This Blog is Written as part of Study Assignments Given To Sem- 1 Students of Department Of English, MKBU
Name: Ghanshyam Katariya
Paper 101: Elizabethan and Restoration Literature
Subject Code: 22392
Topic Name: John Donne’s Poem ‘The Flea’
Batch: M.A. Sem-1 (2022-24)
Roll No: 8
Enrolment No: 4069206420220017
Email Address: gkatariya67@gmail.com
Submitted to: Smt. S. B. Gardi, Department of English, MKBU
'The Flea' Poem By John Donne
Introduction
John Donne was born in 1572 in London, England. He is one of the earliest of the ‘Metaphysical Poets’, a term created by Samuel Johnson, an eighteenth-century English essayist, poet, and philosopher to describe the loosely associated group of poets such as George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, and John Cleveland. The Metaphysical Poets are known for their ability to startle the reader and view new perspectives through paradoxical images, subtle argument, inventive syntax, and imagery from art, philosophy, and religion using an extended metaphor known as a conceit. Donne reached beyond the rational and hierarchical structures of the seventeenth century with his exacting and ingenious conceits, advancing the exploratory spirit of his time.
The Metaphysicals
Basically metaphysics is the branch of psychology. Literally metaphysics means beyond nature. In English literature, a number of writers used the concept of metaphysics to great effect and lasting long. Many writers have used the term metaphysics and have applied it in their corresponding literary works, but famously it was Samuel Johnson who very first time named the metaphysical poetry.
We can consider Metaphysical poetry as poetry marked by bold, Ingenious Conceits, Incongruous Imagery, Complexity and Subtlety of thought, frequent use of paradox and often by deliberate harshness or rigidity of expressions. Metaphysical poets have a common theme. They all had a religious sentiment.
Poets, commonly grouped in a class which includes Donne, Herbert, Cowley, Crashaw, and others famous in their day, received the name of metaphysical poets, not because of their profound thought, but because of their eccentric style and queer figures of speech.
The name 'metaphysical poetry' was first devised by Dryden, in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy. It was revived by Johnson, and is now generally accepted by historians of English literature. It is used by Johnson, as it was used by Dryden, to express the love of remote analogies, which was a mark of the poetry of Donne and those who wrote more or less after the manner of Donne.
The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour; but, unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry, they only wrote verses, and very often such verses as stood the trial of the finger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect, that they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables.
John Donne
John Donne was born sometime in the first half of 1572 in the City of London. His father was a prosperous merchant of Welsh ancestry.Donne’s mother was Elizabeth Heywood The family had a strong Roman Catholic tradition.
In 1584, Donne matriculated at Hart Hall, Oxford. As it was impossible for a Roman Catholic to take the oath of supremacy required at graduation, he left without taking a degree. According to Izaac Walton, Donne went to Cambridge on leaving Oxford. He became a law student at Lincoln’s Inn in 1592. He read voraciously and lived gaily. He was described as a great visitor of ladies, a great frequenter of plays, and a great writer of conceited verses. Most probably he travelled extensively during the period between leaving Oxford and entering the rims of Court.
In 1601, he fell passionately and seriously in love with Ann More, the young niece of the Lord Keeper and, by his secret marriage to her, ruined his chances of a promising diplomatic career.His marriage proved to be the great error of his life from the worldly point of view. In his mood of despair, he wrote wittily to his wife: “John Donne, Ann Donne, Un-done.” (Porto)
From 1602 to 1615 Donne struggled to find ways to support himself and his growing family. His wife bore him twelve children, seven of whom survived her. She died a premature death in 1617. From 1602 to 1615 Donne struggled to find ways to support himself and his growing family. His wife bore him twelve children, seven of whom survived her. She died a premature death in 1617.
He was ordained on the 23rd January 1615 and at the age of forty-three began a new life as a priest. Shortly after his ordination Donne was, by royal command, made a Doctor of Divinity at Cambridge. In 1621, he became Dean of St. Paul’s. There was a proposal in 1630 to make him a bishop, but he was by then a very sick man. He died in London on the 31st March 1631, and was buried in St. Paul’s, where his monument still stands.
John Donne as Metaphysical Poet
When we begin exploring John Donne’s verse, the description of him as a ‘metaphysical’ poet is inescapable.Donne and the other 16th- and 17th-century poets gathered under the ‘metaphysical’ banner – Carew, Vaughan and Marvell to name some of the most renowned – didn’t form a cohesive movement in their own time.Although it’s important not to lose sight of the differences between these writers, Donne does make use of many typical ‘metaphysical’ features used by others in the group.
The chief characteristic of Donne’s metaphysical poetry
1. It is complex and difficult. Most varied concepts are brought together.
2. It is intellectual in tone. There is an analysis of the most delicate shades of psychological experience.
3. There is a fusion of emotion and intellect, as there is intellectual analysis of emotions personally, experienced by the poet.
4. It is full of concepts which are learned, intellectual and over elaborated.
5. It is argumentative. There is Cubic evolution of thought as Donne advanced arguments, after arguments to prove his points. He is often like a lawyer choosing the fittest arguments for the case.
6. Originality is archived by the use of a new vocabulary drawn from the world of trade and commerce, the art and the science.
7. In order to arrest attention to tone a poem begins abruptly and colloquially, and unusual rhythms are used, unusual compound words are also used for the same purpose.
8. It is often dramatic in form. The blossom is the form of a dialogue between the poet and his heart which is treated as a separate entity; it has been well said his poetry presents a drama of ideas. His lyrics are dramatic. A poem of Donne’s is a piece of drama.
Flea (insect) and literary arts
The flea has been, indirectly, one of the protagonists in the history of man. As one of the two vectors of Yersinia pestis, the etiological agents of the Black Death, the flea (Xenopsylla Cheopis) has contributed, over the centuries, to the death of millions of people in many countries. Galileo Galilei was the first to observe the flea with a microscope (1624), but the credit of depicting it with a stunning drawing goes to the Britisher Robert Hooke in 1665.
A number of zoologists, including Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek and Diacinto Cestoni, well described and illustrated the life cycle of the flea in the XVII century. Some of these reports inspired scholars such as J. Swift and J. Donne for the composition of classic poems. Also, the flea, alone and with its hosts, has inspired a number of artists to create fine paintings; among them: G. M. Crespi, G. B. Piazzetta, G. de la Tour and others. Colourful sonnets on the flea in the Roman dialect were written by G. Belli and Trilussa. The flea also, as a theme, inspired musicians such as G. F. Ghedini and M. Mussorgsky, play writers such as Feydeau and moviemakers such as Charlie Chaplin.
The Flea
Fleas were a popular subject for ribald humour during the Renaissance. The creatures were everywhere in both real life and in erotic poetry (inspired by the writing of the Roman poet Ovid) – their ability to freely roam ladies’ flesh making them the envy of John Donne’s poetic narrator as well as many others. Since 17th-century society viewed sex as the mingling of bloods, the flea’s bloodsucking nature had huge possibilities as a risqué metaphor.
It may come as a great surprise to people versed in some of John Donne’s
Better-known works that this great 17th century poet used as a Flea as a central figure in a love poem.“The Flea” is a steamy testimony of the passion for which the young poet was known as “the rake, Jack Donne”.
In “The Flea,” Donne builds a complex argument about a woman’s denial of love’s
consummation with the poem’s persona. The poem is built around the simple situation where a flea has just bitten a man (the poem’s persona) and the woman that he loves. The woman is poised to crush the flea when the persona builds an elaborate argument that the insect and its act of feeding is a corporal, though symbolic, consummation of the love affair and possible marriage that she and her parents are denying in real life. The persona’s pleas fail to prevent her from crushing the flea with her fingernail.
Poem’s Structure
Donne's poem is composed of three stanzas of nine lines. The first six lines in each stanza are made from three rhyming couplets, while the last three lines of each are a triplet. In this way Donne’s form mirrors his content as three distinctly separate entities – man, woman and flea – become one.
Poem Analysis
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.
In the poem’s opening stanza, we are thus presented with a lusty lover seeking the ultimate favour from a young lady and he is meeting resistance; hence the necessity of the argument in the first stanza. The lover seeks to convince the young lady that the intimacy he seeks will in no way bring her shame or dishonor; for, after all (as Aristotle says), sexual intercourse is but the mingling of blood~13-which is exactly what happens when the flea bites first him, then her. Surely This is no loss of honour, merely the mingling of blood. But there is more here than a perverse argument. When the poem’s speaker reasons that the mingling of bloods that is his heart’s desire is like the mingling of bloods in a flea, he is, all unawarely, betraying that his love is as barren as the encyclopedists had described the flea’s to be. Like the flea, he will copulate, but produce no ‘creatures of like kind’. The speaker’s response to the flea’s mock pregnancy- the flea ‘swells with one blood made of two,and this is more then we would doe’-is further evidence that Donne is presenting us with a profane lover, a man whose love produces, in the language of the Roman de la Rose, a desire ‘More for delectation/Than only
procreation.’This lover’s is thus an inversion of a properly ordered love.
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.
Whereas in the first stanza he had attempted to demonstrate directly that a loss of honour is but an inconsequential thing, in the second stanza the argument is all by indirection. Seeing that the lady has captured and plans to execute the flea, he tries now to convince her that, since the flea has their two bloods, ‘This flea is you and I’. The lover spiritualizes his lady by first identifying her with a flea, and then spiritualizing the flea! The flea is a cloister, a ‘temple’. In fact, the flea is more than sacred. It is divine, a Trinity-‘three lives in one flea’. Like Christ’s, the flea’s blood is the royal, purple, ‘blood of innocence’, and the flea, again like Christ, is nailed, though not to a cross. Further, if the flea is a trinity, the lover and his mistress are members of that Godhood. But, neither the argument nor the double entendre speeds the lover, and he is forced to try again. At the opening of the third stanza the lady has squashed the flea.
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 lady’s action is, of course, a rather nice refutation of the lover’s argument of the preceding stanza, for, whereas he had assured her that they both, along with God and their marriage bed were bundled up inside the flea, she has driven her nail into the purple ‘blood of
innocence’-and the earth does not groan, there is no darkness upon the face of the earth, the veil of the temple is not rent; indeed, she finds them neither one ‘the weaker now’. Obviously another strategy is required. So the lover tries an argument by analogy. He admits freely that the flea’s death was trivial, but from that fact she is to Learn how false her fear was. Fear in anticipation of the flea’s death proved false; fear for the loss of honour, when she yields, will, he assures her, prove equally false, as this flea’s death took life from her, He’ll take just a little honour. She’ll be none the weaker. Patently, This is a perverse argument. The lover is confusing the quantitative with the qualitative. Of blood one can lose a little or a lot, with
effects varying accordingly; but honour is qualitative: she either has it, or she’s lost it. Thus the lover is a man who uses reason, perverse reason, for the wrong ends.
Conclusion
In "The Flea" Donne wrote of secular or physical love in a somewhat lighter vein than he usually did. By this statement I do not mean to imply that he was being humorous, though the use of a flea, a curious little insect given to leaps, frolics, and sudden little scurryings, may have carried humorous overtones to the Renaissance mind.
Dryden has attacked this poem on the grounds that it is not realistic, that no lady would yield to such an argument There are no wild protestations of undying love, no impassioned pleadings for the lady to be kind, no appeal to the emotions whatsoever. Instead, the appeal is to the reason. One has to agree with Dryden that such an " approach" would not prove efficacious unless—unless the lady were as desirous of being convinced as the lover of convincing. This conception of ladies is fairly common in Donne's secular poetry.
Works Cited
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Bansal, Atal Bihari. “METAPHYSICS IN LITERATURE.” JETIR, vol. 7, no. 2, 2020. ISSN-2349-5162.
Brumble, H. David. “John Donne ’ s ‘The Flea’ : Some Implications of the Encyclopedic and Poetic Flea Traditions.” Critical Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 2, 1973.
Cohen, Allen C. “A Man, A Woman, and the Insect That Consummated Their Love: Passion and Metaphysical Conceit in John Donne’s “The Flea.”” American Entomologist, vol. 48, no. 2, 2002.
Donkor, Michael, et al. “John Donne and metaphysical poetry.” The British Library, 31 March 2017, https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/john-donne-and-metaphysical-poetry. Accessed 4 November 2022.
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MADISON., ARTHUR L. “EXPLICATION OF JOHN DONNE'S "THE FLEA."” Notes And Queries, vol. 202, no. February, 1957.
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Raj, Prithvi. “A Study of John Donne as a Metaphysical Poet.” INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CREATIVE RESEARCH THOUGHTS, vol. 8, no. 10, 2020. ISSN: 2320-2882.
Vaughan, Charles Edwyn. “English literary criticism by Charles Edwyn Vaughan.” Project Gutenberg, 2004, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6320. Accessed 4 November 2022.
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