Tracking the Theme of Love in "The Flea" Poem

C/W How can I track the theme of love in the poem The Flea ? Thursday, 24 April 2025 ENGLISH What does my teacher's marking during English lessons mean? Today we will know The context of Donne and metaphysical poetry. A close analysis of The Flea . Well done! Stop and think, or listen to your teacher. SPAG symbols You have met the success criteria. Something's not right. Today we will remember How to make predictions about a poem. How to closely analyse a poem. Keep going. Make a correction in purple pen. Useful words for today Volta, Sonnet, Conceit Speaker, Subject, Metaphysical Make a correction in purple pen compassionate, discerning and analytical readers eloquent, intentional and imaginative writers active, truthful and confident speakers

C/W How can I track the theme of love in the poem The Flea ? Thursday, 24 April 2025 ENGLISH Today we will know The context of Donne and metaphysical poetry. A close analysis of The Flea . School Prayer Tien-ta-foy! Give us O lord, A steadfast faith, A steadfast commitment, And the steadfast determination To always do and be of our best. Amen Today we will remember How to make predictions about a poem. How to closely analyse a poem. Useful words for today Volta, Sonnet, Conceit Speaker, Subject, Metaphysical compassionate, discerning and analytical readers eloquent, intentional and imaginative writers active, truthful and confident speakers

C/W How can I track the theme of love in the poem The Flea ? Thursday, 24 April 2025 YEAR 7 ENGLISH The Story of English Greek Mythology Quests WHAT are we learning today? The context behind Shakespeare s writing. How to closely analyse at a higher level. Today we will know The context of Donne and metaphysical poetry. A close analysis of The Flea . YEAR 8 The Art of Rhetoric A Midsummer Night s Dream The Tempest YEAR 9 Romantic Poetry Victorian Voices Oliver Twist WHY are we learning this? So that we can build our knowledge of love poetry across time. The Today we will remember How to make predictions about a poem. How to closely analyse a poem. The Gothic War Poetry Dystopia American Dream? YEAR 10 An Inspector Calls / Writers Viewpoints and Perspectives A Christmas Carol / Creative Reading Power and Conflict Poetry / Creative Writing YEAR 11 Shakespeare / Language Revision A-Level Literature HOW does it connect to our English learning journey? By giving us a set of skills that we can then take into an exam. Exam Preparation Useful words for today Unseen poetry and prose Love Modern times Shakespeare poetry/prose Volta, Sonnet, Conceit Speaker, Subject, Metaphysical A-level Media Represen- tation Media Language Audience compassionate, discerning and analytical readers eloquent, intentional and imaginative writers active, truthful and confident speakers

C/W How can I track the theme of love in the poem The Flea ? Thursday, 24 April 2025 ENGLISH Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly. Today we will know The context of Donne and metaphysical poetry. A close analysis of The Flea . Home learning and reading check: 1. We will go around the room and you will each tell everyone what you have been reading and what your main takeaway from the reading was. Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness. Today we will remember How to make predictions about a poem. How to closely analyse a poem. 2. I will have a look at the research you did on metaphysical poetry. These quotes are from Toni Morrison s novel The Bluest Eye a novel about an African-American child who internalised Western standards of beauty and prayed for blue eyes. Morrison was writing in the same context as Alice Walker (The Colour Purple) and this novel also looks at ideas of love like we are. Useful words for today Volta, Sonnet, Conceit Speaker, Subject, Metaphysical compassionate, discerning and analytical readers eloquent, intentional and imaginative writers active, truthful and confident speakers

C/W How can I track the theme of love in the poem The Flea?Thursday, 24 April 2025 ENGLISH Today we will know The context of Donne and metaphysical poetry. A close analysis of The Flea . At the front of your book write the BLQ and full date. Complete and stick in the knowledge quiz. Today we will remember How to make predictions about a poem. How to closely analyse a poem. Useful words for today Volta, Sonnet, Conceit Speaker, Subject, Metaphysical compassionate, discerning and analytical readers eloquent, intentional and imaginative writers active, truthful and confident speakers

C/W How can I track the theme of love in the poem The Flea?Thursday, 24 April 2025 ENGLISH Today we will know The context of Donne and metaphysical poetry. A close analysis of The Flea . Before we read our next poem, we are going to slowly build an image of it through prediction, images and context. Today we will remember How to make predictions about a poem. How to closely analyse a poem. What is a flea? What do they do? How do they survive? What do they look like? What do we associate with fleas? Useful words for today Volta, Sonnet, Conceit Speaker, Subject, Metaphysical compassionate, discerning and analytical readers eloquent, intentional and imaginative writers active, truthful and confident speakers

C/W How can I track the theme of love in the poem The Flea?Thursday, 24 April 2025 ENGLISH Today we will know The context of Donne and metaphysical poetry. A close analysis of The Flea . Now that you have some context, what are you predicting this poem will be about / explore / entail? Write down your initial response. Today we will remember How to make predictions about a poem. How to closely analyse a poem. Useful words for today Volta, Sonnet, Conceit Speaker, Subject, Metaphysical compassionate, discerning and analytical readers eloquent, intentional and imaginative writers active, truthful and confident speakers

C/W How can I track the theme of love in the poem The Flea?Thursday, 24 April 2025 ENGLISH Context surrounding the poet and metaphysical poetry: Today we will know The context of Donne and metaphysical poetry. A close analysis of The Flea . The Flea was likely written in the 1590s, during an explosion of love poetry. Poets competed with each other to develop more elaborate, more beautiful ways of expressing their love. The Flea arguably emerges from exhaustion or exasperation with this kind of love poetry. It is a love poem, a poem of seduction. But it uses an intentionally grotesque conceit to make its case. A conceit is a highly complex extended metaphor. (In doing so, it draws on a tradition of flea poems that stretch back to the Roman poet Ovid). It is almost as though the speaker is making fun of other poets, with their overly sincere, elaborate love poems. He is satirizing their work, pointing out how silly and strange it sounds by producing a poem which is itself self-consciously silly and strange. However, the poem is not simply satire. Donne is a skilled and serious poet: even at his most playful, he is capable of infusing his poems with religious and intellectual complexity. Because of the poem's intellectual complexity and its jaded, satirical relationship with earlier love poems, "The Flea" is often counted as an early example of "metaphysical poetry," a highly artificial, witty, and self-conscious genre of poetry that developed in the 17th century. Today we will remember How to make predictions about a poem. How to closely analyse a poem. Metaphysical poetry was a style of poetry popular in late 16th- and 17th-century England. Meta means beyond or after , so the literal meaning of metaphysical is beyond the physical i.e. concerned with the abstract or the philosophical. Metaphysical poetry asks serious questions about the nature of existence and the universe. Themes will often cover the body vs the soul. Useful words for today Volta, Sonnet, Conceit Speaker, Subject, Metaphysical compassionate, discerning and analytical readers eloquent, intentional and imaginative writers active, truthful and confident speakers

C/W How can I track the theme of love in the poem The Flea?Thursday, 24 April 2025 ENGLISH Today we will know The context of Donne and metaphysical poetry. A close analysis of The Flea . HISTORICAL CONTEXT: The Flea was written during a relatively peaceful decade in English history. In 1589, Queen Elizabeth defeated the Spanish Armada, securing her country from the threat of foreign invasion. She was at the height of her power in the decade that followed though she was unmarried and therefore had no direct heir, a circumstance that caused considerable political anxiety. Today we will remember How to make predictions about a poem. How to closely analyse a poem. However, Elizabeth s power and her status as an unmarried woman were closely linked together. Indeed, she often used her marital status as a way to license her position as the female ruler of a very patriarchal culture. Virginity thus occupied an ambiguous position in English culture during the 1590s: it was a source of anxiety and, at the same time, a source of political power. In some ways, it was an obsession for the culture which makes the speaker s argument in The Flea all the more perverse and playful. He argues that virginity is unimportant, inconsequential at a moment in English political history when virginity was arguably at its most important: not simply as a religious or familial matter, but as something integral to the sovereign s identity and her strategies for maintaining control. Useful words for today Volta, Sonnet, Conceit Speaker, Subject, Metaphysical compassionate, discerning and analytical readers eloquent, intentional and imaginative writers active, truthful and confident speakers

C/W How can I track the theme of love in the poem The Flea?Thursday, 24 April 2025 ENGLISH Today we will know The context of Donne and metaphysical poetry. A close analysis of The Flea . Under the visualiser, we will read the poem. Key word Definition Mark Look Today we will remember How to make predictions about a poem. How to closely analyse a poem. Maidenhead Virginity Woo Pursue Swells Fills with blood Cloister Enclosed courtyard in a church Useful words for today Sacrilege Misuse of something sacred Volta, Sonnet, Conceit Speaker, Subject, Metaphysical compassionate, discerning and analytical readers eloquent, intentional and imaginative writers active, truthful and confident speakers

C/W How can I track the theme of love in the poem The Flea?Thursday, 24 April 2025 ENGLISH Today we will know The context of Donne and metaphysical poetry. A close analysis of The Flea . Modern day summary: Look at this flea and you'll see how small the thing that you deny me really is. It bit me first and now it bites you. In the flea, our two bloods are mingled together. You know that this isn t sinful or shameful; it s not a loss of virginity. And yet the flea gets to enjoy your blood without courting you first, and it grows fat digesting our combined blood. And that is more than we are allowed to do. Wait, don t kill the flea and kill us with it! In the flea s body, we are almost, no, more than, married. The flea is you and me. It is our marriage bed, our wedding chapel. Though our parents disapprove, we are safe within these dark, living walls. Though you may want to kill me, do not add suicide and sacrilege to your list of sins: three sins will come from killing the flea. Cruel and unpredictable woman, have you stained your nails purple with the flea s innocent blood? The flea is guilty of nothing but sucking a drop of blood from you. Yet you exalt in your victory over the flea and say that neither you nor I are weaker for killing it. That s true enough and you should learn from that how false your fears are. You will lose as much honor when you give your virginity to me as this flea s death took from you. Today we will remember How to make predictions about a poem. How to closely analyse a poem. Useful words for today Volta, Sonnet, Conceit Speaker, Subject, Metaphysical compassionate, discerning and analytical readers eloquent, intentional and imaginative writers active, truthful and confident speakers

C/W How can I track the theme of love in the poem The Flea?Thursday, 24 April 2025 ENGLISH Today we will know The context of Donne and metaphysical poetry. A close analysis of The Flea . Close analysis: - Who is the speaker / subject? - Summary of the poem. - Major themes. - How is context relevant? - How is it using the sonnet form? - Major symbols. Today we will remember How to make predictions about a poem. How to closely analyse a poem. Useful words for today Volta, Sonnet, Conceit Speaker, Subject, Metaphysical compassionate, discerning and analytical readers eloquent, intentional and imaginative writers active, truthful and confident speakers

C/W How can I track the theme of love in the poem The Flea?Thursday, 24 April 2025 ENGLISH Today we will know The context of Donne and metaphysical poetry. A close analysis of The Flea . Structure Language Using Lit Charts and your own knowledge, build these 3 spider diagrams. Today we will remember How to make predictions about a poem. How to closely analyse a poem. Form Useful words for today Volta, Sonnet, Conceit Speaker, Subject, Metaphysical compassionate, discerning and analytical readers eloquent, intentional and imaginative writers active, truthful and confident speakers

C/W How can I track the theme of love in the poem The Flea?Thursday, 24 April 2025 ENGLISH Today we will know The context of Donne and metaphysical poetry. A close analysis of The Flea . Plenary: Which part of this poem do you find most shocking? Today we will remember How to make predictions about a poem. How to closely analyse a poem. Useful words for today Volta, Sonnet, Conceit Speaker, Subject, Metaphysical compassionate, discerning and analytical readers eloquent, intentional and imaginative writers active, truthful and confident speakers