The Flea
For my two authors, I chose the poem, “The Flea” by John Donne, in the stylistic format of Shakespeare’s many sonnets. In order to mimic a traditional Shakespearean sonnet while also keeping the subject of Donne’s accurate, I focused on Shakespeare's ‘ABAB, CDCD…GG’ rhyme scheme in addition to iambic pentameter to influence my word choices in my writing. As “The Flea’ contains three stanzas with differing topics of discussion, I chose to mimic those in the three quatrains of my attempt to write a Shakespearean sonnet. As Donne often uses interesting, almost non fitting metaphors to describe his lovers and love as a whole, I thought rewriting this poem in the stylings of Shakespeare would be a nice challenge as Shakespeare uses much more simple metaphors in his sonnets, but often focuses on the theme of love and the many forms it possesses.
The first major aspect of a Shakespearean sonnet is his specific rhyme scheme which alternates line by line between three quatrains, ending in a rhyming couplet. For example, quatrain one has the rhyme scheme “...this / …me / …sinfulness / …flea” (ll.1-4). In “The Flea”, Donne uses the first
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The first two stanzas, or three quatrains in the sonnet rewrite, are used to go back and forth on the question: would the woman losing her virginity be sinful? How much ‘honor’ would she lose by following through? According to Donne, the woman almost answers her own question by killing the flea. He believes she holds too much power to the idea of virginity and honor that sleeping with him would do no more wrong than killing this flea, a tiny insect that exists in the hundreds of