Explication Of John Donne's 'The Flea'

Explication of "The Flea" John Donne's "The Flea" (rpt. in Thomas R. Arp and Greg Johnson, Perrine's Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, 8th ed. [Fort Worth: Harcourt, 2002] 890-891) explains that a teenage male will say almost anything in order to seduce a woman. The reader discovers that "The Flea" is about a man who is quick on his feet, clever, and persistent in trying to win the woman. With his poem, Donne also gives the reader an insight to his own life as a Casanova before entering the ministry.
This poem consists of three stanzas, which demonstrate the structure and meaning of the poem. The speaker compares the woman's life with the man to the flea while the woman is itching to kill it. In the first stanza, the man tries to seduce the woman. In the second stanza, the woman disagrees and disapproves of the seduction efforts. Finally, in the third stanza the man accepts the fact that she denies him, but tells her that he will not give up his efforts. Stanza I is a plea from the speaker to the woman for her to give up her virginity, which arranges a seductive tone for the opening stanza. During the Renaissance time, the belief was that when a man and a woman had sex, there was an exchange of blood. Therefore, as the speaker says that the flea "suck'd me first, and now sucks
The tone hints back toward seduction when the man says that killing the flea is as simple as the woman giving in to the temptation the man has set out for her. He again tries to make his plea by asking the woman, "Wherein could this flea guilty be, / Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?" where the man asks how the flea has done something wrong by biting her and why she wants to kill it and their false marriage. After the woman kills the flea, the man says that even though they did not die from that, he will still pursue