Scaliger’s Flea
D A Burns thinks John Donne ‘the only poet who has written about the flea in an amorous setting … “The Flea” elevates the feeding habits of this insect to a romantic plane’ [D A Burns ‘A Potpourri Of Parasites In Poetry And Proverb’, British Medical Journal, 303:6817 (1991), 1611–1614]. But D A Burns is wrong. In fact, scholars tell us, the flea as a trope for love in witty metaphysical poems was a widespread and celebrated Renaissance figure.
Gary M Bouchard quotes John Carey:
Long before John Donne “marked” the flea as one of the most singularly provocative and complex conceits in English poetry, there were, as John Carey says, “scores of them in all European literatures,” functioning not as intricately layered metaphors but as voyeuristic vehicles for “smutty old jokes”. The lyric ribaldry to which Carey refers originated in Carmen of Pulice, a composition by one Ofilius Sergianus, errantly attributed to Ovid, that became “the fountainhead of ‘flea’ poetry” [Carey, John Donne, 146]. The convention reached its apogee in the 1582 collection La Puce de Madame des Roches, a work containing over fifty poems in five languages. [Bouchard, ‘Flea: Annihilating the Copulative Conceit: John Donne’s Conversion of the “Son of Dust” into Uncertain Sacrilege’, in Keith Botelho and Joseph Campana (eds), Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance: Volume 1, Insects (Penn State University Pres), 2023]
Bouchard also quotes Helen Gardner to the effect that these poems ‘fall monotonously into two types. The poet either wishes to be a flea, or he envies the flea its death at his mistress’s hand on her bosom.’ Actually this blog is about a poem, by Joseph Scaliger, that falls into neither type, but Gardner wants to stress the originality of Donne’s approach by contrast.
I’m not so sure. It’s not that there weren’t loads of poems by male poets about fleas biting their mistresses’ boobies, since there clearly were (Marcel Françon, ‘Un Motif de la poésie amoureuse au XVIe siècle’, PMLA, 56:2 (1941), pp. 307–336). But I wonder how many of them Donne had actually read. And in fact, when you look into it, those ‘loads of poems’ shake down into broadly three groups: [1] not-Ovid-actually-Ofilius-Sergianus’s first poem and Coelius Calcagninus; [2] the sixty plus (Bouchard underestimates the number) poems in La Puce de Madame des Roches, and [3] a few other volumes containing reprints of a few of the poems from La Puce de Madame des Roches. Let’s say Donne never read La Puce de Madame des Roches, as it’s very possible he didn’t. What was he likely to be aware of, in terms of the tradition of flea-troped poems?
Catherine Des Roches (1542 –1587), was a celebrated French writer, wit and beauty, who was at the centre of a literary circle in Poitiers that included a wide range of poets and authors. One day at her literary salon, a flea was observed between her breasts; and the poets immediately all wrote verses expressing their envy of the flea’s privileged position, in such a place, upon the most beautiful and intelligent woman in France.
In the provincial city of Poitiers a bourgeois salon run by a mother-daughter pair, Madeleine and Catherine Des Roches produced an anthology of poems and prose by various hands the was published for the first time in Paris in 1582, again in 1583 … The anthology, originally entitled La Puce de Madame Des-Roches, recalls a literary contest in the form of epigrams improvised on a limited but stimulating — indeed, a piquant — topic: a flea that Pasquier claimed to have seen on Catherine Des Roches’s breast. A poem by Catherine opens the collection, followed immediately by Pasquier’s ‘La Puce.’ This pair leads on to over sixty texts by more than a dozen hands, composed in Greek, Latin, Italian and as well as French. Most of the writers were hommes de robe, Parliamentary lawyers who had come down from Paris to preside over extra court sessions called ‘Les Grands Jours de Poitiers.’ The printed anthology preserves poems that had been read out loud in the Des Roches’ house, as well as texts by other writers who took up the topic after hearing about the exchange in Poitiers or returning to Paris. [Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Contentious Readings: Urban Humanism and Gender Difference in La Puce de Madame Des-Roches (1582)’, Renaissance Quarterly, 48:1 (1995), pp. 110–1]
Donne scholars have argued that La Puce de Madame Desroches influenced Donne’s poem: see for instance David B. Wilson’s ‘La Puce de Madame Desroches and John Donne’s “The Flea”’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 72:2 (1971), 297–301. But Wilson only considers the poems in the anthology that are written in French — it is in French that the pun on pucelle (girl, a maiden; a virgin; but also a prostitute, a slut) and puce, ‘flea’, really works — and speculates that Donne may have seen a copy of the original volume. I don’t know how likely it is that a book out of a provincial literary salon in Poitiers published in 1582 would have made its way to Donne. Wilson does not mention the poems in other languages in the volume — Latin, Greek, and Italian.
I have a different theory. I don’t think Donne saw a copy of La Puce de Madame Desroches. But we know he read Joseph Justus Scaliger. Of all the contributors to the La Puce de Madame Desroches volume, Scaliger was surely the most famous. His contribution was a poem in Latin (not French) entitled ‘In Pulicem Catharinae des Roches, elegantissimae poetriae’. This poem was reprinted several times, and included in Scaliger’s poetic works, Poemata omnia (1615). I think Donne saw it. It doesn’t seem to have been translated into English, so I’ve done that, here:
Pulicelle niger, nigelle Pulex,
Incitatior haedulis petulcis,
Delicatior hinnulis tenellis,
Docti passere nequior Catulli,
Stellae blandior albula columba;
Qua te prosequar aurea camena?
Quo te nomine praedicem, o beate
Pulex pumile, pumilille Pulex?
An quod, cum libet os meae puellae
Tuo purpureo ore suaviaris:
Mihi, cum libet, os meae puellae
Meo non licet ore suaviari? [10]
An quod cum subiit cibi voluptas,
Non in quadriviis, neque angiportis
Plebeos avidus cibos liguris,
Sed in lacteolis latens papillis,
Tingens virgineo cruore rostrum,
Plenus nectaris et satur recedis:
Mox circumsiliens modo huc modo illuc,
Meras delicias, meros amores,
Ludis ebrius in sinu puellae?
Anne quod Veneris satelles audis, [20]
Vindex falsidicae malaeque linguae,
Cum periura Deos puella laesit,
Atque ulciscere saucios amores,
Feris morsibus appetens lacertos?
Illa in insidiis morata, soli
Vindictae imminet, ac favens dolori,
Suspenso meditatur ungue mortem:
Tu cessim fugis, et fugis recessim;
Ac subsultibus hinc et hinc citatis
Vibras cruscula, et improbae puellae [30]
Eludis digiti impetentis ictum:
Ut campis equa trima ludit olim
Motis aera calcibus lacessens.
An quod legibus omnibus solutus,
Puellaria membra pervagaris,
Usque Cypridis ad beata regna,
Impune insinuans amoris almi
Secretis adytis, sacrumque limen
Insistens, quod ab omnibus profanis
Et tangi scelus, et nefas videri? [40]
Hic tu ianitor excubas, et ipsam
Aureae Veneris tueris aram.
Quam sancte tibi tradidit tuendam
Et ridens Venus, et puer Cupido.
Tene propterea, o venuste Pulex,
Tene prosequar aurea camena?
Tene hoc nomine praedicem beatum,
Pulicelle niger, nigelle Pulex?
Non: sed quod nimio tuo lepore
Tot solus facis et paris Poetas, [50]
Quorum cantibus, aureaeque linguae
Vena divite, versibus canoris,
Immortalis eris, diuque vives.
Nam dum, pumile pumilille Pulex,
Haeres pendulus in sinu puellae
Novus Pegasus in nova Hippocrene,
E morsu tuo, ut ungula ex equina,
Fluxerunt latices Poetici, dein
Tot sunt carmina nata, tot Poetae.O black Flea-icule, o little black flea,
more excitable than a frisky young goat
more delicate than a tender little hinny,
I cannot outdo the learned Catullus
on the whitest breasts of my sweet darling:
how can my golden lyre ever describe you?
How ever to name you, o you lucky one
o tiny flea, teenytiny flea?
And how is it my girl’s delicious mouth
gets kissed by your reddening mouth [10]
when my girl’s delicious mouth
is forbidden from delighting my mouth?
Or when it was time for the pleasures of food:
not at the crossroads, nor in the alleys
where you lick-up your food from ordinary folk,
but hiding amongst those milky nipples
dyeing your face with virgin blood,
pulling away sated and full of nectar:
then leaping this way and that way,
in sheer delight, undiluted love, [20]
drunken games in my girl’s lap?
Or again: what news from Venus’s followers?
avenger of falsity and evil tongues,
after my blaspheming girl offended the gods;
who will avenge such injured loves,
such assaulting wild bites on the shoulder?
She loitered, and was ambushed, it’s simple
vengeance he threatens, a dose of pain,
risking death upon a waiting fingernail:
you flee forward, and you flee backward; [30]
moving here and there in leaps
shaking your tiny legs, and so you elude
wanton girls crushing you with their finger:
like a three-year-old mare playing in a field
excitedly kicking at the air.
Or it might be that, freed from all laws,
you wander between girlish legs,
and arrive at Venus’s blessed realm
entering with impunity the intimate
secret places of love, standing at the sacred
threshold, that all seek to profane,
touched with crime, and seen as evil? [40]
Here you, a doorman, keep watch, and
protect the altar of golden Venus herself.
How sacredly she gave it to you to protect
and smiling Venus, and the child Cupid!
Will you stay there, o fair Flea,
stay til I accompany you on my golden lyre?
Stay til I have made known this blessed name:
o black Flea-icule, o little black Flea?
No: because of your exceeding charm
you yourself can do this, equal to any poet [50]
in whose songs, and golden tongues
and rich veins, and lyric verses,
you will be immortal, and live forever.
And so, littlest of the little fleas,
hang fast, dangling in my girl’s lap
a new Pegasus at a new Hippocrene,
made from your bite, like a horse’s struck hoof,
from which flow springs of poetry, from which
so many poems are born, from so many poets.
The Hippocrene (line 55) is a spring on Mount Helicon, sacred to the Muses. It was supposed to have been formed when Pegasus, the winged horse, kicked his hoof into the ground there, launching himself into the sky. To drink from the Hippocrene spring was to be inspired to write poetry. Scaliger here compares the bite on his mistresses skin to the action of pegasus, releasing a flow of poetry.
Donne’s poem addresses the woman being bitten. Scaliger’s poem is addressed to the flea itself. Indeed, by the end, and despite recording some jealousy, he addresses the flea as an equal: as Scaliger is a poet, singing with his conventional golden lyre, so too is the flea, whose actions, biting the beautiful body of the woman, will immortalise it in verse. The conceit of the poem is, according to the opening lines, that the poet was attempting to write a poem like Catullus, praising his mistress’s beautiful white breasts, when he noticed the flea, and wrote about that instead. Donne’s flea hops from the poet’s body to the mistress’s body. Scaliger’s roams all over the woman: biting her lips, her breast and then leaping down to her vagina, ‘the altar of golden Venus herself’, where, at the poem’s end, it remains, standing guard like a ianitor [41], ‘doorman, porter, janitor’ (the word comes from iānia, doorway; although, relevantly, the feminine noun iānuella ‘little opening’ meant the vulva). The central section of the poem [36–48], where the flea travels down to the mistress’s private parts, is really quite racy: ‘entering with impunity the intimate/secret places of love’ and so on. Where Donne’s poem is an attempt to seduce a chaste woman who won’t put out, Scaliger’s is more Catullan: it seems his mistress has been ‘profaned’ by many others— even though she’s denying him [11–12] — such that he even welcomes the flea taking up its most intimate position at the end, to keep away her other lovers.
The flea is repeatedly compared to a horse, a gesture towards equine sexual vigour (you jerk your body like a horny pony would, as a more recent poet put it): a hinny, a three-year-old mare playing in a field, excitedly kicking at the air, and finally Pegasus itself. Sex and poetry, jealousy and resentment, like Catullus with Lesbia (I suppose the ‘bites on the shoulder’ [26] are from Scaliger’s rivals, and he revels in the flea taking revenge upon the ‘wanton’ girl for her promiscuity), all in diminutive form.
Can we position this poem, so different in address and tone to Donne’s, as an inspiration for John Donne’s ‘The Flea’? I can speculate an imaginative reaction: like other such poems this is talking about the way the flea has ingtimate access to the desired-one’s body in a way denied the poet. But there are ways in which it might have shaped Donne’s own poem. One is Scaliger’s repeated stress on the smallness of the flea: pulex, pulicelle (‘flea-ette, flea-icule’, ‘mini-flea’) pulex pumile [8], literally ‘o dwarf flea’, and pulex pumilille ‘dwarficule flea’ (in my translation I’ve gone with ‘tiny flea, teenytiny flea’). Donne picks up on the tininess: ‘mark but this flea, and mark in this/How little that which thou deniest me is’ (mark in the sense of notice, but also in the sense that a fleabite leaves a mark on the skin) transferring it to the littleness, the insignificance, of what he is asking of her — sex. Scaliger’s flea is motile, and escapes being squished by the woman’s fingernail, where Donne’s mistress does kill the flea, leading to his mock-grief in the poem’s final stanza.
