We shall by morning/Inherit the earth/Our foot’s in the door.

Watch Out For Bees February 13, 2007

Posted by amanda in : Uncategorized , trackback

I’ve spent this week reading critical articles about Syliva Plath and her Bee poems at the end of Ariel. I felt (as many people do) that these poems deserved to be separated out and clustered together as she had clustered them both literally and thematically in her volume (the original/restored editions anyway). Luckily the articles I read for this week had many opinions about these five poems.
Personally, I see them as especially conflicted as compared to the other poems which is only compounded because there are so many about the same topic. The main conflict (is kind of obvious I know) is whether or not she or the bees are in control. Based on the order, I think she gains more and more control as the poems progress. The order FYI is: “The Bee Meeting” “The Arrival of the Bee Box” “Stings” “Wintering” and there is also a poem called “The Swarm” which she did not have in her original manuscript thus it is not in the restored edition with the rest of the bee poems…which actually helps cement my theory. The first poem, “The Bee Meeting” is appropriately enough a description of her initial encounters with the bees. It is unclear whether she is describing a real event or a dream but she details the entire process of harvesting honey from bees. It is actually less about the threatening nature of the bees as it is an introduction to the idea that the bee colony works as a united team to defend the queen and how we are threating to their system. It ends with the line “why am I cold.” A question stated as a sentence because she and we obviously know why she feels cold.
The second poem, is my personal favorite “The Arrival of the Bee Box” where she describes a literal wooden box of bees she has had delivered and because it is night they are simply sitting in her house and it is her observations of how much power she has over their lives. She writes “They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.” and it is a stunning realization that might seem kind of psychotic but it is the first time she has felt this way (or at least expressed it through her poetry) becasue though she has written many poems about motherhood those relate a feeling of independence from versus these bees which she apparently feels control over. This poem ends with the lines “Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free./The box is only temporary.”
The Third poem is “Stings”. I find this to be the most complicated of the bee poems although she is once again feeling bolder amongst the bees. In this poem she becomes or speaks through the ageing queen bee. So even though the bees are getting more of an upper hand in this poem, she is the head of the bee colony so she too is in a place of power.
The fourth poem is “Wintering” which is noteable because it is the final poem in “Ariel” which completed Plath’s vision to write a volume that begins with the word “love” and ends with the word “Spring”. In this poem it seems as though she has moved the bees into her cellar for the winter. This poem not only shows her as powerful but also demonstrates how unified the bee colony is. In some ways I get a sense of longing from this poem.
The fifth and final bee poem is added as an appendix to my restored edition on page 190 and it is “The Swarm”. This poem gives the bees the most power, turning them into an unstoppable army. I can in a way see why Hughes added this to his version because it is about bees and as long as he was meddling he might as well strive for consistency, but I can also see why Plath left it out. It is a good poem but a huge departure from how she talks about the bees in the other poems. This one is almost too obvious in the bee as army metaphor. It wouldn’t really fit with the other poems because it would be impossible to stick it in the middle of the other ones and a totally harsh way to begin the small bee sequence and obvioulsy she couldn’t end the sequence with this violent (however triumphant on the bee’s part) image.

So now the question remains…why the fixation on bees?
Even though scholars disagree as to her purpose behind these poems, they all agree that initial interest in the subject came from her late father. He was a german entemoligist who studied honey bees and wrote books about them. There is also biographical evidence that when living in her country home in the final year of her life, Plath also tried her hand at bee-keeping.
One article posed the argument that these bee poems are literally an ode to her her father that express her feelings about him using the bees as a catalyst. There is even evidence in this article to suggest that the german imagery and the nazi imagery are due to some evidence that Otto Plath was a fascist.
The other article I read was by Breslin and it tried to argue that you cannot truly know Plath through her poems because she used her poetry to try on different personalities and the bee poems are no exception. It remarked upon her various confidence levels in these poems and how they show that she was almost unreliable as a constant narrator.
I’m not sure which opinion I’m more likely to agree with because the fist seems to simplified and the second seems to neglect the autobiographical nature in a great deal of her poetry.
This was a really long, ranting, inconclusive post and I’m sorry about that! I meet with professor Emerson tomorrow and hopefully after that meeting i’ll have more of an idea of how to streamline my varied thoughts about these poems

*as an interesting side note and reward for reading this terribly boring post…..here is a fun fact: Hitler’s father also studied bee keeping…….FUN

also in response to my last post about the dixie chicks, professor emerson posed this queston to me this morning and i’d like to think on it some more but it is interesting to consider: When does a celebrity (be it poet, musician, actress, etc) stop being an artist and start becoming a personality?

for instance: The Dixie Chicks made one politically charged comment and the focus was taken completly off of their music and put onto their personal lives and now they have almost reached politician status in the amount of political sway public opinion has given them. Likewise Plath, after her suicide, she became less of a poet and more of a “personality” and her poetry was used primarily as a way of seeing into her personal life…..I guess this is similar to the questions in my dialogue with Jim Groom in the PMS post….but it’s something more to think about.