The Flea: Symbols | SparkNotes

The Flea

As the speaker attempts to convince his mistress to have sex with him, the flea accumulates several symbolic meanings. The speaker begins by implying that the flea has already facilitated their lovemaking (lines 1–4):

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

Donne has done something playful here, but we’ll only recognize it if we’re familiar with early modern typography, where a lowercase s at the beginning of a word looks like a lowercase f. This typographical ambiguity introduces a cheeky rudeness to the line, “It sucked be first, and now sucks thee.” With that, the speaker makes the flea into a symbolic vehicle for sexual intercourse. He reinforces this symbolism when he explicitly likens the flea to a bed and then a temple (lines 13–14):

This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is

If the flea symbolizes a “marriage bed” or a “marriage temple,” it’s because the flea is where the body fluids of the speaker and his mistress have become mingled. Yet despite the speaker’s use of the flea to make vulgar references to the sexual act, he also attempts to ennoble the flea by symbolically linking it to the tripartite God: “three lives in one flea” (line 10).

Blood

Central to the poem is the image of the speaker’s blood inside the flea, mingling with the blood of his mistress. The speaker leverages this image for its erotic implications, in which the “blood” of both the speaker and his mistress symbolically transmutes into sexual fluids. This symbolic transmutation is implicit in the speaker’s description of the flea as a marriage bed and temple. And yet, in the shift from marriage bed to marriage temple, the speaker adds an additional symbolic layer that brings a theological dimension to the image of blood (lines 12–18):

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.
   Though use make you apt to kill me,
   Let not to that, self-murder added be,
   And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Initially, the speaker makes a simple equation between the flea and the marriage bed. This symbolic link makes sense. Just as the flea is the site where the blood of the speaker and his mistress has mingled, the marriage bed is the site where their sexual fluids would come together. However, immediately following this symbolic link, the speaker goes a step further to reframe the marriage bed as a temple. That is, it’s a sanctified place where their mingled blood becomes holy—much like the “blood of innocence” (line 20), which is to say the blood of Christ. Hence why killing the flea would be tantamount to “sacrilege, three sins in killing three.”