The Fettered and the Flea

This contribution explores for the first time a 22‐line poem in a British Library manuscript, ‘To a young lady that kept a flea chay’nd in a box’, which can be convincingly ascribed to Edmund Waller. Its most famous relative is Donne’s ‘The Flea’, but its ancestry differs. Moreover Waller’s is addressed, as a playful compliment, to a child, not a lover. Several traditions combine in it: that deriving from the pseudo‐Ovidian Pulex ; that of ‘multum in parvo’ in poetry of and beyond the English Renaissance; the French verse of the contemporary précieuses . Its close relationship to Waller’s ‘To a very young Lady’/‘To my young Lady Lucy Sidney ’ is examined. A coda places into the same tradition a ‘flea poem’ of the later seventeenth century by Joshua Barnes

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Biology · Coda · Flea · Literature · Poetry · History · Literature: history, themes, analysis