The Flea

For a contemporary culture, the idea of associating premarital sex with sin and/or considering sex an action with cosmic ramifications might seem quaint, even amusing. For a Renaissance culture, sin was anything but a symbol. Within the Judeo-Christian culture, influential despite Europe’s gradual movement away from the authority of the Church, sin was very real; it was a grave insult to an omnipotent, omniscient God who took such transgressions as meaningful and the sinner as ultimately accountable. For the Renaissance Christian culture, sin represented a deviant abuse of the intellect and a clear lack of control over the appetites.

The speaker’s insouciant, even playful use of the concept of sin here as a way to try to sabotage his potential lover’s understandable hesitation to risk her very soul just to lay with him reveals the speaker’s contempt for the Christian notion of sin. In the second stanza, when the speaker compares the two lovers, their blood now in the flea, he makes the bug a symbol of the Trinity; when he compares the flea to marriage and even to a temple; when he compares the act of premarital sex and its presumed impact as a deadly sin to little more than a flea bite in the final stanza, the speaker reveals his own lack of spiritual and moral sensitivities.

In the end, the poem uses sin as a strategy to convince the woman to commit sin. It is an extravagantly cynical perception of a Church that, at least when Donne was growing up, meant much to him, even defined him. Biographers know that during his early twenties, when this poem was composed, Donne drifted away from his moral foundation in the Church and lived a life of licentious behavior in London. Only later, after his much-vaunted conversion to the Anglican faith that would ensure him political advancement, did Donne return to the moral and spiritual guidance of the Church (he much admired the conversion narrative of St. Augustine, who also went through a period of bohemian behavior before returning to his faith). Thus, it matters that the speaker uses sin as a strategy for seduction. For the young and dashing Donne who writes the poem, sin was an ironic bugaboo that here he delights in lampooning. For the later Donne, such carnal games-playing would reflect a life being wasted in the pursuit of empty pleasures of the corrupt flesh.