Selected Poems by John Donne

‘O stay, three lives in one flea spare,’ – the ‘lives’ are the blood of the flea, the speaker and his beloved (though another possibility is that Donne is thinking of a new being, offspring of the ‘mingling of bloods,’ alongside the ‘bloods’ of the lovers considered separately).

‘Where we almost, yea, more than married are.’ – As their blood has mingled in the flea, they are ‘almost’ married. Pretending to think aloud, the speaker corrects this to ‘more than married’ as a ‘pregnancy’ has already taken place in the ‘womb’ of the flea’s carapace. This is the fruit of marriage.

‘This flea is you and I, and this/Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.’ – As the lovers are married within the flea, the insect combines the two required elements of marriage: the ‘temple,’ for the public vows, and the bed, for consummation.

‘And cloister'd in these living walls of jet.’ – ‘cloister’d’ implies the seclusion of monastics, implying something holy about their union.

‘Though use make you apt to kill me,/Let not to that self-murder added be,/And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.’ – ‘Though use…’ means that the lady has got into the habit of ‘killing’ the speaker, presumably through unkindness, and the withholding of her favour. In killing the flea, she would spill the speaker’s blood (murder), as well as her own (suicide), and she would also destroy their marriage temple or church (the flea) thus committing sacrilege.

‘Wherein could this flea guilty be,’ – The speaker argues that all the flea has done is to take a drop of her blood.

‘Yet thou triumph'st, and say'st that thou/Find'st not thyself nor me the weaker now.’ – The logic here is that she has ‘spilt her own blood,’ but feels no weaker.

‘Just so much honour, when thou yield'st to me,/Will waste, as this flea's death took life from thee.’ – The speaker promises that his beloved will feel just as little hurt to her honour as a flea bite when she yields herself to him.

Language

The beauty of this poem, like so much of Donne, is the way in which our imaginations are stretched to encompass widely varying dimensions. The flea is miniscule, ugly and rather an unpleasant thing to contemplate.