"The Flea" The speaker uses the occasion of a flea hopping from himself to a young lady as an excuse to argue

that the two of them should make love. Since in the flea their blood is mixed together, he says that they have already been made as one in the body of the flea. Besides, the flea pricked her and got what it wanted without having to woo her. The fleas bite and mingling of their bloods is not considered a sin, so why should their love-making? In the second stanza the speaker attempts to prevent the woman from killing the flea. He argues that since the flea contains the life of both herself and the speaker, she would be guilty both of suicide and a triple homicide in killing it. The woman in question is obviously not convinced, for in the third stanza she has killed the flea with a fingernail. The speaker then turns this around to point out that, although the flea which contained portions of their lives is dead, neither of them is the weaker for it. If this commingling of bodily fluids can leave no lasting effect, then why does she hesitate to join with him in sexual intimacy? After all, her honor will be equally undiminished. Analysis Donne here makes use of the wit for which he eventually became famousalthough in his own day his poetry was often considered too lurid to gain popular notoriety, and little of it was published during his lifetime. One of his earlier poems, The Flea, demonstrates his ability to take a controlling metaphor and adapt it to unusual circumstances. The Flea is made up of three nine-line stanzas following an aabbccddd rhyme scheme. He begins the poem by asking the young woman to Mark this flea (line 1) which has bitten and sucked blood from both himself and her. He points out that she has denied him something which the flea has not refrained from enjoying: the intimate union of their bodily fluids (in this case, blood). This commonplace occurrence, he argues, cannot be said/A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead (lines 5 -6); if this tiny commingling of the two people is not wrong, then how can a greater commingling be considered evil or undesirable? He even points out that the flea is able to enjoy the womans essence before he woo (line 7), the implication being that he need not court the woman in order to enjoy her sexual favors. In the second stanza the poet argues for the life of the flea, as his desired lady has made a move to kill it. He paints the flea as a holy thing: This flea is you and I, and this/Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is (lines 12-13). (Note also the reference to the Christian concept of "three lives in one" (line 10), suggesting that a spiritual union already exists, although unlike a spiritual marriage in a "marriage temple," the third being in the trio is not God but a flea.) Besides arguing for the sanctity of the fleas life, the speaker is also arguing that he and the lady have already bypassed the usual vows of fidelity and ceremony of marriage; thus, he pushes toward his point that the two of them have already been joined as one in the flea, so there is no harm in joining their bodies in sexual love. There is a hint that he has already attempted to gain the ladys favors and failed, either through her response or that of her parents: Though parents grudge, and you, (line 14) he says, suggesting that even her opinion does not matter anymore. The flea has already cloisterd them within its bodys walls of jet (line 15, possibly also suggesting that they are alone together in a dark room). The womans disdain for him and his suit becomes more apparent as he claims she is apt to kill him (line 16), following her habit of killing fleas, but he offers that she should refrain from harming the flea because in so doing she would add suicide (Let not to that self-murder added be line 17) by destroying the vessel holding her blood. In fact,

he says, she would be guilty of sacrilege, three sins in killing three (line 18) since his own blood is there too. He fails in his defense of the flea, for she has purpled her finger with the flea's blood by the opening of the third stanza (line 20). It is a sudden but perhaps inevitable betrayal of an innocent being. The woman claims triumph over the lover's argument, responding that neither she nor the man is weaker for her having killed the flea (lines 23-24). In this way she attempts to unravel the speakers argument that the flea represents a sacred bond between them; the flea is simple to kill and nothing has been lost, and the single drop of blood will not be missed. Thus there is no reason to have sex. The poet, however, is quick-witted enough to turn her argument back against her: if the death of the flea, which had partaken of just a tiny amount of their life-essences, is virtually no problem, despite his pretended fear, then any fear she might have about her loss of honor is equally a false fear. The act of physical union would cause virtually no serious harm to her reputation. That is, as much as she lost to the flea, Just so much honour, when thou yield'st to me, / Will waste, as this flea's death took life from thee (lines 26-27). He thus returns to his original argument from the first stanza: the fleas intimate contact with the woman has caused her no harm, so a physical encounter with the poet will cause no harm either. Although the lover suggests that he is in control and that it is a matter of "when thou yield'st," some feminist scholars have noted that he is powerless to do anything until the woman makes her decision. He merely utters his words of warning, but she can raise her hand and kill the flea; similarly, she can exercise her power by continuing to deny the man his desires. The flea could take what it wanted without stopping to woo, but the lover uses no force beyond the force of argument. He has not been successful so far, but we do not know what will happen next. "The Sunne Rising" The poet asks the sun why it is shining in and disturbing him and his lover in bed. The sun should go away and do other things rather than disturb them, like wake up ants or rush late schoolboys to start their day. Lovers should be permitted to make their own time as they see fit. After all, sunbeams are nothing compared to the power of love, and everything the sun might see around the world pales in comparison to the beloveds beauty, which encompasses it all. The bedroom is the whole world. Analysis The Sunne Rising is a 30-line poem in three stanzas, written with the poet/lover as the speaker. The meter is irregular, ranging from two to six stresses per line in no fixed pattern. The longest lines are generally at the end of the three stanzas, but Donnes focus here is not on perfect regularity. The rhyme, however, never varies, each stanza running abbacdcdee. The poets tone is mocking and railing as it addresses the sun, covering an undercurrent of desperate, perhaps even obsessive love and grandiose ideas of what his lover is. The poet personifies the sun as a busy old fool (line 1). He asks why it is shining in and disturbing us (4), who appear to be two lovers in bed. The sun is peeking through the curtains of the window of their bedroom, signaling the morning and the end of their time together. The speaker is annoyed, wishing that the day has not yet come (compare Juliets assurances that it is certainly not the morning, in Romeo and Juliet III.v). The poet then suggests that the sun go off and do other things rather than disturb them, such as going to tell the court huntsman that it is a day for the king to hunt, or to wake up ants, or to rush late schoolboys and apprentices to their duties. The poet wants to know why it is that to thy motions lovers

seasons run (4). He imagines a world, or desires one, where the embraces of lovers are not relegated only to the night, but that lovers can make their own time as they see fit. In the second stanza the poet continues to mock the sun, saying that its beams so reverend and strong are nothing compared to the power and glory of their love. He boasts that he could eclipse and cloud them *the sunbeams+ with a wink. In a way this is true; he can cut out the sun from his view by closing his eyes. Yet, the lover doesnt want to lose her sight so long as a wink would take. The poet is emphasizing that the sun has no real power over what he and his lover do, while he is the one who chooses to allow the sun in because by it he can see his lovers beauty. The lover then moves on to loftier claims. If her eyes have not blinded thine (13) implies that his beloveds eyes are more brilliant than sunlight. This was a standard Renaissance love-poem convention (compare Shakespeare My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun in Sonnet 130) to proclaim his beloveds loveliness. Indeed, the sun should tell me/Whether both thIndias of spice and mine/Be where thou lefst them, or lie here with me. Here, Donne lists wondrous and exotic places (the Indias are the West and East Indies, well known in Donnes time for their spices and precious metals) and says that his mistress is all of those things: All here in one bed lay (20). Shes all states, and all princes I(21). That is, all the beautiful and sovereign things in the world, which the sun meets as it travels the world each day, are combined in his mistress. This is a monstrous, bold comparison, a hyperbole of the highest order. As usual, such an extreme comparison leads us to see a spiritual metaphor in the poem. As strong as the suns light is, it pales in comparison to the spiritual light that shines from the divine and which brings man to love the divine. The strange process of reducing the entire world to the bed of the lovers reaches its zenith in the last stanza: In that the worlds contracted thus (26). Indeed, the sun need not leave the room; by shining on them thou art everywhere (29). The final line contains a play on the Ptolemaic astronomical idea that the Earth was the center of the universe, with the Sun rotating around the Earth: This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare. Here Donne again gives ultimate universal importance to the lovers, making all the physical world around them subject to them. This poem gives voice to the feeling of lovers that they are outside of time and that their emotions are the most important things in the world. There is something of the adolescent melodrama of first love here, which again suggests that Donne is exercising his intelligence and subtlety to make a different kind of point. While the love between himself and his lover may seem divine, metaphorically it can be true that divine love is more important than the things of this world. The conflation of the earth into the body of his beloved is a little more difficult to understand. Donne would not be the first man who likened his female lover to a field to be sown by him, or a country to be ruled by him. Yet, if she represents the world because God loves the world, is Donne really putting himself, as the one who loves, in the position of God? What we can say with some firmness is that the sun, which marks the passage of earthly time, is rejected as an authority. The seasons of lovers (with the pun on the seasons of the earth, also ruled by the sun) should not be ruled by the movements of the sun. There should be nothing above the whims and desires of lovers, as they feel, and on the spiritual level the sun is just one more creation of God; all time and physical laws are subject to God. That the sun, of course, will not heed a mans insults and orders is tacitly acknowledged. It will continue on its way each day, and one cannot wink it out of existence. There is nothing that the poet can do to change

the movements of the sun or the coming of the day, no matter how clever his comparisons. From his perspective, the whole world is right there with him, yet he knows that his perspective is limited. This conceit of railing against the sun and denying the reality of the world outside the bedroom closes the poem with a more heartfelt (and more believable) assertion that the bed thy center is. It can be imagined that here he is speaking more to himself, realizing that the time he has with his lover is more important to him than anything else in his life in this moment, even while the spiritual meaning of the poem extends to the suns relatively weak power compared with the cosmic forces of the divine. "The Canonization" The poet demands that some complainer leave him alone to love. The complainer should turn his attention elsewhere, and nobody is hurt by the love. They are not sinking ships or causing floods, delaying spring or causing others to die, or supporting wars or lawsuits. The poet and his lover take their own chances together; they are unified in their love. They are like candles that will burn out on their own, yet they have been reborn together in fire like the fabled Phoenix. On the other hand, their love is a beautiful example for the world that will be immortalized, canonized, a pattern for all other love in the world. Analysis In The Canonization, Donne sets up a five-stanza argument to demonstrate the purity and power of his love for another. Each stanza begins and ends with the word love. The fourth and eighth lines of each stanza end with a word also ending -ove (the pattern is consistently abbacccaa), all of which unifies the poem around a central theme. The title leads the reader to expect a poem concerned with saints and holy practices, but the very first lines sound more like a line delivered on stage. For Gods sake hold your tongue is nearly blasphemous when following the sacred title. By the end of the poem, the reader determines that canonization refers to the way that the poets love will enter the canon of true love, becoming the pattern by which others judge their own love. As usual, this hyperbole also leads the reader to find a spiritual or metaphysical meaning in the poem, and as usual, this will lead us to see that Donne sets out the perfection of divine love as the only realistic model for all others. In the first stanza the poet complains that his verbal assailant is misguided. Has he no more important work to do than criticize others love? He could just as easily attack Donnes gout or palsy (line 2) or even his five gray hairs (line 3), but he should get a job or go to school or enter a profession, so long as he leaves the poet alone. The kings stamp'd face (line 7) most likely refers to coinage with the kings likeness. The things of the world can be left to the critic and the world, so long as the critic will let me love (line 9). The second stanza takes a live-and-let-live individual rights perspective: who's injured by my love? (line 10). The lovers are not making war, fighting lawsuits, interfering with commerce, or spreading disease. They respect others property; his tears do not trespass. They take their own chances together in their fleeting lives, as the third paragraph notes. To the rest of the world, they are tiny flies, or candles that will burn together in peace. They may destroy themselves in the act of burning with passion for one another, yet by the middle of the poem, Donne translates their love to a higher plane. First he compares himself and his beloved to the eagle and dove, a reference to the Renaissance idea in which the eagle flies in the sky above the earth while the dove transcends the skies to reach heaven. He immediately shifts to the image of the Phoenix, another death-by-fire symbol (the Phoenix is a bird that repeatedly burns in fire and comes back to life out of the

ashes), suggesting that even though their flames of passion will consume them, the poet and his beloved will be reborn from the ashes of their love. In their resurrection, their relationship has become a paradox. The key paradox of love is that two individuals become one. By uniting in this way, they prove/Mysterious by this love (lines 26-27). These words may imply the mystery of marriage as it reflects the relationship of Jesus and his church, as stated by Paul in I Corinthians. Indeed, the new union is unsexed even though it incorporates both sexes: to one neutral thing both sexes fit, just like in Christ there is no longer any male or female (Galatians 3:28). Compare the story of love in Platos Symposium where the original human beings had the marks of both sexes before they were split into male and female, each person being left to seek his or her other half. The fourth stanza opens out to consider the legacy of the poets love with his beloved. Their love will endure in legend; the language of verse and chronicle suggests canonization at nearly the level of Scripture, which is counted by verses and has books called Chronicles. Even if their love is not quite at that level, songs will be sung and sonnets composed commemorating their romance. On the one hand, their love is self-contained and perfect, like a well-wrought urn. (This is a phrase that would become famous after poet John Keats wrote Ode on a Grecian Urn and critic Cleanth Brooks wrote a book treating each poem like its own beautifully and carefully crafted urn, full unto itself.) On the other hand, the ashes in this urn are meant to spread, in this case covering half an acre but symbolic of spreading the tale of perfect love throughout the world. The final stanza voices the poets sense of future vindication over the critic. The poet expects that the rest of the world will invoke himself and his beloved, similar to the way Catholics invoke saints in their prayers. In this vision of the future, the lovers legend has grown, and they have reached a kind of sainthood. They are role models for all the world, because Countries, towns, courts beg from above/A pattern of your love (lines 44-45). From the lovers perspective, the whole world is present as they look into each others eyes; this sets the pattern of love that the world can follow. "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" The poet begins by comparing the love between his beloved and himself with the passing away of virtuous men. Such men expire so peacefully that their friends cannot determine when they are truly dead. Likewise, his beloved should let the two of them depart in peace, not revealing their love to the laity. Earthquakes bring harm and fear about the meaning of the rupture, but such fears should not affect his beloved because of the firm nature of their love. Other lovers become fearful when distance separates thema much greater distance than the cracks in the earth after a quakesince for them, love is based on the physical presence or attractiveness of each other. Yet for the poet and his beloved, such a split is innocent, like the movements of the heavenly spheres, because their love transcends mere physicality. Indeed, the separation merely adds to the distance covered by their love, like a sheet of gold, hammered so thin that it covers a huge area and gilds so much more than a love concentrated in one place ever could. He finishes the poem with a longer comparison of himself and his wife to the two legs of a compass. They are joined at the top, and she is perfectly grounded at the center point. As he travels farther from the center, she leans toward him, and as he travels in his circles, she remains firm in the center, making his circles perfect. Analysis

The first two of the nine abab stanzas of A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning make up a single sentence, developing the simile of the passing of a virtuous man as compared to the love between the poet and his beloved. It is thought that Donne was in fact leaving for a long journey and wished to console and encourage his beloved wife by identifying the true strength of their bond. The point is that they are spiritually bound together regardless of the earthly distance between them. He begins by stating that the virtuous man leaves life behind so delicately that even his friends cannot clearly tell the difference. Likewise, Donne forbids his wife from openly mourning the separation. For one thing, it is no real separation, like the difference between a breath and the absence of a breath. For another thing, mourning openly would be a profanation of their love, as the spiritual mystery of a sacrament can be diminished by revealing the details to the laity (line 8). Their love is sacred, so the depth of meaning in his wifes tears would not be understood by those outside their marriage bond, who do not love so deeply. When Donne departs, observers should see no sign from Donnes wife to suggest whether Donne is near or far because she will be so steadfast in her love for him and will go about her business all the same. The third stanza suggests that the separation is like the innocent movement of the heavenly spheres, many of which revolve around the center. These huge movements, as the planets come nearer to and go farther from one another, are innocent and do not portend evil. How much less, then, would Donnes absence portend. All of this is unlike the worldly fear that people have after an earthquake, trying to determine what the motions and cleavages mean. In the fourth and fifth stanzas, Donne also compares their love to that of sublunary (earth-bound) lovers and finds the latter wanting. The love of others originates from physical proximity, where they can see each others attractiveness. When distance intervenes, their love wanes, but this is not so for Donne and his beloved, whose spiritual love, assured in each ones mind, cannot be reduced by physical distance like the love of those who focus on lips, and hands. The use of refined in the fifth stanza gives Donne a chance to use a metaphor involving gold, a precious metal that is refined through fire. In the sixth stanza, the separation is portrayed as actually a bonus because it extends the territory of their love, like gold being hammered into aery thinness without breaking (line 24). It thus can gild that much more territory. The final three stanzas use an extended metaphor in which Donne compares the two individuals in the marriage to the two legs of a compass: though they each have their own purpose, they are inextricably linked at the joint or pivot at the topthat is, in their spiritual unity in God. Down on the paperthe earthly realmone leg stays firm, just as Donnes wife will remain steadfast in her love at home. Meanwhile the other leg describes a perfect circle around this unmoving center, so long as the center leg stays firmly grounded and does not stray. She will always lean in his direction, just like the center leg of the compass. So long as she does not stray, Thy firmness makes my circle just, / And makes me end where I begun, back at home (lines 35-36). They are a team, and so long as she is true to him, he will be able to return to exactly the point where they left off before his journey.

Holy Sonnet 14, "Batter my heart"

The speaker asks God to intensify the effort to restore the speakers soul. Knocking at the door is not enough; God should overthrow him like a besieged town. His own reason has not been enough either, and he has engaged himself to Gods enemy. He asks God to break the knots holding him back, imprisoning him in order to free him, and taking him by force in order to purify him. Analysis In his holy sonnets, Donne blends elements of the Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet with the English (Shakespearean) sonnet. Here he begins in the Italian form abba abba, but his concluding idea in the third quatrain bleeds over into the rhyming couplet (cdcd cc) that completes the poem. The poet begins by asking God to increase the strength of divine force to win over the poets soul. He requests, Batter my heart (line 1), metaphorically indicating that he wants God to use force to assault his heart, like battering down a door. Thus far, God has only knocked, following the scriptural idea that God knocks and each person must let him in, yet this has not worked sufficiently for the poet. Simply to mend or shine him up is not drastic enough; instead God should take him by force, to break, blow, burn in order to help him stand and be made new (lines 3-4). This request indicates that the speaker considers his soul or heart too badly damaged or too sinful to be reparable; instead, God must re-create him to make him what he needs to be. The paradox is that he must be overthrown like a town in order to rise stronger. Indeed, the second quatrain begins with that metaphor, with the speaker now an usurpd town that owes its allegiance or due to someone else (line 5). He is frustrated that his reason, Gods viceroy in the town of his soul, is captive to other forces (such as worldly desire) and is failing to persuade him to leave his sins behind. The poet then moves from the political to the personal in the last six lines. He loves God, but he is betrothd unto *Gods+ enemy (line 9), the Satanic desires of the selfish heart (if not the devil himself). He seeks Gods help to achieve the divorce from his sinful nature and break the marriage knot (lines 1011). In the final couplet, he gives voice to the paradox of faith: the speaker can only be free if he is enthralled by God (line 13), and he can only be chaste and pure if God ravishes him (line 14). The poet uses this dissonance of ideas to point out just how holyin this case, otherworldly and spiritual in a carnal worldGod truly is. In other words, a relationship with God requires being reborn and rebuilt from the ground up, in but not of the world. Finally, since the speaker here suggests being in the female role of betrothal and ravishment (a city too tends to be coded as female), we once again see that the speaker is putting himself in the position of the Christian church generally. In the New Testament, the church is metaphorically said to be married to God. Can it be that, in Donnes eyes, the church still needs to be utterly reformed, even after the Reformation?