"The Flea" John Donne Rachel Retica Transcription, correction, editorial commentary, and markup Students and Staff of the University of Virginia Rachel Retica National Endowment for the Humanities Literature in Context
University of Virginia Department of English P. O. Box 400121 Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121 jobrien@virginia.edu lic.open.anthology@gmail.com
Published by Literature in Context under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Unported License "The Flea" John Donne Poems, by J. D., With Elegies on the Authors Death London M. F. for John Marriot 1633 We have taken our text from the Text Creation Partnership's digitized version of the 1633 edition of Donne's poems: https://github.com/textcreationpartnership/A69225/blob/master/A69225.xml. Donne's poems circulated in manuscript during his life time, and were not issued in a print version until this edition, which came out after Donne's death in 1632. The long "s" of the original has been modernized, but we have otherwise kept the original spelling. The title page has been sourced from Princeton University Special Collections. 230-231 English print single poem London, England

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Original spelling and capitalization is retained, though the long s has been silently modernized and ligatured forms are not encoded.

Hyphenation has not been retained, except where necessary for the sense of the word.

Page breaks have been retained. Catchwords, signatures, and running headers have not.

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 Numbered divs used. Library of Congress Name Authority File Library of Congress Classification Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Open Researcher and Contributor ID John O'Brien created LIC edition. TH added line numbers, page image, title page xml POEMS, By J. D[onne].WITHELEGIESON THE AUTHOR'SDeath. LONDON. Printed by M. F. for [J]OHN MARRIOT,and are to be sold at his shop in St Dunstans Church-yard in Fleet-street. 1633.
The Flea. Marke but this flea, and marke in this, How little that which thou deny'st me is; It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee, And in this flea, our two bloods mingled bee; Thou know'st that this cannot be said A sinne, nor shame nor losse of maidenhead, Yet this enjoyes before it wooe, And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two, And this, alas, is more then wee would doe. Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare, Where wee almost, yea more then maryed are. This flea is you and I, and this Our mariage bed, and mariage temple is; Though parents grudge, and you, w'are met, And cloysterd in these living walls of Jet. Though use make you apt to kill mee, Let not to that, selfe murder added bee, And sacrilege, three sinnes in killing three. Cruell and sodaine, hast thou since Purpled thy naile, in blood of innocence? Wherein could this flea guilty bee, Except in that drop which it suckt from thee? Yet thou triumph'st, and saist that thou Find'st not thy selfe, nor mee the weaker now; 'Tis true, then learne how false, feares bee; Just so much honor, when thou yeeld'st to mee, Will wast, as this flea's death tooke life from thee.