The Flea By John Donne: Poem Analysis

Poetry has always been used as a literary art form to express one’s intense emotions or feelings, but does poetry have a true meaning of reflecting on people’s lives? Despite of the situation the reader may be going through, many people find comfort in poetry to recover and discover new meanings in their lives by relating to the author’s intense literary point of view. Through my journey with poems, I try to see the eye of the author and feel one’s emotions by rereading this type of literature. On this journey, I discover new meanings and different interpretations from John Donne’s “The Flea” that reflects contemporaneous events. John Donne’s poem “The Flea” is a soft poem, however it contains a hard betrayal and heartbreak that challenges

I highlighted specific words and look up the meaning behind each term. Certain words like “maidenhead”, “thou”, “cloistered’, and “jet” were all terms that I was not too familiar with. I underline certain lines and annotating them that stuck out to me like, “[i]t sucked me first, and now sucks thee.” My first interpretation of this line was that “the flea” was on you and now it is on someone else. After looking up the definition of “maidenhead”, which means hymen, I started to realize that this poem was about how the author may have taken away his beloved’s virginity. Another line I interpreted was, “[a]nd pampered swells with one blood made of two” could refer to the author’s beloved having a baby. However, the last line that I could not fully understand was, “[a]nd cloistered in these living walls of jet.” I searched up the term “cloistered” which means a covered walk in a monastery and “jet”, which is a hard semi precious lignite. The diction that the author used had me confused until I finally gathered all my definitions and unscrambled my

The correlation that I connect with this poem is how feminity can challenge modern relationships. The intellectual realization that Donne’s poem covers is how the women’s perspective can dominate over the male’s perspective when it comes to relationships. In many interpretations of the poem, people have drawn the conclusion that the speaker is trying to woo the female in the poem, however she rejects his advances and the speaker is left with a heartbreak. The interpretation of others and my own still show the female dominance that is being carried over between this male and female