John Donne's "The Flea" is one of the cleverest propositions for intimate relations in all of literature. We can picture the speaker and his beloved sitting somewhere close together. The speaker would like to get closer yet, but his beloved is putting a stop to that. He draws her attention to a flea that has apparently just bit both of them, and the speaker points out that their blood is now mixed in this flea. There is no shame in that, he argues; yet his beloved is unwilling to mix in other ways.

In the second stanza, the beloved moves to kill the flea, and the speaker facetiously pleads for the flea's life. Their blood is mingled in that little body, he says, so it is like a marriage bed or marriage temple. Killing that flea, he continues, would be like murder and suicide and sacrilege all in one. Spare the flea, he appeals.

We can almost picture the beloved raising her eyebrows and rolling her eyes as she unceremoniously squishes the flea. In the final stanza, the speaker mourns the little insect that was guilty only of sucking little drops of blood. His beloved is cruel, he says, and he implies that she is more cruel to him than to the flea, because she will not give in to his desires. The beloved remarks that they are certainly not weaker now that the flea is dead (so much for murder and suicide).

The speaker ends with the suggestion that perhaps their intimacy would be just as easy as the flea's death and would rob his beloved of nothing more than she lost when she killed the flea. We never learn if the beloved is convinced by his creative proposition.