fifty-six

We are having (yet another) book-throwing-out session in my house (it never seems to make any difference), so I have been sorting through piles of books, trying to decide what I can make room for on my bookshelf.

I spent this morning flicking through a poetry anthology called 'Favourite Verse', which spans the 16th - 19th centuries (with a couple of 20th century poems dotted about). I haven't read much from the earlier periods, so it will be interesting to learn more about that.

That said, some of my favourite poems were written by John Donne, who died in 1631. He had slipped my mind, and it was nice to stumble across him again.

The Flea

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 sincePurpled 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.

Donne is funny, playful, clever and kinda irreverent; I imagine straight-laced christians being a tad offended by the references to marriage and the trinity ('three lives in one') in a poem about the narrator trying to persuade his girlfriend to have sex. And making the flea - a parasite, whose bites could resemble the marks of syphilis - holy, a temple? Hah.

An excerpt from the poem. Donne took full advantage of Renaissance typography, using the famous long S to make visual puns (see line three).

I also like the refusal of the woman to be taken in with the narrator's logic: she rebuffs him, squashing the flea with her fingernail - although, the narrator, wiley and desperate as he is, quickly turns this action into another reason for her to agree to sex.

The Flea Catcher, Georges de la Tour

I want to know more about fleas and their erotic associations now. A cursory search of the internet suggested that the flea made numerous appearances in renaissance literature, connected to sex and intimacy - because fleas have freedom to crawl all over our bodies, can bite and suck the flesh those renaissance men cannot touch. A clown in Marlowe's Faustus states, 'if you turn me into anything, let it be in the likeness of a little pretty frisking flea, that I may be here and there and everywhere. O, I'll tickle the pretty wenches' plackets'.

The possibilities the tiny flea held for sexual and romantic expression were not limited to the European Renaissance; I came across this 12th century Chinese folk poem here:

Suchow mattress has nine springs.

Quilt and canopy

cover the mandarin ducks.

The embroidered quilt

wraps him and me.

The flea biting him

bites me, too.