Following a unique poetic language of the Renaissance, John Donne's "The Flea" is a poem illustrating the metaphor of a flea to represent the act sexual and relationships between a man. and wife. Portrayed through language, imagery, and structure, John Donne's poem is a poem of vanity and seduction, as the speaker (assumed to be male) follows a consistent pattern of persuading one to have sex before marriage with a woman. Written in the 17th century, John Donne uses an unconventional genre in his poem, demeaning and objectifying the female gender. A common motif in Renaissance poems, Donne uses a flea as a metaphorical simile to sexual intercourse and the eternal bond between man and woman. Exemplified throughout the poem, Donne continues to compare the act of love to the actions of a flea, which attaches itself to its host, sucks blood, and later dies. “Mark this flea, and mark this one” (line 1), Donne immediately introduces the metaphor of a flea, in this line literally describing a flea bite, but figuratively describing love. “How little is what you deny me” (line 2), the speaker's voice in the poem portrays a very manipulative and chauvinistic tone, demonstrated in the second line of the poem where he compares love to a bite of chip, and describing the act of “small”. Obviously, the speaker is trying to get the woman into bed using a flea bite as a metaphor, describing that their blood has already been mixed in the flea's body, and so it is as if the sexual act of Love had already been accomplished. The image that Donne illustrates in the first stanza of the poem is that of a man and a woman lying in bed, bitten by a flea, thus "mixing" their blood to become one. "And in this flea, our two b...... middle of paper ...... reads, alluding to the mixing of their blood in a flea's body, however in the third stanza the woman kills the flea , and demonstrates that this changes nothing There is therefore a reversal of the argument, since the speaker no longer seeks to convince the woman of the opposite, and the tone continues to be motivated by vanity "Cruel and sudden, have you since/purple". your nail, in the blood of innocence" (lines 19, 20). Here the diction shows that although the woman's emotions are not depicted and her voice is not used in the poem, it is evident that she had an effect on the speaker and her The diction depicts a slight anger. Therefore, through clever manipulation of a flea metaphor, structure, rhyme scheme, and tone, Donne depicts a male speaker's view toward sex, as he trivializes and constantly simplifies the act of love in order to cause unhappiness. a woman in bed.