"The Flea" Commentary

In "The Flea" by John Donne, he uses symbolism and metaphor to show the speaker's lust and his longing for and effort to persuade the woman for her virginity. Donne does this in the structure of three stanzas with an AA, BB, CC, DDD rhyme sceme, to help reinforce the speaker's attempt to persuade the woman. In doing this Donne creates a pressuring and desperate tone as he uses the flea's body as a symbol for intimacy in an ongoing metaphor throughout the entire poem.
In the first stanza, the speaker introduces the idea of the flea as he begins to persuade the woman he has great lust for. He states, "And in this flea, our two bloods mingled be" as he brings in the flea as a symbol for sex. In this time period the people believed when a couple had sex their bloods became mixed, and in a flea this same occurence happens. Here, the speaker is saying to the woman that in the flea they have already technically had sex because their bloods have been mixed, so it would not really be that much of a sin if they had pre-marital sex. The speaker continues on with this flea symbol and ongoing metaphor as he attemts to still persuade her in stanza two though near the end brings up the idea of killing the flea. By killing the flea, he means the woman would kill the idea of having sex, deny and reject him. In the last line he states, "And sacrilege, three sins in killing three" meaning that if she were to kill the flea she would technically be killing him, herself and the flea, which happen to be three horrible sins and still in an effort to persuade her, he tries to show her that it would be much easier to just commit one sin and have sex with him.
Lastly in stanza three the Donne sort of switches the poem to an accusatory and ashamed one. The woman has now killed the flea, and in killing it denied the speaker in the act of sex. Donne shows this switch of tone when the speaker states, "Cruel and sudden, hast thou since, Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?" as if the speaker is trying to make the woman feel as though she has committed a horrible sin and she is in the wrong. He uses the words cruel and sudden to contribute to the tone and uses the words in blood of innocence when relating to her virginity and that she killed the "flea" or the idea of having pre-marital sex when it was innocent or not bad/something sinful.
In "The Flea" by John Donne, he uses symbolism and metaphor to show the speaker's lust and his longing for and effort to persuade the woman for her virginity. He uses the structure to contribute to the speakers attempted persuasion as if he were going through he were arguing with everything the woman is worried about. As the flea unravels as a symbol for the pre-marital sex the speaker wants from this woman, Donne creates a fluxuation of the tone as the speaker argues with the woman. Without these literary techniques, Donne would not have been able to get across the speaker's longing and the woman's defiance of pre-marital sex as well as he did.