The Flea
A man argues a woman into bed using a flea that bit them both. It’s the most dazzling sophistry in English, and a sly comedy in which she acts while he only talks, kills the flea, and demolishes his logic with a fingernail.
Era
metaphysical
3 poems
metaphysical
To His Coy Mistress
Vegetable love, worms, and birds of prey — Marvell’s seduction poem is stranger and more aggressive than “seize the day” suggests, and the mistress never gets to answer.
No Man Is An Island
It isn’t a poem, and it isn’t really about friendship. Donne wrote “No man is an island” as prose while gravely ill, and its subject is death — the funeral bell you hear for a stranger tolls for you too.