When I read this, I was pretty sure he was writing it to Anne - she probably is also the subject of Elegy 19, aka 'To His Mistress, Going to Bed'. I just read his Devotions 12 yesterday, and Donne definitely did not think fleas were as harmless as the artful conceit in the poem might convey:
"For they that write of poisons, and of creatures naturally disposed to the ruin of man, do as well mention the flea as the viper, because the flea, though he kill none, he does all the harm he can".
It made me remember just how harmful the human flea, a species now nearly extinct in the West due to hygiene, the vaccum cleaner, and central heating, was in Donne's day. The last Great Plague of London occured over three decades after Donne's death. It was fleas in a bundle of cloth carried by a tailor's assistant from London that so fatefully carried the Plague to the rural village of Eyam, the courageous village that voluntarily, with the leadership of its minister, sealed itself off from the surrounding countryside to stop the Plague's spread, a story I read in childhood from a very old book and recalled in recent years during the lockdowns: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-35064071
I’ve taught this poem to college students so often and get caught up in explaining the metaphysical view of sex it offers, that this time around I ended up thinking a lot more about the flea and just how realistic the scene is in that way. It’s really something.
Also, at the risk of TMI, I was doing more cleaning this week and cleaned out a cleaning supply closet and ended up throwing away a very old can of flea spray. It made me remember how just a couple decades ago fleas were a much common problem for pet owners. But now we have so many more medications we can give them that are preventative and it’s really a blessing!
Anyone else remember having to “flea bomb” your house? There’s even a Seinfeld episode about that if I remember correctly.
One of the few places where bubonic plague is still endemic is in Madagascar, and those trying to eliminate the problem have discovered fleas are more prevalent in houses with grass matting that keep animals inside. The matting keeps humidity at the correct levels for flea eggs, while the animals provide a secondary host.
By the way, I found a vintage copy of all Donne's religious poems and devotions, published by a Peter Pauper Press. There is no publication date, but it has the look of a book published in the 1940s.
Speaking of books, I can barely read horror. I used to think I was pretty strong minded, watching a lot of gritty films, but after becoming a nurse and being repeatedly confronted with true human horrors, imagined ones either do not ring true or provoke a deep visceral response that I can only describe as being like a triggered PTSD flashback.
I don't think you have had a Pollyanna real life - getting hit by a bus and betrayed by trusted colleagues are real life horror. You just probably don't see a resemblance between those and the stories you read. I often don't know quite why I get triggered (unless it is snakes - I know exactly why I am triggered by images of snakes) and it shifts over time. I used to really enjoy the film 'Mad Max: Fury Road' in the past - ultra violent car chase flicks are *not* my thing, but Fury Road has such a redemptive theme - but the other week I tried watching it and found myself experiencing such a visceral terror that I had to stop watching. I have no idea what changed for me.
Oh goodness, Karen--thank you! I read this in my Donne volume in the original language; the modern English didn't help much :-) I knew two lovers (married, yes?) were in bed and a flea was present but sooooo did not make any other connections. There is always much more depth to a poem than what's on the surface--I appreciate the help in being shown what to look for.
Your last few lines wrapped it up well--
"Donne shows the absurdity of a completely materialist view that would understand the sexual act as something only physical and therefore as insignificant as two people being bitten by the same flea. Pretending it is so shows why it is not so."
P.S. adding a vote/request to maybe look at "The Baite"??? ("Come live with me and be my love").
I think Holly is right that Anne is the subject of Elegy 19 and of the elegy you wrote about (17?). An implication of this is that, although we have the story of the ladies-man John Donne and the Preacher, eroticism doesn't disappear for the married man.
That should be obvious. But culturally, perhaps dating to some Christian era of the past, the erotic has been divorced from the married, with the result that the erotic is always naughty and/or fornication-adjacent. This has been true for a very long time, but I wish that frank eroticism and marriage were more often thought complementary. (Not to return to the "smokin' hot wives" discourse, though.) I think of the sonnets which make up Spenser's Amoretti: written to his wife, they evince both yearning and satisfaction, but not crudely so.
Very good points. I was thanking that Donne's erotic poetry is beautiful because it is right that a man who falls in love with and then marries a woman should regard her in such a light. After all, the Bible contains the Song of Songs, which is much more bluntly erotic in description than Donne's metaphysical imagery.
Donne's Holy Sonnet 17 is clearly written after Anne's death, and in it, he seems to set aside any question of marrying again. His biographer Izaak Walton said that Donne did not marry again in order to provide for his children - if one thinks about it, a second marriage, between marriage settlements and the possibility of more children, a second marriage might well have incurred more expense. Donne might have began his life as something of a libertine, but he ended it by generously living for others, rather than himself, and truly being a one-woman man.
If you like writers who started out erotic and ended up all spiritual, Theodore Beza’s your man!
But in regard to the fantasy, I’ll say it again: I think you might like The Silmarillion. It’s basically a Northern European mythic saga like Volsunga or Kalevala, which is why many dislike it but you might like it.
I don’t like myth either, haha! (Seems like fantasy) but that is one book I should try. I did recently read Out of the Silent Planet and it was ok. It was good until it turned into a lesser version of Gulliver’s Travels (which I adore).
So you read it! I can see the resemblance to Gulliver's Travels in the descriptions of Mars, but when I read 'Out of the Silent Planet' I am less interested in the imagined societies of Mars, but in what Random is learning about his own planet and humanity.
I read 'Gulliver's Travels' in early childhood after my father read it to us when I was very young, and for a while it was a favourite book. But as I got older, Gulliver began to seem more and more unlikable. One day, somewhere in my teens, as I reread his final description of how badly he treated his household after returning from the land of the Houyhnhnms, I decided Gulliver was an insufferable prig and never read it again. I now understand that Swift's purpose was satire and Gulliver isn't intended to be relatable the way a central novel figure was in later literature, but because I had thought he was a relatable character in childhood, the distaste lingers.
That makes sense (the distaste). But I still think Silent Planet is too derivative of GT—Ransom, like Gulliver, learns about his own society by learning about the new one. And Swift’s satire is funny. I’m going to have to cover GT in this series! 😀
🙂 Well, it is probably time for me to revisit GT as a mature reader.
I would say Ransom's discoveries aren't about his society, but spiritual discoveries. At the beginning, Ransom isn't overtly a person of faith - he has had a typical English religious education, but hasn't clearly applied it to himself. But seeing the effects in Mars of what happened when his planet went silent, and then telling the Oyarsa what Maleldil did to rescue Ransom's world (Oyarsa's lack of knowledge on this subject is a direct reference to I Peter 1:12) brings Ransom to a firmer understanding of a faith he only nominally held before.
I am really going to think about doing GT. I am afraid I will lose a lot of interest from readers. 😂 But I also have to figure out if I will do this survey in one go-round, or come back to things we missed in another…
Another great entry. Also, bonus points for modelling how to interact with sexual themes in literature in an actually adult way. Should it require a Ph.D in Literature to do it? No. But when the world is full of grown men getting paid to write and talk like teenage boys, it's good that you are.
Rachael, thanks for making this point. It’s not something I thought much about, having taught literature for so long and learning to do so professionally and care-fully. But you are right: why do so many leaders who should do better not do better?
I may say something about Donne later, but a thought about S. King. I first read him, Salem's Lot, when I was too young for it. Then, because I am squeamish about some visual imagery (I walked straight out of Slumdog Millionaire when the blinding occurred), I associated King with movies I wouldn't see (Shawshank excepted). I very occasionally read his nonfiction, On Writing (which everyone who wants to write should read) and Guns.
Then the university where I taught changed its curriculum and we had a course titled Monsters, Freaks, and Geeks, and I was assigned to teach it. The first round I still avoided King, but when the course came up again, I decided I was avoiding a canonical writer for the course. So, to not spend endless time on him, I assigned short story selections from Nightmares and Dreamscapes, a number of which directly allude to Poe and Shirley Jackson. I think my students enjoyed my choices, as did I.
Last summer, post-retiredment [sic], I bought and read the Night Shift short stories. And I think "Children of the Corn" is an excellent short story! So much to discuss in that story. So well put together. (So unlikely to persuade me to see its multiple movies.) I would love to teach it. And I think a person can try the story as a Kindle single for a dollar. All the caveats and cautions Karen gives apply, but if a person is willing to take a chance . . .
I'll mention something I got from it: the children are a cult with some very plausible exterior trappings of a pseudo-Christian faith. But one sees that there once existed a valid Christian presence in that community. The story is of our moment.
Thanks for sharing your experience with King, Jack. I love that you returned to him and saw him in a different light.
His detective series is excellent. Folks might be interested in that who don’t like horror.
And Misery is in a class all by itself. The novel and the film are both excellent in their own ways. Almost entirely different works.
I’m pretty sure I read Carrie when I was Carrie’s age. It made some weird sense for all of us girls in that moment. The novel itself became a rite of passage. At least for me. 😅
When I read this poem, I thought, "This is about death." I'm just kidding, but it was over my head on the first reading. However, I did pick up some parts of it simply from your previous teaching, so I count that as a win. It's a clever poem. Honestly, (after your excellent explanation), it's brilliant. Fleas are the last thing on my mind when I attempt to write.
So, I was allowed to watch "Misery" when it came out, and it threw me off reading Stephen King. I've watched it as an adult because, I mean, Kathy Bates is an excellent actress. I was also allowed to watch this old film called "Chop chop, Sweet Charlotte" fairly young, and that movie is truly horror. Haha. I don't mind that kind of horror, but I can't stomach gore movies like "Nightmare on Elm Street."
When I read this, I was pretty sure he was writing it to Anne - she probably is also the subject of Elegy 19, aka 'To His Mistress, Going to Bed'. I just read his Devotions 12 yesterday, and Donne definitely did not think fleas were as harmless as the artful conceit in the poem might convey:
"For they that write of poisons, and of creatures naturally disposed to the ruin of man, do as well mention the flea as the viper, because the flea, though he kill none, he does all the harm he can".
It made me remember just how harmful the human flea, a species now nearly extinct in the West due to hygiene, the vaccum cleaner, and central heating, was in Donne's day. The last Great Plague of London occured over three decades after Donne's death. It was fleas in a bundle of cloth carried by a tailor's assistant from London that so fatefully carried the Plague to the rural village of Eyam, the courageous village that voluntarily, with the leadership of its minister, sealed itself off from the surrounding countryside to stop the Plague's spread, a story I read in childhood from a very old book and recalled in recent years during the lockdowns: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-35064071
I’ve taught this poem to college students so often and get caught up in explaining the metaphysical view of sex it offers, that this time around I ended up thinking a lot more about the flea and just how realistic the scene is in that way. It’s really something.
Also, at the risk of TMI, I was doing more cleaning this week and cleaned out a cleaning supply closet and ended up throwing away a very old can of flea spray. It made me remember how just a couple decades ago fleas were a much common problem for pet owners. But now we have so many more medications we can give them that are preventative and it’s really a blessing!
Anyone else remember having to “flea bomb” your house? There’s even a Seinfeld episode about that if I remember correctly.
One of the few places where bubonic plague is still endemic is in Madagascar, and those trying to eliminate the problem have discovered fleas are more prevalent in houses with grass matting that keep animals inside. The matting keeps humidity at the correct levels for flea eggs, while the animals provide a secondary host.
By the way, I found a vintage copy of all Donne's religious poems and devotions, published by a Peter Pauper Press. There is no publication date, but it has the look of a book published in the 1940s.
Speaking of books, I can barely read horror. I used to think I was pretty strong minded, watching a lot of gritty films, but after becoming a nurse and being repeatedly confronted with true human horrors, imagined ones either do not ring true or provoke a deep visceral response that I can only describe as being like a triggered PTSD flashback.
Also, congrats on the book find! 🙌
I am pretty pleased, even if the edition has that semicolon in 'Death be not proud'.
That really makes sense. I do think my love of horror and other “gritty” fiction (and films) is owing on part to a pretty Pollyanna real life.
I don't think you have had a Pollyanna real life - getting hit by a bus and betrayed by trusted colleagues are real life horror. You just probably don't see a resemblance between those and the stories you read. I often don't know quite why I get triggered (unless it is snakes - I know exactly why I am triggered by images of snakes) and it shifts over time. I used to really enjoy the film 'Mad Max: Fury Road' in the past - ultra violent car chase flicks are *not* my thing, but Fury Road has such a redemptive theme - but the other week I tried watching it and found myself experiencing such a visceral terror that I had to stop watching. I have no idea what changed for me.
Well, I almost added “until recently.”…I do have trouble seeing vehicular accidents in movies now. And there are a LOT!
Oh goodness, Karen--thank you! I read this in my Donne volume in the original language; the modern English didn't help much :-) I knew two lovers (married, yes?) were in bed and a flea was present but sooooo did not make any other connections. There is always much more depth to a poem than what's on the surface--I appreciate the help in being shown what to look for.
Your last few lines wrapped it up well--
"Donne shows the absurdity of a completely materialist view that would understand the sexual act as something only physical and therefore as insignificant as two people being bitten by the same flea. Pretending it is so shows why it is not so."
P.S. adding a vote/request to maybe look at "The Baite"??? ("Come live with me and be my love").
I think sometimes the surface itself is just hard and complicated. Every word has to be closely examined and we aren’t used to reading that way!
I will try to work in “The Bait” at your request!
I think Holly is right that Anne is the subject of Elegy 19 and of the elegy you wrote about (17?). An implication of this is that, although we have the story of the ladies-man John Donne and the Preacher, eroticism doesn't disappear for the married man.
That should be obvious. But culturally, perhaps dating to some Christian era of the past, the erotic has been divorced from the married, with the result that the erotic is always naughty and/or fornication-adjacent. This has been true for a very long time, but I wish that frank eroticism and marriage were more often thought complementary. (Not to return to the "smokin' hot wives" discourse, though.) I think of the sonnets which make up Spenser's Amoretti: written to his wife, they evince both yearning and satisfaction, but not crudely so.
Very good points. I was thanking that Donne's erotic poetry is beautiful because it is right that a man who falls in love with and then marries a woman should regard her in such a light. After all, the Bible contains the Song of Songs, which is much more bluntly erotic in description than Donne's metaphysical imagery.
Donne's Holy Sonnet 17 is clearly written after Anne's death, and in it, he seems to set aside any question of marrying again. His biographer Izaak Walton said that Donne did not marry again in order to provide for his children - if one thinks about it, a second marriage, between marriage settlements and the possibility of more children, a second marriage might well have incurred more expense. Donne might have began his life as something of a libertine, but he ended it by generously living for others, rather than himself, and truly being a one-woman man.
😭😭😭
Yup. Totally agree. Song of Songs is the example we have as Christian’s!
If you like writers who started out erotic and ended up all spiritual, Theodore Beza’s your man!
But in regard to the fantasy, I’ll say it again: I think you might like The Silmarillion. It’s basically a Northern European mythic saga like Volsunga or Kalevala, which is why many dislike it but you might like it.
I don’t like myth either, haha! (Seems like fantasy) but that is one book I should try. I did recently read Out of the Silent Planet and it was ok. It was good until it turned into a lesser version of Gulliver’s Travels (which I adore).
I think only God can help you at this point. haha
😩😂😂😂
So you read it! I can see the resemblance to Gulliver's Travels in the descriptions of Mars, but when I read 'Out of the Silent Planet' I am less interested in the imagined societies of Mars, but in what Random is learning about his own planet and humanity.
I read 'Gulliver's Travels' in early childhood after my father read it to us when I was very young, and for a while it was a favourite book. But as I got older, Gulliver began to seem more and more unlikable. One day, somewhere in my teens, as I reread his final description of how badly he treated his household after returning from the land of the Houyhnhnms, I decided Gulliver was an insufferable prig and never read it again. I now understand that Swift's purpose was satire and Gulliver isn't intended to be relatable the way a central novel figure was in later literature, but because I had thought he was a relatable character in childhood, the distaste lingers.
That makes sense (the distaste). But I still think Silent Planet is too derivative of GT—Ransom, like Gulliver, learns about his own society by learning about the new one. And Swift’s satire is funny. I’m going to have to cover GT in this series! 😀
🙂 Well, it is probably time for me to revisit GT as a mature reader.
I would say Ransom's discoveries aren't about his society, but spiritual discoveries. At the beginning, Ransom isn't overtly a person of faith - he has had a typical English religious education, but hasn't clearly applied it to himself. But seeing the effects in Mars of what happened when his planet went silent, and then telling the Oyarsa what Maleldil did to rescue Ransom's world (Oyarsa's lack of knowledge on this subject is a direct reference to I Peter 1:12) brings Ransom to a firmer understanding of a faith he only nominally held before.
Hmmm…probably worth a re-read at some point.
I am really going to think about doing GT. I am afraid I will lose a lot of interest from readers. 😂 But I also have to figure out if I will do this survey in one go-round, or come back to things we missed in another…
Another great entry. Also, bonus points for modelling how to interact with sexual themes in literature in an actually adult way. Should it require a Ph.D in Literature to do it? No. But when the world is full of grown men getting paid to write and talk like teenage boys, it's good that you are.
Rachael, thanks for making this point. It’s not something I thought much about, having taught literature for so long and learning to do so professionally and care-fully. But you are right: why do so many leaders who should do better not do better?
I may say something about Donne later, but a thought about S. King. I first read him, Salem's Lot, when I was too young for it. Then, because I am squeamish about some visual imagery (I walked straight out of Slumdog Millionaire when the blinding occurred), I associated King with movies I wouldn't see (Shawshank excepted). I very occasionally read his nonfiction, On Writing (which everyone who wants to write should read) and Guns.
Then the university where I taught changed its curriculum and we had a course titled Monsters, Freaks, and Geeks, and I was assigned to teach it. The first round I still avoided King, but when the course came up again, I decided I was avoiding a canonical writer for the course. So, to not spend endless time on him, I assigned short story selections from Nightmares and Dreamscapes, a number of which directly allude to Poe and Shirley Jackson. I think my students enjoyed my choices, as did I.
Last summer, post-retiredment [sic], I bought and read the Night Shift short stories. And I think "Children of the Corn" is an excellent short story! So much to discuss in that story. So well put together. (So unlikely to persuade me to see its multiple movies.) I would love to teach it. And I think a person can try the story as a Kindle single for a dollar. All the caveats and cautions Karen gives apply, but if a person is willing to take a chance . . .
I'll mention something I got from it: the children are a cult with some very plausible exterior trappings of a pseudo-Christian faith. But one sees that there once existed a valid Christian presence in that community. The story is of our moment.
Thanks for sharing your experience with King, Jack. I love that you returned to him and saw him in a different light.
His detective series is excellent. Folks might be interested in that who don’t like horror.
And Misery is in a class all by itself. The novel and the film are both excellent in their own ways. Almost entirely different works.
I’m pretty sure I read Carrie when I was Carrie’s age. It made some weird sense for all of us girls in that moment. The novel itself became a rite of passage. At least for me. 😅
When I read this poem, I thought, "This is about death." I'm just kidding, but it was over my head on the first reading. However, I did pick up some parts of it simply from your previous teaching, so I count that as a win. It's a clever poem. Honestly, (after your excellent explanation), it's brilliant. Fleas are the last thing on my mind when I attempt to write.
So, I was allowed to watch "Misery" when it came out, and it threw me off reading Stephen King. I've watched it as an adult because, I mean, Kathy Bates is an excellent actress. I was also allowed to watch this old film called "Chop chop, Sweet Charlotte" fairly young, and that movie is truly horror. Haha. I don't mind that kind of horror, but I can't stomach gore movies like "Nightmare on Elm Street."
Thanks again for teaching.