The speaker of “The Flea” is an anonymous lover who addresses his mistress, attempting to convince her to have sex with him. We don’t have any specific information about the speaker’s class position or racial identity, but we might reasonably assume that he’s young. Though his preoccupation with sex isn’t necessarily juvenile, his sense of humor certainly is. Virtually all the jokes in the poem are vulgar and amusingly adolescent. Perhaps the most juvenile joke in the entire poem derives its humor from early modern typographic conventions. At the time when Donne’s poem was written, a lowercase s at the beginning of a word looked very similar to a lowercase f. This typographical ambiguity brought a cheeky rudeness to the first published version of the poem’s third line: “It sucked me first, and now sucks thee.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the F-word has been part of the English language since the sixteenth century. Donne comically references this newfangled vulgarity through his youthful speaker.

Yet for all the speaker’s adolescent vulgarity, he is also a rather clever lad. His notion of the flea as a “marriage bed” (line 13) shows an eye for brilliant, if also shocking, conceits. The fact that he’s able to develop this conceit in real time also demonstrates an improvisational flair. When his mistress raises her hand to kill the flea, he responds immediately with a new development to his initial conceit. He now implies that the flea is like the tripartite Christian God and must therefore be saved: “three lives in one flea spare” (line 10). The speaker’s spontaneous capacity to weave such a complex theological reference into his seduction is mirrored in the formal structure of the seduction itself. The poem’s three stanzas echo the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, as do the rhyming tercets that conclude each stanza. From this vantage, the speaker’s display of intellectual prowess begins to overtake his seduction. Indeed, if we didn’t know any better, we might suspect that the speaker is more in love with his own wit than with his mistress!

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