The Flea Explication

Blake Fletcher

AP English

October 25, 2011

The Flea Explication

Who is the speaker? Define and describe the speaker and his/her voice. What does the speaker say? Who is the audience? Are other characters involved?

The Flea reveals a speaker who seems to be trying to find his way into his girlfriend’s pants. He makes comparisons to things that are pretty far fetched. Then the tone changes to be somewhat dark. The entire time the only audience seems to be a flea and this woman.

When the speaker compares the fact that the flea bit him and his girlfriend to some sort of connection that is equal to or greater than marriage. It shows he is either very much going out on a limb for this pickup line or somewhat delusional. He is trying to seduce this woman by comparing the fact that the flea has bitten both of them so their blood has mixed inside of it.

The speaker seems to be a man who is searching for love. You can see this through his voice in the beginning because he is trying to make a love connection thought an idea that because they where both bitten by a flea that they are now connected. His voice in the end of the poem changes to a darker more scary voice after the woman kills the flea and says that they are both stronger because of the death of the flea.

The speaker in the poem the flea is a desperate man who is searching for love. His ways of trying to get this love are questionable and not taken well by the woman in the poem who crushes his love metaphor quite literally. This in turn makes the speaker lose his patience or possibly his reasoning and makes him become a little darker. The darker voice from the speaker completely changes the tone of the poem.