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The ‘Bee’ Poems. A focused overview of the five-poem sequence Plath wrote about bees in less than a week in early October 1962. The Bee Poems. The mot important of her October poems were the five Bee poems. Expert and complicated, they are her survival poetry.
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The ‘Bee’ Poems A focused overview of the five-poem sequence Plath wrote about bees in less than a week in early October 1962.
The Bee Poems • The mot important of her October poems were the five Bee poems. • Expert and complicated, they are her survival poetry. • The poems describe the joy of creation, the role of the bee community of the role of the old queen who fights against dispossession by the more beautiful queen, and survives. • Much of the effect in these poems comes from the rhythm – noun after noun, phrase after phrase. They are often called her literary poems. • According to Plath, these are poems “for the ear, not the eye: they are poems written out loud.”
The ‘Bee’ metaphor… • Bees function as a powerful metaphor in all five of the related poems. • Beekeepers are not only honey gatherers but also social manipulators, and the persona in her role as a beekeeper exploits the hive even when she identifies with the workers as females. • Indeed the persona shifts her role often – between the queen, the workers, or the beekeepers. • Always the metaphor of bee life expresses the fundamental precariousness of the human psyche that is essentially female.
The ‘Bee’ metaphor… • The erratic way the bees respond to what they perceive as dangerous to their collective existence reinforces the way the persona deals with her precarious sense of being. • Two poems, “The Arrival of the Bee Box” and “The Swarm” take on a unique approach to viewed threats: • The victim’s counter aggression takes a political rather than a sexual form. • The impulse to hide from forces beyond her control like those in “The Bee Meeting” exhibits in “The Arrival of the Bee Box” with the “fingers in the ear” gesture of one who has every intention of unleashing violent aggression upon the world.
A General Understanding • "The Bee Meeting" opens with a vivid imaging of the poet’s vulnerability before the hive. • In the poem, all the villagers but her are protected from the bees, and she equates this partial nudity with her condition of being unloved. • In the symbolic marriage ceremony which follows, a rector, a midwife, and she herself—a bride clad in black—appear. • She seems to remember that even the arrows which Eros used to shoot into the ground to create new life were poisoned darts.
A General Understanding • Certainly most if not all mythology relates the sex act to death. • In nature, the connection is even more explicit: Always the male bee dies after inseminating the Queen • Plath’s personal mythology anticipates this. • If the central figure of authority, the Queen, is her father, then the daughter/worker must die after the incestuous act, as she does at the conclusion of "The Bee Meeting" and as Plath did at the conclusion of her suicide attempts. • The long white box in the grove is in fact her own coffin, only in this light can the poem’s protagonist answer her own questions. "What have they accomplished, why am I cold."
A note on Plath’s personal mythology • Although every detail causes the persona within this poem concern, she claims, "I could not run without having to run forever“. • This brings about a feeling reiterated in Plath’s letters of this period, which detail her desire to face life alone and not to seek help by returning to her mother. • Although the persona realizes that the villagers are hunting the queen bee, she feels somehow that she herself is attacked. She asks, in the end, "why am I cold?“ • This connects to Plath’s biological entrapment – which we see in other works, especially the later poems like Paralytic and Edge.
One last observation… • In "The Bee Meeting," the scene is a village social; the speaker goes to hunt the queen bee in the company of the rector, the midwife, the sexton -- those public agents of marriage, birth, death, the world in which she must now define her identity. • The queen bee eludes these searchers. "She is very clever," Plath says. • But the villagers are actually helping to preserve the queen bee by moving the virgins who would kill her. • Still, not very grateful, the queen rises, "The upflight of the murderess into a heaven that loves her." • Left behind, the speaker identifies at this point not with the flying bee, but with the empty box, an emblem of survival ("Pillar of white in a blackout of knives") and a possible coffin.
Progression of the poem • “I ordered this” at the start of the poem sets the understanding that the persona is responsible for the box’s arrival (its birth). • Yet the box is immediately compared to a coffin of oddity – a midget or “square baby”! • By the second stanza, the box is locked and dangerous – arousing distress. • Yet it is almost magnetic and the persona is fascinated with what may be inside – as there is no window into the world of the bee box the person is left without the ability to satiate this curiosity. • Interestingly, there is “no exit” either – for the bees or apparently for the keeper.
Progression of the poem • In the third stanza, diligence in peeking inside continues – but only darkness is seen. • The keeper feels “swarmy” and takes on a dictatorial tone as the bees are only described negatively. • By the fourth stanza, the persona is frustrated by the “noise” of the bees – like a “Roman mob”. The persona can be seen to be almost frightened by they bees strength, even though she ultimately hold the key! • By stanza five, she hears “furious Latin” – angrily labeling the bees as unable to communicate with her: “a box of maniacs”. But this time she realizes her power over them – “I am the owner”.
Progression of the poem • Switching once again in stanza six, the persona wonders just how hungry are the bees – even considering letting them free. Ultimately resolving not to do so for fear of the bees revolting against their keeper. • Next, the personal believes she might be “immediately” safer in “my moon suit and funeral veil” – referring to a beekeepers garments, presumably. • Interestingly, the persona realizes, in the end, that the bees will not attack her, for “I am no source of honey” – sinisterly implying that the persona could never be a source of sweet/good. • Yet two lines later we are told, “I will be sweet God, I will set them free”. • She actually catches the reader off guard with the description of herself as “sweet God” unless the reader believes that the persona will actually let the bees go.
Progression comes to an end! • The poem ends with the only stanza that is just one line! • Apparently, with this line in mind, the persona knew all along that the entrapment of the bees was temporary. • There is a feeling that by freeing the bees, she too can be free – free from noise, responsibility, etc. • But ultimately, most important, she will be free of being the prison keeper, one who never initially understood her prisoners. • Also, the notion of the box (seeing as a coffin), by being opened is a statement that scoffs at death – once opened the bees will fly lively! • It is this last image that most supports the idea that Plath’s later poems do not fear death, but rather look at death as a chance at rebirth.
General Understanding of the hive and the queen • It seems that in the queen bee's double-bind situation, Plath identifies with the complexities of her institutional position as queen versus her experiences as mother. • We must remember that the apiary is a world of curiously inverted sexual principles. The queen, parthenogenic, can only produce idle male drones--"the blunt clumsy stumblers, the boors"--who will ruin the hive. Only the drone mate can contribute the female principle to the union. • One law, however, is central to the apiary. The queen, old and plushless, neither directs nor participates in any of her subjects' riches of cross-pollination, never sees daylight, has no bodily provisions for work. To her the virgin worker's world of activity is "death to the taste." She remains ill-fated, hidden, and otherwise useless in her singular mission of motherhood.
The speaker/persona… • In "Stings" the speaker successively dons the roles of beekeeper, honey-drudge, and queen in a dramatic exploration of their various functions. "It is almost over./I am in control," she announces midway through the process of adopting and rejecting various forms of power. • And indeed Plath is in control. She conducts us from the literal level of "sweet bargaining" for honey, through the mechanical collection of it by drudges, finally to the queen bee's controlling inactivity which is her last triumph. • In the final stanza, despite the imagined ritual deaths throughout the sequence, the elusive queen, at last visible, is a triumph of contradictions. She comprises images of illness, vulnerability (red scar, wings of glass) as well as those of vital resilience. • Here--in fact, in the whole sequence--the authoritative mode is abandoned.
A focus on images • The bee poems focused on domestic and womanly topics, but they were very much poems about power as well! • In this poem, the persona is a fearless female speaker – like a lioness, red, winged, and powerful. • Egyptian, African, and Grecian, Plath’s lioness escapes her painful life but send tribulation on her enemies. She is a world force, a moral and corrective force. • Interestingly, Ted Hughes astrological sign was that of a lion – Leo.
The opening … • The sense of anonymity that opens "The Swarm" - "Somebody is shooting at something in our town"--has the opposite effect of the atmosphere of anonymity in "The Bee Meeting." • In the earlier poem, the speaker’s inability to distinguish the identities of others serves to heighten her own extreme subjectivity. • Here, however, the speaker is not concerned with determining who the particular actors are; on the contrary, the poem will argue that "somebody" is ultimately "everybody."
A General Understanding… • In "The Swarm" the speaker parallels her own personal story with world history. • Only in the first stanza does the speaker briefly account for the shooting in terms of her own experience: "Jealousy can open the blood, / It can make black roses." • Her first impulse when she hears the shooting is to think what would motivate her to violence--jealousy. • She indulges her imagination in one vivid metaphor--that visualizes blood-saturated gunshot wounds as "black roses"27--but then immediately turns to the larger question: "Who are they shooting at?"
A Historical Understanding… • The voice that emerges in the second stanza to answer this question is powerfully accusatory, marshaling a variety of rhetorical resources to the task of declaring an important truth about history. • The image of the throats is used again in this poem to suggest victimization and vulnerability--the facts about the masses that "somebody" like Napoleon would deny. • The narrative of Napoleonic aggression is interwoven with that of the swarm. • The pervasiveness of violence is what allows Napoleon to be "pleased" at the end of the poem, even despite his own defeat at Waterloo.
A Historical Understanding… • The speaker, however, knows from witnessing the self-destruction of the bees in "Stings" that violent retribution is not "worth it"; she comes to "The Swarm" from "Stings" able to confront the abuses of history because she is not susceptible to the lesson they teach. • What she confronts in the poem is the same oppression she experiences in her private life--played out on a world scale. Understandably, then, the tactics that enabled her to withstand her own hardships permit her to address the suffering of others as well.
Side note: • This poem was never included in the original British publication of Ariel. • Ted Hughes, however, decided to include it within the publication released in U.S. in 1966.
A General Understanding… • In "Wintering" , the final poem of the sequence, the speaker has come to her last and most important confrontation--that with herself. • With her work completed, and with no demands upon her from others, she is able to give herself to the natural rhythms that the seasons decree. "This is the easy time, there is nothing doing," she says in the first line of the poem in a colloquial manner that expresses her own ease and patience. • A similar line later confirms that she views her wintering as a distinct phase, a certain kind of time: "This is the time of hanging on for the bees." • Her recognition that wintering is one part of a larger cycle of time is important because it qualifies the images of hibernation--elements that lead many readers to assume this is a poem about passivity and death.
A General Understanding… • The symbolic importance of the setting is further established through sound, repetition, and metaphors of the unconscious. • The cellar parallels the core of the self, where normal perception fails her because she has never before been there. Wintering in a dark without window At the heart of the house . . . This is the room I have never been in. This is the room I could never breathe in. • The soft alliteration of w’s and h’s creates a tone of silent, solitary reflection, yet the sense of calm that these sounds convey does not completely offset the agitation she feels in such surroundings. The repeated, "This is the room," suggests how difficult it is for her to accept where she is. • The gothic imagery, accompanied by the alliteration of the explosive b’s, incites her nervous dread: "The black bunched in there like a bat.
The Bees in comparison • At first glance, these bees appear similar to those in "The Swarm." Both are compared to soldiers. • In the first poem "the swarm balls and deserts," the "bees argue in their black ball." On the other hand, the "Wintering" bees "ball in a mass" in order to concentrate their vitality against the cold and snow. • Their unity is necessary for survival (and is proven efficacious in the last line where all the bees fly, not just the queen). • No doubt there is something awesome about their wintering, "Black / Mind against all that white." • The season of hibernation is clearly stark and extreme, black and white, and it requires stolid obstinacy ("black asininity" even) rather than the emotional self-indulgence of "The Bee Meeting."
Women Roles in the poem… • Plath wrote: “Winter is for Women” • Women survive together. As winter approaches, the community that endures is female: “They have got rid of the men The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors.” • The key to the survival of the bees, in this poem, is their willingness to accommodate their circumstances. • Some readers make an effort to extract from this passage a vindictive spirit toward men, but the tone is so obviously detached and humorous that such an interpretation is unconvincing. • Furthermore, the lovely, unperturbed portrait of the mother over the cradle immediately detracts attention away from the men who are not there and refocuses it on this female community: "The woman, still at her knitting, / At the cradle of Spanish walnut, / Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think." • The alliteration of w’s (winter, women, woman, walnut) recalls the opening tone where that sound has already been associated with forbearance and equanimity.
