22 pages • 44-minute read
The Flea
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Background
Historical Context
John Donne is and is not a Renaissance poet. That makes Donne’s historical context problematic. After all, the Renaissance did not happen over a weekend. What contemporary historians term the Renaissance was in fact an evolutionary transition within European culture from a theocentric civilization to a broad secular civilization, a movement away from the logic and assumptions of a culture that collectively positioned the Christian God at its center and one more intrigued by the complexities of humanity itself and the mysteries of nature itself, informed but not limited by assumptions about a Creator.
Donne’s historical context is his position now as one of the foremost poetic voices of the Elizabethan Era, important not so much because of how he embodied that historical era as by how his poetry, particularly his love poetry, anticipated its ultimate collapse. “The Flea” suggests exactly this historical positioning. The poem both summarizes the love poetry of Donne’s historical era—as part of the sea-change brought about by nearly two centuries of evolutionary thought and radical challenges to more than a millennium of theocentric writing—and explores a decidedly secular kind of love. The two lovers, disputing whether to have sex, represent something other than sacred love. This love is expressed in the muscle and friction, the blood and flesh of physical love, or in this case, the anticipation of physical love. In addition, Donne breaks with his historical era with his radical experiment in perspective, endowing the speaker with not just a voice but a complex personality: at once clever and crude, charismatic and insulting, passionate and misogynistic. In this, Donne’s poem anticipates the point-of-view experiments that would define Modernism nearly 500 years after his death.
As a Renaissance poem, then, “The Flea” uses for ironic effect the theological discourse about the nature of love within a cosmos sustained by a God and how human love is an expression of the soul. Love here is decidedly secular, even profane. In using the mingling of blood within the flea as its centering metaphor, in suggesting a woman can be a complex, sexual being in control of saving or losing her virginity, and in the unflattering light in which the poem casts a man trying every argument to winnow his way into the woman’s bed, the poem anticipates cultural assumptions about love and about sexual politics that would not be embraced into popular awareness for centuries. Perhaps this might account for Donne’s reluctance to publish his work.
Literary Context
John Donne’s literary context reflects more on what came long after his era rather than on what came before it. It would cause Donne significant confusion, even consternation, to find out he is now in fact the most prominent of the British Metaphysical poets, primarily because the term “metaphysical poets” itself was not coined under nearly two centuries after Donne’s death. When Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), an essayist and minor poet known to contemporary readers largely for his work producing the first dictionary of the English language, coined the term, not surprising given his predilection (obsession?) for definitions, he was referring to how these Elizabethan poets—among them Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Robert Herrick—tackled ambitious (read metaphysical) topics about the nature of love and the concept of death, the place of the soul, the integrity of morality itself, and supremely the role of God (most of the Metaphysical poets eventually joined the ministry). These poets were hyper-intellectuals, their poetry often dense and intimidating in their arguments (their most direct descendant in American literature would be the first-generation Puritan poets, most notably the Congregationalist apologist Edward Taylor).
Since Dr. Johnson coined it, the term “metaphysical” has come to suggest the poets’ collective affinity for highly eccentric poetic lines, their willingness to use jarring and often unsettling figures of speech (like a flea sucking blood), their interest in expanding the concept of the speaker of a poem, their deep learning and their allusions to the literatures of Antiquity, their often cutting wit and withering sense of honesty when dealing with humanity’s foibles, and ultimately their fascination with rhythm itself and their experiments with nontraditional beats. Interestingly, Dr. Johnson, a staid and quite conservative literary critic, actually used the term “metaphysical” derisively to suggest the pretentiousness and apparently careless crafting of Donne and his ilk. More than two centuries later, the self-described Modernist poets, most notably Nobelist T. S. Eliot, used the term “metaphysical” not as a put-down but rather to suggest the ambitious reach of these poets’ intellect and their brash experiments in upcycling poetry itself into radical reinventions of rhythm and rhyme that poets would not appreciate for nearly 400 years.
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