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

Sylvia Plath The Ambivalent Bee God February 26, 2007

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I met with professor Emerson today and we (finally) got to discuss the bee poem sequence at the end of Ariel. It was nice to validate my idea that the poems are extremely scattered in their assertions and ideas about the bees and that the only consistency is the use of perfect dichotomies (ie: power vs. powerlessness). By “scattered” I mean that they present this chaotic web of descriptions about various ways and situations in which Plath kept or encountered bees and in all four poems (not including “The Swarm) she never comes to a clear conceit as to how she feels about the bees or herself or her relationship with the bees. This ambivalency to make definite assertions is heightened by Plath’s seeming innablility to characterize herself; throughout the poems she is Plath the poet, Plath the eager bee keeper, Plath the fearful beekeeper, Plath a bee, Plath a vengeful domineering god, and Plath a benevolent god. I have read (and blogged about) many different critical takes on these bee poems, including the article that says that they are all about her father and her father as a nazi, but i think these poems are actually about herself and how she see’s herself in the world (shocking, I know). True, she may have gotten the idea to try her hand at bee keeping from her father, and she may have originally become inspired to write poems about bees because of her late father, but I think the poetry produced from her adventures (and misadventures) with the bees is incredibly self-reflective and has very little to do with Otto Plath. The bee sequence becomes this tiny meta-world of self-evaluation, that consequently turns out to be her final attempt at self-evaluation, and I think it ends on a very hopeful note. Throughout the poems she grapples with her own humilty, self-worth and power. The bees are merely a catalyst for this self-analysis, they provide for her a maleable subject that sometimes bends to her will and at other times tests her power. They also mirror her existence in a convenient way, at times being separate bee armies apart from the world and at times being one single bee-mind-entity working together against the world; much like Plath herself could often view herself in a secular light as a working single mother or in a kind of other-worldly light as a removed troubled poet. To view the bee poems in this way is at once nicely consistent with Plath’s confessional poetry and in another way troubling and reductive because it allows me to simply shrug and claim purposeful inconclusiveness on the part of the poet. I am beginning to accept that for the most part all I can do is shrug and pick an argument when it comes to Sylvia Plath because there are so many presented for me to choose and they are all (for the most part) convincing, so when I pose my own suggestions, even if they are inconclusive, only partially substantiated and slightly reductive, at least I trying to think on my own!
Professor Emerson and I did discuss at legnth the final idea in the poem “Wintering” which is the final poem in Plath’s Ariel. The last line reads, “The bees are flying. They taste the spring”. This final line of the final poem is so startlingly resolute and satisfying. Plath’s poems are many things but satisfying is rarely one of them, at least in the literal sense of having a concrete, hopeful, quasi-certainty. This line implies that the bees have made it. That after months in her cellar, and even longer as her property with her as their ambivalent god the bees are going to live and thrive after all. It seems then that Plath also “tastes the spring” and feels as though she may live another year. Professor Emerson told us in poetry about the southern superstition that if an elderly person lives through february they will live for another year and this poem seems to fit that notion. It almost makes Plath’s suicide seem more like a test (like how she tested her skills at bee keeping) and if she were found she’d have had another year. Plath successfully committed suicide on February 11 and so I know that makes this idea even more tragic but it’s something to think about…

anyway this idea is far more streamlined then my last few posts…so that’s a nice change and here is another video, just a short video about bee keeping!