On the Joy of Metaphysical Conceit (With Reference to John Donne's 'The Flea')

John Donne (1572-1631): The Flea 

(First published posthumously in 1633) 

Whilst it's true that I don't like conceited individuals, I do like writers who make use of conceits; i.e. literary devices that form extremely ingenious or fanciful parallels between apparently dissimilar objects. And I'm particularly fond of what are known as metaphysical conceits, associated - not surprisingly - with a loosely associated group of 17th century English poets known as the metaphysical poets, a term coined rather sneeringly by the critic Samuel Johnson.

These conceits, according to Johnson, violently yoke together in a clever but displeasing manner the most heterogeneous ideas and establish provocative analogies between spiritual qualities on the one hand and base matter on the other; such as, for example, the virgin purity of an unmarried woman and the vile body of an insect.

It's for this reason that John Donne's famous poem, The Flea, continues to delight. It's a comic and erotic verse that uses the conceit of a flea which has sucked blood both from the male speaker and the young woman he is hoping to seduce, as an extended metaphor for the amorous relationship between them.

The speaker attempts to persuade the woman to surrender her sex to him, not with sweet talk, or romantic flattery. Nor does he make an emotional appeal to her feelings. Rather, he uses his wit and his logic to appeal to her reason, arguing that if their blood mingles together within the body of the flea, then they have, essentially, already been joined as man and wife, so may as well fuck together without further delay.

Thus, as Dryden rightly says of Donne - and again, one can sense the disapproval in this remark:

"He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love."

However, despite the criticisms of Dryden and Johnson, there have been those, following T. S. Eliot, prepared to champion metaphysical poetry for its witty, cerebral style. Camille Paglia, for example, ranks The Flea as amongst the world's best - and queerest - love poems; a perfect illustration of Donne's effrontery and ostentatious use of conceits, in which, amongst other things, he satirizes the absurd arguments men will advance in the hope of getting laid.

As Paglia also points out, the three stanzas that compose The Flea are like scenes from a play; full of what she terms dramatic immediacy. This is in part due to the fact that there's no superfluous or old-fashioned lyricism; the reader feels as if they are listening to a genuine conversation between actual lovers, rather than the speech of those still earnestly clinging to the tired conventions of Petrarch.

Ultimately, perhaps what's most engaging about The Flea is the fact that the young woman is "serenely impervious to the poet's dazzling flights of rhetoric." So much so that, despite his desperate plea for clemency, she squashes the blood-swollen bug beneath her nail without a qualm. He may imagine that they are united as one within the body of the flea, but she's not buying into this holy trinity line of bullshit for a second.      

However, in protesting that the death of a flea is inconsequential and that her act of cruelty is not one that in any way morally dishonours or physically weakens her, she allows the man an opportunity to make his final, beautifully nihilistic point: nothing really matters in the grand scheme of things.

Thus the sacrifice of her virginity means nothing more, nothing less, than the murder of an insect and her determination to maintain her maidenhead until her wedding night, based on groundless fear and superstition, is absurd.

(Whether this finally convinced her to take him into her bed, we sadly cannot know ...)  

See:

Helen Gardner (ed.), Metaphysical Poets, (Revised Edition: Penguin Books, 1966). The quote from Dryden is taken from this text. 

Helen Gardner (ed.), John Donne: The Divine Poems, (Second Edition: Oxford University Press, 1978).

Camille Paglia, 'John Donne, The Flea', Break, Blow, Burn  (Vintage Books, 2006), pp. 20-25.