Thomas Wyatt
William Shakespeare
John Donne
Andrew Marvell
Richard Lovelace
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
William Blake
Robert Burns
Lord Byron
Christina Rossetti
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy
John Keats
Ernest Dowson
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Robert Frost
Charlotte Mew
Elizabeth Jennings
Louis MacNeice
Anne Sexton
Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin
Seamus Heaney
Keith Douglas
Tony Harrison
Carol Ann Duffy
Paul Muldoon
Wendy Cope
One of Donne’s most popular poems, written in Donne’s college years. The speaker uses the conceit of a flea as an extended metaphor of his relationship with his addressee in order to persuade her to sleep with him. Whether this game worked is unknown.
It is a carpe diem* poem, that is ‘seize the da...
Mark but this flea, and mark in this
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two;
And this, alas! is more than we would do.
O stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is,
Though parents grudge, and you, we're met
And cloister'd in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.
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 suck'd from thee?
Yet thou triumph'st, and say'st that thou
Find'st not thyself nor me the weaker now.
'Tis true; then learn how false fears be;
Just so much honour, when thou yield'st to me,
Will waste, as this flea's death took life from thee.
The Flea was written by John Donne.