The Concept of Love in John Donne's The Flea and to His Mistress Going to Bed

In order to truly grasp how John Donne (1572 - 1631) regards and treats the concept of love in his poems, one must be well aware of the fact that his love poems never refer to one single unchanging view of love. Instead, in Donne’s love poems, not only can one find a wide variety of emotions presented, but there are also his contrasting attitudes towards love. Among Donne’s many different love experiences, however, both ‘The Flea’ and ‘To His Mistress Going To Bed’ can be viewed as Donne’s attempts to glorify the physical nature of love, most guiltlessly and shamelessly, to reject and challenge the Petrarchan traditional idea of courtly love, and to equate physical love to the spiritual love by transforming its mere physicality into a celebration of holy union between souls and God.

Both ‘The Flea’ and ‘To His Mistress Going To Bed’ are dedicated to Donne’s glorifying of the physical nature of love. ‘The Flea’ is all about seduction and persuasion, and love-making is depicted as both natural, innocuous and even heretical. In ‘The Flea’, the speaker of the poem endeavours to invalid the young lady’s moral concerns and to convince her to surrender her virginity to him by taking the advantage of a flea. In the first stanza, the speaker explains to the young lady that after the flea has sucked both their blood, the two of them already become one through their blood mingling in the flea’s body, as a result if such a commonplace occurrence “... cannot be said / A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead” (line 5-6), then sexual intercourse between them should also be considered harmless and shameless. Later in stanza three, after the young lady has killed the flea in spite of the objection of the speaker, he describes her concern for the loss of chastity as “false fears” (line 25) since having sexual intercourse with him should be of no greater consequences than an act as simple as killing the flea. Under Donne’s pen, therefore, even premarital sex becomes glorified as natural and innocuous.

In ‘To His Mistress Going To Bed’, not only is the physical nature of love without guilt or shame, but that it is also glorified as a happy and exciting exploratory adventure. ‘To His Mistress Going To Bed’ is all about praising the sensual pleasure of a young lady’s body. The poem unfolds as the speaker of the poem waits and witnesses his mistress undress before him in stages. Such an experience is full of excitement and anticipation for the speaker, as he claims that “... All joys are due to thee, As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be, To taste whole joys.” (line 32-35) and thus “full nakedness!” (line 32) is what brings him joys. The speaker also deems the young lady’s body as an unexplored land that is waiting for him to conquer, as he describes her body as “O my America! my new-found-land” (line 27) and that during the exploration he establishes “My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d” (line 28). ‘To His Mistress Going To Bed’ therefore is a piece of celebration of the physical pleasure in love.

Donne’s glorifying of the physical nature of love consequently rejects and challenges the Petrarchan notion of love. In Petrarchan poetry, the mistresses are usually chaste and remote while the male lovers would be constantly devotional yet eventually suffering from unrequited love. In ‘The Flea’ and ‘To His Mistress Going To Bed’, however, unlike his prevailing works in Petrarchan poetry, Donne creates an entirely different scene with the idea of a courtly love non-existent. In ‘To His Mistress Going To Bed’, the heroine is far away from being remote to the male lover, as she has a real physical presence in the poem, which is in the bedroom with the speaker. In ‘The Flea’, unlike how the male lovers would usually try to win over the mistresses with beautiful and unrealistic languages in the Petrarchan love poetry, in ‘The Flea’ the speaker uses an unromantic imagery of a mediocre animal, the flea as the metaphor for his intimate relationship with the young lady, in order to persuade her to sexually connect with him. Most importantly, both ‘The Flea’ and ‘To His Mistress Going To Bed’ stress on the immediate physical satisfaction which is a direct contrary to the chastity spirit of the Petrarchan world.

Apart from glorifying the physical nature of love and consequently breaking the Petrarchan conventional notion of love, in ‘The Flea’ and ‘To His Mistress Going To Bed’, Donne also equates the physical love with the spiritual love by transforming the mere physical union into a more holy union between soul and soul, and even between soul and God. In ‘The Flea’, the flea becomes the representation of the sacred and holy religious ritual of marriage between the speaker and the young lady as he claims to her that “This flea is you and I, and this Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.” (line 12-13). The blood that the flea carries in its body not only represents the essence of life, but it also symbolizes different aspects of life under Donne’s pen, from the physical passion to the religious devotion. In the second stanza, the “three lives in one flea spare” (line 10) also refers to the flea as a sacred ideal of the holy trinity of the Bible. The many religious metaphors presented in ‘The Flea’ therefore, can be regarded as an indication of Donne’s belief that the physical union with women can also bring him closer to the union with God.

Such a connection between the physical love and the spiritual love can be also reflected in Donne’s adaptation of the Neoplatonic conception of love in ‘To His Mistress Going To Bed’. The Neoplatonic conception of love treats the physical love as the lowest rung of the ladder. Once there is the appearance of physical love, it can then move onto the higher rungs of the ladder and eventually progress as the love for God and for spiritual beauty. In ‘To His Mistress Going To Bed’, the speaker suggests in “As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be” (line 35) that the spiritual connection of two souls outside the body is crucial. The speaker compares his mistress with an angel, as in “In such white robes, heaven’s Angels used to be Received by men; Thou Angel bringst with thee A heaven like Mahomet’s Paradise” (line 19-21). Angel symbolizes the divine mediate between human beings and God, and therefore here in the poem the speaker believes that his love for her, be it merely physical admiration or not, can help bring him closer to God.

Despite Donne’s many changing views of love, ‘The Flea’ and ‘To His Mistress Going To Bed’ share a lot of similarities. In both poems, Donne glorifies the physical nature of love, rendering it not only natural and innocuous, but also exciting and worthy of celebration. Such a glorifying of the physical pleasure in love then in turn rejects and challenges the conventional Petrarchan notion of courtly love and its spirits of chastity. Finally, in both poems, Donne also equates the physical love with the spiritual love, transforming the physical union into the holy union between souls and God.