Mark​​​​ Canada, Ph.D.​

I like a poet with a sense of humor.

 

I'm not thinking only of Edward Lear, although "The Owl and the Pussycat" and "The Jumblies" both deserve their own columns here.  No, today's winking bard is none other than the brilliant--and wry--John Donne. 

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I don't suppose many people outside literary circles are thinking much about Donne these days.  Even if you don't know the name, you might know his most famous line, "No man is an island," which actually comes not from one of his poems, but from a prose meditation he wrote.  A slightly younger contemporary of Shakespeare, Donne was not only a poet, but also an Anglican priest, and he wrote both religious and secular poetry--and I mean really secular poetry.  It's clear from the poem that begins "Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you as yet / But knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend" that Donne thought deeply about his relationship with God, but that was not the only relationship in his life.  A later seventeenth-century poet, Anne Bradstreet, wrote of the conflict between "The Flesh and the Spirit," but the two managed to co-exist in Donne and his poetry--although we might wonder what his "three-personed God" thought of the final lines of that poem: "For I, / Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, / Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me."  Did Donne meet with some awkward silence at the pearly gates?  Even if he and the Man Upstairs had a good laugh over it, there was still the Apostle Paul, who almost certainly was less forgiving.

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Anyway, Donne belonged to an age when poetry was not always somber and earnest, as it often was with, say, Keats and Poe a few centuries later.  Some of the poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would enjoy a little fun in their verse from time to time, even when they might have appeared to be serious.  Michael Drayton's delightful sonnet "Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part" is a perfect example.

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Donne's humor can be seen in some of his best-known poems, such as "Song" (which begins, "Go and catch a falling star"), as well as "The Sun Rising" (one of my favorite poems by anyone) and, our subject for today, "The Flea."

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"Mark but this flea," the poem begins, "and mark in this / How little that which thou deniest me is . . ."  With this opening, Donne's speaker launches a courtship poem (although "courtship" is a rather formal way of putting it--the speaker is not looking merely to treat this woman to dinner and a movie).  Since she is denying him, he decides to make a case for, well, not denying him.  Let's see how he goes about it.

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In the next two lines, the speaker says:

 

It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,

And in this flea our two bloods mingled be . . .

 

So far, he has not said anything particularly humorous or bold, only that a flea has bitten both of them and taken in some of their blood, so that their bloods are now "mingled" inside the flea. To most people, this fact would be of little consequence.  To a poet, on the other hand . . .

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The speaker continues:

 

Thou know'st that this cannot be said

A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead,

Yet this enjoys before it woo,

And pampered swells with one blood made of two,

And this, alas, is more than we would do.

 

The flea, the speaker observes, "enjoys before it woo"; without committing a sin, it gets to bite them and thus unite their bloods, but the two lovers are not enjoying the same guiltless union.  That doesn't seem right, does it?  In other words, the speaker is making what appears to be a logical argument from nature.  Now, as he and we well know, a flea bite and a sexual union are two ultimately different things, despite their similarities, but "suspend our disbelief" (to borrow Coleridge's famous phrase) and play along with this not-so-serious poem.

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The next stanza begins in a way that makes Donne's poetry particularly appealing to me:

 

Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,

Where we almost, nay more than married are.

 

That first word, "Oh," may not seem like much, but it gives the poem a bit of drama, along with the sound of natural speech.  Like an actual person who has become alarmed, the speaker of this poem begins with the interjection "Oh."  I get the sense that his lover is about to kill the flea, perhaps moving a finger toward it, as if to crush it.  The poem is taking a turn here.  The speaker tries to stop her, making a provocative statement equating the killing of the flea to an act that would end three lives.  The notion that they are "married" in the flea is not something that would occur to most people, but the speaker returns to the notion of a union because of the mingling of their bloods.  He continues:

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This flea is you and I, and this

Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;   

Though parents grudge, and you, w'are met,   

And cloistered in these living walls of jet.

 

He ends this stanza with three lines that extend his tenuous logic:

 

Though use make you apt to kill me,

Let not to that, self-murder added be,

And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

 

Here he is suggesting that killing the flea would be an act of suicide, since she would be killing herself in killing the flea, which contains her blood.

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In the third stanza, the first four lines indicate that the lover has followed through and killed the flea:

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Cruel and sudden, hast thou since

Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?   

Wherein could this flea guilty be,

Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?   

Yet thou triumph’st, and say'st that thou   

Find’st not thy self, nor me the weaker now;

 

With comical regret, the speaker implies his lover has done a terrible thing in killing the largely innocent flea, purpling her nail by crushing it and exposing the mingled bloods within it.  (Like other insects, fleas do not have blood of their own; thus, the exposed blood must be a combination of that sucked from the lovers.)  Despite being a murderer (according to the speaker's specious logic) of all three individuals--the flea, the speaker, and his lover--his lover says neither of the two humans seems to have been made any weaker by her act of killing the flea.  She triumphs, apparently feeling that she has won this argument over killing the flea.  "Look," she seems to say, "nothing happened!  We're fine."

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We humans love a twist.  Here, Donne ends his poem with a bit of irony that adds to the humor.  The final three lines read:

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’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.

 

Relatively short poems such as this one can convey a lot in few words when a master such as Donne employs words and syntax so well as to pack a lot of meaning in a small number of words.  The first of these three lines introduces a 180-degree turn.  "'Tis true," he begins, conceding defeat, it seems, but adds, "then learn how false, fears be."  He had been wrong to be fearful about the killing of the flea--but what about her own fear, specifically the fear that giving in and engaging in a sexual encounter with him would destroy her honor?  Maybe it's a "false" fear, too!  The honor she fears she will lose is as little or insignificant as what, if anything, was lost to her when the flea died.

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The joke is on her (and us), as he has led her down a path that ultimately takes them back to his proposal.  She, like us, probably never saw this final clever twist coming.  The joke is also on him, however, because the reasoning is ultimately unsound, even silly.  Finally, the joke is on all wooing lovers--and, more broadly, on sophists everywhere--who will resort to clever, but laughably specious stratagems to win their arguments.

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The joke is not on the jokester, though.  Donne, as the brilliant magician behind this little rhetorical trick, gets away scot-free, impressing and amusing us with his ability to take us all in with his joke.

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Some poems are heavy with tragedy, despair, and indictment of human failings.  Gerard Manley Hopkins's "No worst there is none . . . " and Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" come to mind.  Both of these poems are among my favorites, but there is something to be said about a witty poem that brings both a diversion and some insight.  Donne could write that kind of poem.