Since ancient times, a favorite subject for artists and writers has been . . . the lowly flea. Not only have fleas always been close associates of humans, they also seem to provide writers with ready metaphors for all sorts of things, ranging from stand-ins for a lover to a canon of poetry to the Holy Trinity.
People didn’t seem as skeeved out by fleas as we are today, perhaps because everyone was bugged by them.
Evidently the Roman poet Ovid wrote some naughty flea sonnets. And writer Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745) used the flea metaphor to satirize lesser poets who criticized better ones:
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ’em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.
—Jonathan Swift, from “On Poetry: A Rhapsody”
And then there was John Donne (1572 – 1631), a favorite poet of mine.
In his younger days, he wrote some pretty racy love poetry, but as he grew older and more devout (and obsessed with death), his poems become more devotional (although some would argue his later poems are still pretty racy). In about 1610, he wrote an entire poem called “The Flea,” which is basically a long plea to hook up with an indifferent love interest. But you see glimmers of his emerging piety (he was a well-known preacher who converted from Catholicism to Protestantism) when the narrator of the poem urges the woman not to crush the flea that just bit them both: “three lives in one flea spare.” (I’m pretty sure that’s a reference to the Holy Trinity.) You can read that poem here.