Poetry Practice (Comparison, John Donne)

Thesis: In both The Flea and The Apparition, the speakers try to seduce a woman into bed, but the the tones of the two poems contrast greatly, where The Flea has a more playful tone, and The Apparition has an almost threatening tone.

Although both poems focus on getting a woman into bed, The Flea has a more light-hearted tone. The speaker playfully tries to seduce the woman, using logic to convince her. He says, "In this flea our two bloods mingled be. / Thou know'st that this cannot be said / A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead; / Yet this enjoys before it woo, / And pampered swells with one blood made of two; / And this, alas! Is more than than we would do" (4-10), in order to express his belief that it isn't a big deal if they have sex. The speaker appeals to the woman's virtue when he explains that mixing of their blood in the flea would not be considered a sin and that a mixing of aspects of themselves in another way should also not be considered a sin. Although the speaker's reasoning is somewhat foolish, it indicates that he is joking with the woman. Although he wants to have sex with her, he is not angry and threatening, unlike the speaker in The Apparition.

The speaker in The Apparition is fiercely irritated that the woman will not have sex with him. Rather than using jocular reason like the speaker in The Flea, he becomes overwhelmed with his irritation and threatens the woman. He tells her that she is killing him because she will not sleep with him: "When by thy scorn, O Murd'ress, I am / dead" (1-2). He is angry that the woman continues to deny him and threatens to haunt the woman after he dies from her rejection: "Shall my ghost come to thy bed [...] And then, poor aspen wretch, [...] Bathed in cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie, A verier ghost than I" (6-15). The speaker says that he will return as a ghost to scare her to death in an attempt to make her have sex with him. He explains that her fate will inevitably be fatal if she does not have sex with him, and therefore should.