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

The speaker opens the poem with these lines, where he establishes the basis for the elaborate conceit about the flea, which he will develop throughout the rest of the poem. He notes that a flea has bitten both him and his mistress. This means that the flea now contains samples of each of their blood, the mingling of which will inspire his later idea of the flea as a “marriage bed.” Here, however, the speaker simply insists that having sex isn’t a big deal. If his mistress is content to let a flea bite her, he seems to imply, then she shouldn’t have any problem letting him have sex with her—especially since their “two bloods” already “mingled be.” Here Donne takes advantage of a certain typographical ambiguity to humorous effect. At the time when the poem was written, it was common in printed text for a lowercase s at the beginning of a word to look more like a lowercase f. This typographical ambiguity brought a cheeky rudeness to the first published version of the third line: “It sucked me first, and now sucks thee.” The implicit substitution of the F-word makes it very explicit what the speaker wants from his mistress.

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.

In lines 10–15, the speaker responds to his mistress’s threat to kill the flea. He bids her “stay” her hand and “spare” the flea, which now contains “three lives in one.” With this language of three-in-one, the speaker alludes to the spiritual numerology of the Holy Trinity. According to Christian doctrine, God exist in three divine persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Despite being distinct, these persons are united through the notion of consubstantiality, meaning they share the same eternal essence. The speaker applies the logic of consubstantiality to the mingling of his and his mistress’s blood within the flea. In other words, their quasi-sexual union within the flea is implicitly holy. This notion leads the speaker to make the bold claim that the flea is a “marriage bed”—and indeed a “marriage temple”—where the speaker and his mistress have already consummated their love. With that spiritual consummation already achieved, they are “more than married” and hence free to engage in physical intercourse. Regardless of the “grudge” that the mistress and her parents both seem to hold against the speaker, the two lovers are already bound together in the sanctified “temple” of the flea—“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.

In lines 16–18, the speaker continues to beg his mistress not to kill the flea. Once again, he riffs on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, claiming that killing the flea would extinguish two other lives: both his and his mistress’s. But what’s arguably more significant here than the theological undertones is the speaker’s wordplay, which implies an intimate relationship between sex and death. In the seventeenth century, killing was a common pun for intercourse. “Killing” meant having sex, and “dying” meant having an orgasm. The speaker is therefore teasing his mistress. Even as he counsels her not to destroy their spiritual union within the flea, he playfully implies that killing the flea will cause all three to “die” together in a moment of sexual ecstasy. The “sacrilege” of killing the flea is thus tantamount to the sacrilege of having premarital sex. In pointing this out, the speaker puts his mistress in an amusing double bind. He’s constructed a logic in which, regardless of whether she kills the flea or lets their blood mingle inside it, she’s symbolically bound to him in an amorous union.

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 speaker closes the poem with these lines (23–27), which come after his mistress has killed the flea. Here, the speaker recalls the close of the second stanza, where he claimed that killing the flea would result in the death of both him and his mistress. She responded to this claim by smashing the flea, then she celebrated her triumph when neither she nor the speaker were harmed. Now, however, the speaker twists her apparent victory against her. With the intellectual nimbleness of a philosopher, he circles back to his original claim that having sex with him would prove harmless. In line 2 he emphasized “how little that which thou deniest me is.” Now he claims that yielding to him will harm her honor as little as the flea’s death harmed her physical person. Once again, the speaker plays on the symbolic relationship between death and sex, but here he takes it further. Indeed, the word “waste” adds a triple pun. Most directly, the speaker describes the sense of loss that might come with his mistress squandering her honor. But he’s also punning on the word waist while simultaneously referencing the fluid “waste” of his own semen.

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