Poetry Analysis: "Fleas"

For our first poetry analysis, I want to start with one of the shortest poems out there: “Fleas.”

Fleas, Or Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes
by Strickland Gillilan

Adam
Had ‘em.

You might have heard of this poem before, often wrongly attributed to Ogden Nash. It does sound like one of Nash’s, but nope! Further digging reveals it comes from Strickland Gillilan.

Let’s start with the form: “Fleas” is written in trochaic monometer and has a feminine end-rhyme. I have actually heard of this rhyme described as a “pruning rhyme,” because one of the rhymes is fully contained within the other--prune the “H” and you get “Adam.” This poem does what poetry “should” do; it is succinct, metrical consistent, rhymes, and is more or less visually square. It is clean and regular.

But look at how the language has to be corrupted for this to work. What if it had read: “Adam / Had them”? Not only is the two-syllable rhyme disrupted by the “th,” but the end rhyme is a bit skewed. Where the “am” in “Adam” gets swallowed by the first syllable, “them” is most definitely a short “e” sound. That “th” adds an aspirated dental sound while the poem as it exists is all palatal and labial--very smooth. This smoothness only comes at the cost of two letters--and we cannot ignore their absence, because it is marked by an apostrophe. This poem is aware of and draws attention to how it corrupts the language. “Em” is the last word of the last line of the poem, and therefore the most emphasized and meaningful word. This is not the language we expect in poetry, but something we might say in passing. (“Oh, my parents? Yeah, Adam had ’em over for dinner the other night.”) Is “had ’em” one word or two, the way I as a Southerner might say the single word “y’all’d’ve”?

And what does “had” even mean? The first reading might be that Adam was infected with fleas, but there are a number of other meanings to the word. We use “had” to mean entertained, ate, engaged in sex, and possessed. Did Adam keep fleas as pets? Did he have to eat them? Most any reading of “had” suggests something bodily or carnal.

Then there is the question of tense. My first thought on seeing “had” immediately after Adam is that the poet is referring to the biblical Adam but speaking in a later time. The past tense gives the poem a sort of antiquity--as the alternate title suggests--and makes the allusion to Eden that much stronger. But since the poem clearly has no problem using colloquialisms, what if this is not a simple past “had,” but an incorrectly used pluperfect? It can feel quite awkward to use the pluperfect “had had,” and speakers often shorten it to a single “had” when they mean “had had,” or at the least elide it into a contraction. The name Adam already suggests a kind of past-ness, which begs the question: does Adam still have the fleas? Or was he able to be cured of them, relegating his experience to the pluperfect?

And now the allusion: is this referring to the Adam in Eden? We often associate fleas with dirtiness and negligence. No person wants to be accused of having fleas. But Gillilan accuses the forefather of humanity of having them. What, then, is there to be said about us? If Adam was no better than a stray dog, what does that mean for his children? Since Adam is the Hebrew word for man in the genderless, humankind sense, Adam can be a symbol for all of humanity, not just our representative father. Or perhaps this is an argument in favor of Darwinism, suggesting that our ancestors had fleas because Adam was, in fact, an ape. Either way, if this poem is arguing for original sin or for evolution, humans are put on the same plane as animals and are liable to fall victim to other animals. And without the confirmation of the pluperfect, we have to assume that Adam was not cure

Detour: Isn’t it weird how we “have” fleas, but the fleas simultaneously have us? They are the ones performing the action, the invading, the inhabiting, the blood-sucking, but we do not say that “oh, some fleas have my dog, so we ought to go to the vet.” We are so anthropocentric that being the host to a parasite is deserving of being the subject of the sentence. We have fleas like we might have an illness, even though fleas are living creatures like us, all stemming from the same primordial ooze.

Crazy how much we can get from two little lines.