Analysis of "The Flea"

At first when I read Donne's "The Flea" I was extremely confused. I think it is a very difficult poem to analyze but after reading the footnotes and then rereading the poem several times I think I might be beginning to understand. It seems to me as though the speaker is trying to seduce a woman into having sex with him. He begins by saying in the first few lines that the flea has bitten both himself and the woman he is speaking to, and that it isn't a big deal. He then seems to begin to compare the flea that has bitten each of them to a sexual relationship that should, in his opinion, occur between the two of them. He says it cannot be said "A sin, nor shame nor loss of maidenhood" and would like his speaker to believe that having sex with him would be none of those things either. The speaker sums it all up in the last stanza by stating that the flea did little harm to the woman, and the sexual relationship wouldn't take away her honor. I'm not sure I would have been able to come up with any of this without the footnotes at the bottom, but with the information presented to me this is what I believe the poem may be saying.

Applying Those Terms!

Although God's Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins isn't my favorite poem assigned because I'm a Frost fanatic, I think it has interesting rhyme within it. Not only does it have the very common and obvious end rhyme, it contains a great deal of internal rhyme as well. For example in line 6 of the poem "And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;" there are three words that rhyme (seared, bleared, and smeared). This line also contains an end rhyme with line 7. God's Grandeur also contains some figurative language such as the simile in the third line in which a rise to greatness is compared to the ooze of oil.
In Robert Frost's Acquainted with the Night, the rhyme scheme is simple. He uses end rhyme. The poem contains a metaphor in the twelfth line in which the moon is described as a clock in the sky. These tools of language may seem irrelevant but they make large contributions to the overall mood of the poem.

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