"Bees"

Given the recent scientific concern about the health of bee colonies and the ramifications for pollination and agriculture, it's time for a pair of poems about bees.

Sylvia Plath's "The Arrival of the Bee Box" is not objective and scientific. Instead, the speaker signals her unease through words like din, dangerous, moon suit, funeral veil.

It is the noise that appalls me most of all,

The unintelligible syllables.

It is like a Roman mob . . .

I lay my ear to furious Latin.

I am not the Caesar.

I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.

Plath's poem concludes with an implied threat:

Tomorow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.

The box is only temporary.

In "Telling the Bees" by Deborah  Digges, the speaker faces a different task, one that is unavoidable: dealing with the death of a loved one. True, the Digges poem also conveys the sonic horror of the bee colony:

. . . I set out, this once

obedient, toward the hives' domed skeps

on evening's hill, five tombs alight.

I thought I heard the thrash and moaning

of confinement . . .

Or is that confinement not of the bees within the hive but of the beloved's soul upon death?

The voice that found me gave the news.

Up flew the bees toward his orchards.

Note the subtle choice of words: not "I found the voice" to be able to face the fact of his death, but rather "The voice that found me" [emphasis mine]. And perhaps unlike Sylvia Plath's bees, which will probably be allowed to remain, the bees in the Digges poem are released, like the soul of the departed.

    The Arrival of the Bee Box (Sylvia Plath)

I ordered this, this clean wood box

Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.

I would say it was the coffin of a midget

Or a square baby

Were there not such a din in it.

The box is locked, it is dangerous.

I have to live with it overnight

And I can’t keep away from it.

There are no windows, so I can’t see what is in there.

There is only a little grid, no exit.

I put my eye to the grid.

It is dark, dark,

With the swarmy feeling of African hands

Minute and shrunk for export,

Black on black, angrily clambering.

How can I let them out?

It is the noise that appalls me most of all,

The unintelligible syllables.

It is like a Roman mob,

Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!

I lay my ear to furious Latin.

I am not the Caesar.

I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.

They can be sent back.

They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.

I wonder how hungry they are.

I wonder if they would forget me

If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.

There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,

And the petticoats of the cherry.

They might ignore me immediately

In my moon suit and funeral veil.

I am no source of honey

So why should they turn on me?

Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.

The box is only temporary.

        (from The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, editor Ted Hughes, pages 212-213:  Harper Perennial, New York, NY © 2001)

      Telling the Bees (Deborah Digges)

It fell to me to tell the bees,

though I had wanted another duty—

to be the scribbler at his death,

there chart the third day’s quickening.

But fate said no, it falls to you

to tell the bees, the middle daughter.

So it was written at your birth.

I wanted to keep the fire, working

the constant arranging and shifting

of the coals blown flaring,

my cheeks flushed red,

my bed laid down before the fire,

myself anonymous among the strangers

there who’d come and go.

But destiny said no. It falls

to you to tell the bees, it said.

I wanted to be the one to wash his linens,

boiling the death-soiled sheets,

using the waters for my tea.

I might have been the one to seal

his solitude with mud and thatch and string,

the webs he parted every morning,

the hounds’ hair combed from brushes,

the dust swept into piles with sparrows’ feathers.

Who makes the laws that live

inside the brick and mortar of a name,

Selects the seeds, garden or wild,

brings forth the foliage grown up around it

through drought or blight or blossom,

the honey darkening in the bitter years,

the combs like funeral lace or wedding veils

steeped in oak gall and rainwater,

sequined of rent wings.

And so arrayed I set out, this once

obedient, toward the hives’ domed skeps

on evening’s hill, five tombs alight.

I thought I heard the thrash and moaning

of confinement, beyond the century,

a calling across dreams,

as if asked to make haste just out of sleep.

I knelt and waited.

The voice that found me gave the news.

Up flew the bees toward his orchards.

        (from Trapeze: Poems, pages 5-6: Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY © 2005)