Tom Shone
A Very Odd Beast
One of David Cronenberg’s favourite poems is The Flea by John Donne:
‘Marke but this flea, and marke in this,
How little that which thou deny’st me is;
It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea, our two bloods mingled bee.’
It is an idea that would appeal to a film maker who started his career with a film, Shivers, about sexually transmitted parasite slugs, and whose most recent film ended with the death of two gynaecologist twins. For Cronenberg, the idea of two bloods mingling is no mere conceit: in
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‘He did not die in 1804 but lived on for another thirty years, during which his literary achievement ... was overshadowed by failure, opium addiction and charges of plagiarism and apostasy.’
From the archive, Juliet Barker on Coleridge.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/such-a-joy-to-make-sense-of-coleridge
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