Journal #1: First Loves

In First Loves my favorite two poems were “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke and “The Flea” by John Donne. I have read them both before, and the fact that I remembered them specifically means that they spoke to me then as they do now. I remember reading “My Papa’s Waltz” in high school, in a class full of kids who didn’t want to have anything to do with poetry. The only poetry I had read before was Shakespeare, and so I was struck by the simplicity of Roethke’s words. I could smell the whiskey as I read it, and heard the pans clattering as they fell. It really formed images in my brain that Shakespeare, as much as I tried, could just not conjure until a few years and English classes later. I think in that sense my experience was much like Sherman Alexie’s; “My Papa’s Waltz” was probably the first poem I truly understood, too. Unlike Alexie, however, the violence depicted in the poem is (fortunately) alien to me.

Donne’s poem speaks to me in a much different way. His prose is more complex and inaccessible than Roethke’s poem. Donne is one of my favorite poets, and this is probably my favorite poem of his. When I first read it, it made me feel angry at first. I was mad at Donne’s exorbitant attempts to sway a woman into sleeping with him. When I read it again I began to understand the concept of the flea and I fell in love with Donne’s metaphoric argument. This poem makes me feel passionate in a way no other poem has ever done. Maybe passionate isn’t the right word. Alive. Yes, alive, that’s better. The flea is so unimportant in the first stanza – “And pampered swells with one blood made of two, / and this, alas, is more than we would do” (8-9). What the flea does is much worse than such a little thing as sex, because the flea “swells” with two types of blood and Donne assures her that she will not swell like the flea (become pregnant). Then in the next stanza the flea becomes as important as a marriage bed. As the flea’s importance changes from stanza to stanza it reminds me of someone trying to persuade someone else. If one angle proves useless, the persuader switches to a different argument.