John Donne likely composed “The Flea” sometime between 1595 and 1615, when he wrote most of the other love poems that were collected and published in 1633, in a volume later titled Songs and Sonnets. “The Flea” is an erotic poem in which the speaker, following the tradition of carpe diem poetry, attempts to convince his mistress to have sex with him. He does so by developing a shocking conceit based on a flea that has just bitten both him and his mistress. With their blood now mingled within the insect, the speaker takes the flea as a symbolic “marriage bed” where, despite not yet having had sex, he and his mistress have already consummated their love. Resisting the speaker’s witty argument, the mistress at first threatens and then actually kills the flea. The speaker responds in real time to these acts, using wordplay to improvise humorously on the intimate relationship between sex and death. The speaker also makes various allusions to the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity to suggest that sex is an act of spiritual union. Even so, his mistress refuses his advances, reflecting the societal constraints on her sexuality.

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