony. The
Anglican marriage ceremony includes the
lines
Man shall be joined
unto his wife and they two shall be one flesh.
Compare with
one blood made
of two
,
This flea is you and
I...
,etc.
?
Argument gains confidence throughout
the stanzas, and is then abruptly turned
around.
?
?
?
?
?
Note the role of the female in this
poem - her objections are never noted, just
reacted to, and she makes the most
powerful statement in the poem, yet it is a
non-verbal statement (her crushing of
the flea)
There is a lot of hyperbole
in this poem, a technique that Donne often uses to
make a point.
One blood
made of two...
- in Donne's time, the
sex act was though to be a
followed by the teasing
And this, alas, is more than wee would
doe.
Purpled thy
naile...
- purple was a very expensive
colour, associated with royalty
and
romance. Also note that in the first two lines of
this stanza Donne is arguing
that the
death of the flea is more important than the loss
of virginity.
Not a good idea to use
this in a formal exam, but note
Me it
suck'd first, and now
sucks
thee
- apparently in the 17th century
the printed
printed
ambivalent here.
(2/3U Related English handout)
This
fun
ny little poem again exhibits
Donne’s metaphysical love
-poem mode,
his aptitude 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 speaker and his
beloved to sketch an amusing conflict over whether
the
two will engage in premarital sex.
The speaker wants to, the beloved does not, and so
the speaker,
highly clever but grasping
at straws, uses the flea, in whose body his blood
mingles with his beloved’s,
to show how
innocuous such mingling can
be
—
he reasons that if
mingling in the flea is so innocuous,
sexual mingling would be equally
innocuous, for they are really the same thing. By
the second stanza,
the speaker is
trying to save the flea’s life, holding it up as
“our marriage bed and marriage temple.”
But when the beloved kills
the flea despite the speaker’s protestations (and
probably as a deliberate
move to squash
his argument, as well), he turns his argument on
its head and claims that despite the
high-minded and sacred ideals he has
just been invoking, killing the flea did not
really impugn his
beloved’s
honor—
and despite the high-minded and
sacred ideals she has invoked in refusing to sleep
with him, doing so would not impugn her
honor either.
This poem is the
cleverest of a long line of sixteenth-century love
poems using the flea as an erotic
image, a genre derived from an older
poem of Ovid. Donne’s poise of hinting at the
erotic without ever
explicitly
referring to sex, while at the same time leaving
no doubt as to exactly what he means, is as
much a source of the poem’s humor as
the silly image of the flea is; the idea that
being bitten by a flea
would represent
“sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead” gets the
point across with a neat conciseness
and clarity
that Donne’s
later religious lyrics never attained
.
To his coy mistress
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
[
A woman (more or less
young), is the object of this older
gentleman's eye. She could be a
coquette, one who uses arts to
gain the
admiration and the affections of men, merely for
the
gratification of vanity or from a
desire of conquest; and, without
any
intention of responding to the feelings aroused in
her
plaything. At any rate, it was more
the convention in Marvel's day
for a
pretty woman when she found herself interacting
with an
available man, to display
shyness or reserve or unwillingness, at
least for the first little
while
.]
We would sit down,
and think which way
To walk, and pass
our long love's day.
Thou by the Indian
Ganges' side
Should'st rubies find: I
by the tide
[
Remember the
times of the poet, in this case Marvel: circa
1650.
England was beginning its era of
great exploration and the
discovery of
the exotic east.
]
Of Humber
would complain, I would
Love you ten
years before the flood,
And you should,
if you please, refuse
Till the
conversion of the Jews.
[
These lines stumped me,
until I received this e-mail from
margaux:
Genesis in the
Bible. So he would love her since ever. And then
he
adds 'Till the conversion of the
Jews' ... most Jews never have
converted ... Those two religious
references are just a way to
tell her
that he would love and praise her during a very
very long
time before getting into any
kind of sexual intercourse with her,
but ...
the flood part
happened sometime after creation. The conversion
of
the jews is suppose to happen before
Armageddon. That's the
allusion that
Andrew Marvell is using.
have
it.
]
My vegetable love
should grow
Vaster than empires, and
more slow
[
of
my correspondents wrote,
part of a
plant, as opposed to a fruit, which comes from the
reproductive part.
may well
grow slowly, for what ever reason; but it is a
growing
thing: deep, complex and vast.
A lover is devoted to the loving
business of praising his or her lover
and is endlessly fascinated