John Donne's "The Flea"

“The Flea” is a story of a man trying to convince his lover to surrender her virginity to him, and at the center of his plea is a flea. In this clever poem Donne uses a flea, blood, and the death of the flea as an analogy for the oldest most primal exchange, sex. Donne, through symbolic images, not only questions the validity of coveting virginity but also the importance of sex as it pertains to life. The metaphors in “The Flea” are plentiful, but the symbols repeated throughout the poem are clear, beginning with the most prevalent, the flea. This minute creature is full of symbolic meanings. During the time this poem was written (the Renaissance) the flea was used in many poems about sex. In this particular poem the flea bites is symbolic of the act of sex from the man’s remark in the beginning, “Mark but this flea, and mark in this, how little that which deny’st me is” (886). The flea is small and trivial, and while the man’s lover denies him sex, we see the connect...