The Flea
John Donne
Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead,
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pampered swells with one blood made of two,
And this, alas, is more than we would do.
Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, nay more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, w'are met,
And cloistered in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that, self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.
Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?
Yet thou triumph’st, and say'st that thou
Find’st not thy self, nor me the weaker now;
’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.
“The Flea” is a poem by the English poet John Donne, most likely written in the 1590s. In “The Flea,” the speaker tries to seduce his mistress with a surprising (and potentially gross) extended metaphor: both he and she have been bitten by the same flea, meaning their separate blood now mingles inside the flea’s body. Having sex is no different, the speaker argues, and no more dishonorable. His mistress should therefore yield to him. Though the metaphor is intentionally pretty crude, maybe even juvenile, the speaker infuses the poem with religious undertones: the union of speaker and mistress in the flea is like the Holy Trinity. In this way, the poem is both serious and silly, elegant and vulgar. It is as much a display of wit and erudition as a serious attempt to seduce the mistress.
Summary
Look at this flea and you'll see how small the thing that you deny me really is. It bit me first and now it bites you. In the flea, our two bloods are mingled together. You know that this isn’t sinful or shameful; it’s not a loss of virginity. And yet the flea gets to enjoy your blood without courting you first, and it grows fat digesting our combined blood. And that is more than we are allowed to do.
Wait, don’t kill the flea and kill us with it! In the flea’s body, we are almost, no, more than, married. The flea is you and me. It is our marriage bed, our wedding chapel. Though our parents’ disapprove, we are safe within these dark, living walls. Though you may want to kill me, do not add suicide and sacrilege to your list of sins: three sins will come from killing the flea.
Cruel and unpredictable woman, have you stained your nails purple with the flea’s innocent blood? The flea is guilty of nothing but sucking a drop of blood from you. Yet you exalt in your victory over the flea and say that neither you nor I are weaker for killing it. That’s true enough and you should learn from that how false your fears are. You will lose as much honor when you give your virginity to me as this flea’s death took from you.
Themes
Sex and Marriage
“The Flea” is a poem of seduction, but the speaker takes an unusual approach to getting his lady into bed. Instead of praising her beauty or promising her happiness, he instead insists that virginity is unimportant and that its loss will not be a significant source of shame or dishonor. In doing so, he pushes against the values of his society, which prized female virginity and pressured women to preserve it until marriage. “The Flea” thus tries to create a space for sexual pleasure outside the boundaries of marriage.
The speaker begins the poem in frustration, even exasperation, with the implication that his mistress continuously refuses to have sex with him. Though she does not speak in the poem, the reader can guess at her reasons for refusing the speaker based on the arguments the speaker makes to change her mind: she wants to preserve her virginity, and she worries that losing it outside of marriage will result in sin, shame, and dishonor.
The speaker attempts to address these concerns. Playing on the Renaissance belief that during sex the blood of the two partners mingled together, the speaker notes that their blood also mingles in a flea which has bitten both of them. Since it’s not a sin or shameful for their blood to meet in the body of the flea, he argues, it’s not a sin for the same thing to happen during sex.
The speaker’s argument is not entirely convincing: even for a Renaissance reader, it would be surprising, even silly, to think that the most important thing about sex is the mingling of blood between the partners. There is something juvenile and provocative about the poem: some readers may feel that comparing sex to getting bitten by a flea is intended to be funny and gross, rather than seductive.
But underlying the poem’s bawdy humor, the speaker makes a surprising and potentially radical argument. Though he might have more success in seducing his mistress if he played along, promised to marry her and cherish her virginity, the speaker refuses to accept his mistress’s and his society’s values. Instead, he tries to change those values by downplaying the importance of virginity and of marriage itself. In the flea, he notes, he and his mistress are “more than married.” What’s more, he does not seem interested in reconciling their sexual adventures with social values: instead, he imagines that the flea itself offers a kind of refuge from angry “parents.”
The speaker of “The Flea” is thus unusually ambitious. He seeks not only to seduce his mistress, but also to defy—and perhaps remake—social norms around sexuality. You might wonder how sincere the speaker is in advancing this proposal—it is awfully convenient that changing these mores would also fulfill his desires in this moment. Though “The Flea” makes radical proposals about sexuality, questions about the speaker’s sincerity cut down the force of those proposals—and so too does the fact that the mistress kills the flea. She, at least, is unimpressed by the speaker’s arguments.
Sex and the Church
"The Flea" is a poem about illicit sex. It challenges social norms around sexuality and tries to create space for sexual pleasure beyond the boundaries of marriage. It's surprising, then, how often the poem references Christianity. Though the speaker challenges marriage as an institution, he also uses the authority of the Church to support his arguments. In this way, the poem subtly suggests that sex for pleasure isn’t simply acceptable, but can even be thought of as a holy act.
"The Flea" often alludes to Christian traditions in both its content and form. For instance, the speaker describes the flea as "three lives in one." This is in reference to the fact that the flea contains the blood of the speaker, the mistress, and of the flea itself, but it's also an allusion to the Holy Trinity: the Father (God), the Son (Jesus), and the Holy Ghost. The speaker also compares the mingling of his and his mistress’s blood in the flea to marriage, which during Donne's lifetime would have been solely the province of the church. Though he suggests that they are "more than married," marriage remains his reference point for a meaningful union between people. Indeed, he compares the flea’s body to a "marriage bed, and marriage temple," the word "temple" here again making the church's presence and authority felt in the poem.
The speaker once again uses distinctly religious language when he declares that killing the flea, as the mistress, eventually does, is "sacrilege." In the phrase "three sins in killing three" the "three sins" are murder, suicide, and the destruction of marriage, while the "three" things being "killed" are the speaker, the mistress, and the flea. Once again, though, this emphasis on "three" evokes the Holy Trinity, adding yet another layer to the potential "sacrilege" (the mistress isn't just killing the flea, she's killing a symbol of God!). The speaker basically tries to convince his lover that letting the flea live—essentially consenting to sex—is the only course of action that's not sinful.
When she does kill the flea anyway, the speaker describes the blood on her nail as the "blood of innocence." Though the speaker attempts to push beyond Christian values around sexuality, his thinking remains bound up in Christian reference points. He keeps returning to categories like sin and innocence in order to make his points, which suggests that, for the speaker, there's no escaping them; he tries to work his vision of sex into these ideas of sin and holiness rather than skirt them altogether. Even the structure of the poem itself alludes to these Christian traditions: there are also three stanzas, each of which ends with a tercet (three rhyming lines).
The form and content thus suggest an underlying allegiance to Christian thinking, which lies in opposition to the speaker’s bold attempts to separate sexual pleasure from marriage. Some readers may treat this as opportunistic: the speaker uses these references to impress his mistress and to try to break down her resistance. In this view, the speaker’s beliefs are not particularly sincere; he grabs onto whatever he can find to seduce his mistress. Others may see a more serious claim implicit in these references. Perhaps the speaker is suggesting that, however it is currently interpreted, Christianity is not opposed to the illicit sexual pleasures he describes; in fact, those pleasures can be described in Christian terms.
The poem doesn't offer clear evidence either way, and it's up to the reader to decide how to interpret the speaker’s arguments—determining whether they are silly, serious, or some strange combination of the two.
벼룩
이 벼룩을 보시오, 이걸 보면
그대 거절 얼마나 하찮은 것인지 알리라
벼룩은 먼저 나를, 이제 그대를 물었소.
그러니 이 벼룩 안에 우리 둘 피가 섞였소.
이게 죄는 아닐진저, 수치도 아니요
그대 처녀를 잃은 것도 아니요,
그럼에도 이 벼룩은 구애도 없이 즐기는구려,
우리 둘에서 한 피 만들어 부풀대로 부풀었으니,
애통하구려, 이 벼룩이 우리보다 낫네.
오 기다리시구려, 벼룩 한 마리에 세 생명이 들었으니,
이 벼룩으로 우린 결혼한 이상이오.
이 벼룩은 당신과 나, 이 벼룩은
우리 결혼 침상, 결혼 사원이라오
부모가 불평하더라도, 그대 또한 그렇더라도, 우리 만나
이 살아있는 흑옥의 사면에 갇혔구려.
이런다고 당신 나를 죽이고 싶더라도,
그리 마시길, 자기 살해에 더해,
신성모독까지 있으니, 셋을 죽이면 죄도 셋.
잔인하고 성급하구려, 기어이 그대
순수의 피로 그대 손톱을 붉게 물들였단 말인가?
이 벼룩 무슨 죄가 있단 말이오,
당신 핏방울을 빨았던 걸 빼면?
그럼에도 그대 당당하구려, 그대 말로는
그렇다고 그대 자신도 나도 약해진 것 없다니
맞는 말이오, 그러니 알겠구려, 두려움이 얼마나 어리석은지
그대 내게 허락한다 해도, 그대 잃을 정절은,
이 벼룩이 죽어 그대 생명이 사라진 정도.
“남녀 간의 관계에 대한 이야기를 벼룩을 통해서 풀어낸 시”
시의 형식
이 시는 iambic tetrameter와 iambic pentameter가 돌아가며 나타나고 있는 시라고 할 수 있다. 한 줄은 메터가 4개인 tetrameter로, 그리고 그 다음 줄은 meter가 5개인 pentameter로 나타나는 것이 이 시가 가지고 있는 첫 번째 형식상의 특징이라고 할 수 있을 것이다. 그리고, 각 연별로 9자로 이루어져 있는데, 각 연의 마지막 줄에서는 iambic pentameter로 나타나는 모습이다. 강세 패턴은 각 연에서, 454545455의 형식으로 나타난다고 할 수 있을 것이다.
두 번째 특징이라면, 정결한 라임을 갖추고 있다는 점, 각각 9행으로 이루어져 있는 연에서는 라임이 AABBCCDDD형태로 나타나고 있다. 두 행씩 Couplet을 이루고, 마지막 3행은 Triplet을 이루고 있다는 점,