William Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ is a very popular sonnet. It is about love, very much unlike John Donne’s the flea, which is merely about sex. It is easy to see the love shown in this sonnet by a variety of quotes. ‘Though art more lovely and more temperate’, ‘Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines’, ‘Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest’, and ‘So long as men can breathe or eyes can see’. Almost every other line there is a reference to the beauty of the subject of this poem. ‘Shall I compare thee to a summers day’ is all about the love of someone for a fair maiden and to express this love, he uses this sonnet. However, the sonnet equals itself out and begins to show that a summer’s day can be horrible, referring to the sun through a metaphor as ‘the eye of heaven’. Shakespeare writes about the sun being too hot in summer sometimes, ‘Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines’.
The flea is a sex-orientated poem written in a clever way basically asking someone to have sex. It is written in three stanzas. The first is where the flea sucks the blood of both people combining them as one. Donne is trying to persuade the woman in his poem to have sex with the male character. ‘And in this flea, our two bloods mingled bee’. The male character goes on to imply that this is a good reason to have sex. ‘And this, alas, is more than wee would doe’. Donne tries to make the point that if something can enjoy food picked from both of them, why can’t they each enjoy a sexual relationship with each other. In the second stanza, Donne goes on to make the point that the flea is a ‘sign’ of some sort. Even though the parents object to the two people marrying, Donne implies it is the right thing to do, as the two have already been mingled inside another. ‘Where wee almost, nay more than maryed are:’ and that they should then have sex right then and there ‘Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;’ ‘Though parents grudge, and you, w’are met’. Finally, Donne starts to use some flattery. He tries to help her, knowing that this woman would not want to have sex before marriage.
In conclusion, the three poems I selected have small comparisons, but have far more contrasts. For instance, there is the easy comparison that all the poems are love poems pre 1914. However, a contrast is that they are all written by different authors with varying styles. The flea is a clever way of a modern day person asking a girl to have a relationship with them (sex) while Shakespeare’s sonnet, Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day, is more about love and the fact that love may not be as it seems. Jenny kissed me is more about someone in love with someone who isn’t as interested. It’s about a person hanging on to something that happened a long time ago, and he can’t get over it.
They are all very clever ways of bringing the message across other than ‘Jenny Kissed Me’ by James Leigh Hunt. That poem is straight to the point not being clever, just blunt. John Donne and William Shakespeare however, had a history of bringing across a message in more complex ways.
The theme of each poem or sonnet is different. John Donne’s ‘The Flea’ is about someone trying to seduce a woman to have sex with him before marriage, while William Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ is more about how love can be good, but can also hurt. A complete contrast to both is James Leigh Hunt’s ‘Jenny Kissed Me’, which has a theme about someone being loved once, and clinging on to that memory, which could be for a few reasons.
The actual dates of the poems reflect something about them. For instance, both Donne’s ‘The Flea’, and Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a summers day’ were written around the same time and culture, however, ‘Jenny Kissed Me’ by James Leigh Hunt was written about a hundred years afterward, this may reflect the dramatic change in styles of writing, just like the old English of the past and the contemporary writing styles have a remarkable difference.
