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The Flea By John Donne: Poem Analysis

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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 …show more content…

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 …show more content…

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

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I have interpreted these lines in one way, yet there are a million different possibilities. The author puts the words onto the paper, but the reader’s job is to interpret their own emotion, memory or belief and actually apply it to the poet’s words in order to create an

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Poetry is an effective means used to convey a variety of emotions, from grief, to love, to empathy. This form of text relies heavily on imagery and comparison to inflict the reader with the associated feelings. As such, is displayed within Stephen Dunn 's, aptly named poem, Empathy. Quite ironically, Dunn implores strong diction to string along his cohesive plot of a man seeing the world in an emphatic light. The text starts off by establishing the military background of the main protagonist, as he awaits a call from his lover in a hotel room.

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The surgical operation he had gone in his forehead makes him lose his status as a hero in the emotional reaction of despair as other prisoners watch. In analyzing this poem, the main point of focus is that the poet achieves a contemplative mood by listing surface events that are emotional in nature. Looking at the structure of the poem first, the poem has 42 lines or sentences. Most of the sentences are complicated with the poem employing the use of verb-nouns in a normal way. The poet also includes some enjambment, some end-stopped lines and a title that precisely explains what is going on in the poem.

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In “The Trouble with Poetry” the speaker touches on the same idea of how poetry is so forced, and how it has lost its meaning as an expression and has become more of an addiction among

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