Flea
A red flushed flea takes
intimacy
from the blood of its host
crawls about the house,
visits every bedroom
visits every bedroom
until each inhabitant is
tasted.
It is an easy thing to
feast
on those who sleep alone in
gray-walled rooms. For now
gray-walled rooms. For now
the parasite is full, sated
on
the plasma from nearby duct
work.
Women Bathing -- Nicolas Lancret
Fleas (Siphonaptera) include 2,500 species of small flightless insects that survive as external parasites of mammals and birds, consuming blood from their hosts. In Jonathan Swift's 1733 "On Poetry: a Rhapsody" he intoned
ReplyDeleteThe vermin only teaze and pinch
Their foes superior by an inch.
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.
Thus every poet, in his kind,
Is bit by him that comes behind
Artists of the 18th century paid particular attention to fleas, who lived inside wigs, on pets, and in beds. The Parisian painter Lancret delighted in depicting ladies searching themselves for fleas and bathing in an effort to remove them. A flea in French is "la puce." According to Isaac D'Israeli (a noted author like his son Benjamin, the future prime minister), in his "Domestic anecdotes of the French nation, during the last thirty years, indicative of the French revolution" (1800), "IOn the summer of 1775, the queen [Marie Anroinette] being dressed, in a brown lutestring, the king [Louis XVI] good humouredly observed, it was “couleur de puce”, the colour of fleas; and instantly every lady would be drest in a lutestring of a flea colour. The mania was caught by the men; and the dyers in vain exhausted themselves to supply the hourly demand. They distinguished between, an old and a young flea, and they subdivided even the shades of the body of this insect; the belly, the back, the thigh, and the head, were all marked by varying shades of this colour. This prevailing tint promised to be the fashion of the winter." In the early 1700s Franz Ernst Brückmann, a German physician, invented the flea trap, which became a popular fashion accessory worn on a ribbon as a necklace hanging down inside a dress; a hollow perforated cylindrical tube of silver or ivory would have a small rod, tuft or fur, or piece of cloth which was smeared with a few drops of blood to attract the insects and sticky honey resin to trap them.
The Flea
ReplyDeleteMark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And 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 we would do.
Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, nay more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, w'are met,
And cloistered in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that, self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.
Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?
Yet thou triumph’st, and say'st that thou
Find’st not thy self, nor me the weaker now;
’Tis true; then learn how false, fears be:
Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me,
Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.
-- John Donne
That is my favorite John Donne poem.
ReplyDelete