As a member of the Baroque literary movement, John Donne investigated the themes of love, death, and religion to the point where he incorporated his thoughts and beliefs into his poetry. The 17th century saw the beginning of the metaphysical era in poetry since several poets expanded poems to include in-depth analyses of natural and intellectual laws and changed their views to the concept of love (Carey, 20). He wrote more about the sensual delights of being in a relationship with women in his early works, such as “The Flea” and “The Sunne Rising,” which demonstrate his sexist views. John Donne’s two poems reveal his longing for sensual pleasure and have many similarities.
Donne addresses a flea that has eaten the blood from both him and the woman he is enticing in “The Flea” to demonstrate his desire. In line 4, he refers to the mixing of blood (Kelly 85). In this poem, Donne uses the erotic image of a flea to suggest that the exchange of bodily fluids is comparable to having an intercourse.
“The Flea” poem’s subject matter exemplifies the same misogynistic mindset that John Donne had when writing his love poems. “The Sunne Rising” exhibits the same longing for sensual pleasure, which is the most evident similarity between the two. Donne’s lack of awareness of his surroundings and his obsession with sexual gratification are shown in both poems, and this unites them. He insults and challenges the sun repeatedly throughout the poem by personifying it. He commands the “unruly Sunne” to “goe chide late schoole boyes” (Line 6) or “Goe tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride” (Line 1) since he is worried and troubled by it. (Line 7) Donne’s only desire is to make love to the woman he sleeps with.
The poet looks down at such a strong object as the sun rather carelessly because he will not let anything stand in his way. “The Sunne Rising” perfectly encapsulates Donne’s immorality as he attempts to emphasize the significance of bodily passion by opposing and belittling the sun. His usage of the flea as a metaphor for sex in “The Flea” further demonstrates his misogynistic ideas. The latter form a general pattern which lets the readers see the parallelism of the tender tone and atmosphere. In both poems, the speaker is fixated on the sensual joys of love, and Donne tries to entice women for his sex arousal by degrading them into objects of pleasure.
Donne, who has sharply distanced himself from contemporary Petrarchan imitators, turns to the tradition of the Italian poet and creates his version of Petrarchanism. The poems “The Flea” and “The Sunne Rising” belong to this group; they play with the situation typical of the Petrarchan tradition – the unattainable lady condemns the hero for suffering by rejecting his love. This allows him to maintain a proper distance and look at the rejected lover with a smile. For the most part, the lover himself bears little resemblance to the languid lover. In both poems, he is able to analyze his feelings with wit and honesty.
As one of the most characteristic tendencies of his work as a poet, we can note the rejection of the musicality of Elizabethan lyricism and the focus on colloquial speech. Although Donne is able to compose very melodious poems, especially in the genre of song, his poetry is still dominated by conversational intonations. This trait can be clearly seen in “The Flea” and “The Sunne Rising” (Donne, Poems 27). They are equally saturated with appeals, exclamations, questions; they often have a complex rhythmic pattern and resemble dramatic monologues. The peculiarity of satires is also determined by their closeness to dramatic monologues. In the poems, the monologue is presented by an ironic and witty narrator who can sketch the portraits of his contemporaries with a few strokes and present their vices in a comic or grotesque form, depending on the situation.
Late school boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices (Donne, Poems, lines 7 – 9).
From the sonic point of view, the author uses more vivid alliteration in the poem flea. Perhaps this is necessary to emphasize the innovative and somewhat revolutionary approach to love expressed in the image of the flea.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.
Though parents grudge, and you, we’re met,
And cloistered in these living walls ofjet (Donne, The Flea, Lines 8 – 11).
Finally, “The Flea” and “The Sunne Rising” are equally in conflict with the value system that underpinned Elizabethan love poetry. From frequent repetition, many ideas and concepts from this realm have become stamps and have lost their ability to evoke an emotional response in the reader. Baroque art has always been suspicious of stamps and commonplaces since, for the Baroque mind, they were something frozen, static, and therefore devoid of vitality. Donne, challenging Petrarchan poetry, contrasts its Platonism and the excessive idealization of love relationships with the deliberate eroticism of his poems. The poems under analysis are imbued with a similar challenge.
Works Cited
Carey, J. A little history of poetry. Yale University Press, 2021.
Donne, John. John Donne: Poems. Faber, 2007.
Donne, John. The Flea. La Dïéresis Editorial Artesenal, 2014.
Kelly J. Mays. The Norton introduction to literature (13th Ed.). WW Norton, 2015.