A Flea as a Marriage Bed

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“A Flea as a Marriage Bed”

        In the poem "The Flea", by John Donne, the speaker uses a peculiar analogy in order to persuade his beloved to engage in premarital intercourse with him.  The poem is composed of three stanzas that tell a story in chronological order about a flea that has sucked the blood of the two subjects. It tells the reader how the speaker attempts to persuade his beloved not to kill the flea because it is their marriage bed and then tells of how the woman still kills the flea but how the speaker uses that to take his argument one step further and explain how since it is so easy and guilt-free to kill the flea, the same could be said of her going to bed with the him.

        The structure of this poem alternates metrically. It starts with lines in iambic tetrameter and then changes to lines in iambic pentameter and each stanza ends with two pentameter lines. The rhyme scheme in each stanza is in couplets, with the final line rhyming with the last couplet. Since this poem was written in the 1600’s, the words and grammar reflect that time period. The author is still direct in the way he chooses to word each line and is not using metaphors to illustrate a point since the whole poem itself is an analogy of a flea representing a union between the speaker and his beloved. Each stanza is actually one whole sentence and he structures those sentences in a way that makes it seem as though he is just talking to the readers, thinking out loud, or telling us a story.

        The first two lines of the poem, “Mark but this flea, and mark in this, How little that which thou deniest me is” (1-2), tell us that the speaker wants something and is being denied that which he wants, and to him, it is a small and almost insignificant want. He is using the fleas small size to compare what he wants and how small it also is. In the next phrase, “Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee, And in this flea our two bloods mingled be; Thou know’st that this cannot be said A sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead”(3-6), we learn that the flea has bitten the two subjects and the author feels that through the flea, they have been joined together and the author indicates that that is what his beloved is not giving him – herself. He also feels that this act of the flea having both of their blood in its body is clearly not a sin or a big deal. He then goes on and says, “Yet this enjoys before it woo, And pampered swells with one blood made of two, And this, alas, is more than we would do”(7-10). The author is saying while the flea has sucked their blood and it is mixed together in his body and there is no shame in this, the speaker and his beloved still do not sleep together because she sees shame in that act. Here the flea is pampered and full of what he wants, but Donne is not and he purports this as unfair.

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        The next stanza goes on to tell the reader how the woman is going to kill the flea and the speaker begs her not to do so. The author writes “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, we are met, And cloistered in these living walls of jet”(10-15). Here he is asking his beloved to spare the life of the flea because it represents their marriage bed or the place where ...

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