G. M. Hopkins Heaven-haven
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Love’s templeThe bed becomes ‘loves hallow'd temple’. Donne has used the temple image inThe Flea, for a more bathetic effect. The woman's nakedness is likened to ‘souls unbodied’. This idea is explored in The Anniversarie also: the bliss of the soul is finally to escape the body at death. Here the bliss of the body is to escape clothes (ll.33-34). The language is religious: the Bible talks of death in terms of bodies being clothed, in 1 Corinthians 15:53-54 and in 2 Corinthians 5:2-4, where nakedness is also mentioned. A mysteryThen in the religious imagery we have references to ‘Themselves are mystick books’. Many men have this sense that women are mysterious beings. A similar image to bodies as books comes in The Extasie. In any religion where asacred book is central, book imagery frequently takes on religious overtones. Amystery, in religious terms, is something hidden which cannot be completely grasped through human reason. Instead, understanding needs to come throughrevelation, and the revelation is given by ‘imputed grace’ (l.42). Men cannot earn a revelation of women, whether the revelation be simply of her nakedness or of her ‘mystery’. The woman has to ‘impute’ it. More on imputed? CoveringThe last religious image in this dense theological dialectic concerns the idea of ‘covering’ (l.48). To ‘cover’ can mean to clothe the body or to put or lay something over an object to protect or hide it. It is also used of horses when a stallion ‘covers’ (mates with) a mare. Donne takes these meanings and produces a complex image which works at three levels:
All Donne’s elegies are written in non-stanzaic form, basically as iambicpentameters rhyming as couplets. It is a very basic poetic form, but suitable for longer poems, a famous example being Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Donne tends to package his sense into couplets, ll.19-23 being a rare exception, moving the form towards the later development of the heroic couplet. And, of course, this enables the poem to finish with a neat couplet to round it off. THE FLEA. by John Donne
The speaker tells his beloved to look at the flea before them and to note “how little” is that thing that she denies him. For the flea, he says, has sucked first his blood, then her blood, so that now, inside the flea, they are mingled; and that mingling cannot be called “sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead.” The flea has joined them together in a way that, “alas, is more than we would do.” As his beloved moves to kill the flea, the speaker stays her hand, asking her to spare the three lives in the flea: his life, her life, and the flea’s own life. In the flea, he says, where their blood is mingled, they are almost married—no, more than married—and the flea is their marriage bed and marriage temple mixed into one. Though their parents grudge their romance and though she will not make love to him, they are nevertheless united and cloistered in the living walls of the flea. She is apt to kill him, he says, but he asks that she not kill herself by killing the flea that contains her blood; he says that to kill the flea would be sacrilege, “three sins in killing three.” “Cruel and sudden,” the speaker calls his lover, who has now killed the flea, “purpling” her fingernail with the “blood of innocence.” The speaker asks his lover what the flea’s sin was, other than having sucked from each of them a drop of blood. He says that his lover replies that neither of them is less noble for having killed the flea. It is true, he says, and it is this very fact that proves that her fears are false: If she were to sleep with him (“yield to me”), she would lose no more honor than she lost when she killed the flea.
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