The Flea
A flea has bitten both of them, and the speaker builds on that fact an argument that their two bloods are already mingled inside it, so the thing she is withholding has in effect been given and can hardly be worth the fuss. Pressed, he raises the stakes: the insect is now marriage bed and marriage temple, and to crush it would be three sins in one, while her thumbnail waits over the thing. The flea poem was a whole minor genre of Renaissance Europe descending from the pseudo-Ovidian Carmen de pulice, and this is the specimen that outlived the rest.
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Attributes
Theme
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 74% · 12 shared
- 72% · 9 shared
- 66% · 11 shared
- 66% · 9 shared
- 64% · 9 shared
- 64% · 8 shared