IN A HIVE, the queen’s single function is to lay lots of eggs. She is different from the other bees because of her size and splendor. And she is surrounded by fifty thousand worker bees, who have many different functions or careers.
Among them are the cleaner, the nurse, the builder, the fanner, the sentinel, the gatherer, the undertaker, and the packer. The cleaner is responsible for the general upkeep of things. The nurse is occupied with the care of the larvae, which must be fed a thousand times. The builder constructs the beautiful honeycombs, which are fabricated from secreted wax—delicate, exhausting work. The fanner regulates the temperature of the hive, beating its wings constantly to air out the hive and dry the nectar. The sentinel protects the colony from its enemies, who desire to rob the reserves. You might say that the sentinel is like a poetry reviewer or critic. The gatherer hunts for nectar, pollen, and water. It makes between ten and a hundred journeys each day. Some bees become gatherers straightaway, but others never reach this high status. Flying at a mad speed, the gatherer exhausts itself quickly and dies after only four or five days. I think that some poets are gatherers, like Sylvia Plath. And the undertaker bees carry their dead brothers and sisters out of the hive.
Finally, the packer bee sips up the nectar and regurgitates it and sips it up again, repeating the process over and over, adding saliva enzymes of its own, until the nectar is dehydrated and changed into honey to be stored in the hexagonal cells (stanzas?), which are covered over with fine wax, like a cork, for good conservation.
Here at my desk, I resemble a packer bee, striving to put enough pressure on language to transform it into poetry, regurgitating my nectar again and again until honey is formed. I had a beloved teacher who said verse (a late Old English word) must
reverse itself, and go around and around. In contrast, prose (a Latin word) proceeds and moves forward without repetition.
NEAR THE END of her life, Sylvia Plath wrote a sequence of bee poems, and in a letter to her mother she said about them, “They will make my name.” Written in a single week in the autumn of 1962, when her marriage to the English poet Ted Hughes was breaking up, she placed them at the end of her important second book, Ariel, but two years later, when the book appeared after her death, Hughes revised this order, downgrading the bee poems to a less triumphant position in the collection.
In another letter, Plath wrote, “I know nothing of bees,” though her father was Otto Plath, an entomologist who’d published a book titled Bumblebees and Their Ways (1934). When she was a little girl living on the North Shore of Boston, Plath’s father kept beehives. She was only eight when her mother had to tell her of his death, and she replied, “I’ll never speak to God again!” Many years later, when she was living in Devon, England, with her husband and two young children, she described in her journal a visit to a meeting of the Devon beekeepers:
We were interested in starting a hive, so dumped the babies in bed and jumped in the car. . . . We felt very new & shy, I hugging my bare arms in the cool of the evening . . . everybody was holding a bee-hat, some with netting of nylon. . . . The men were lifting out rectangular yellow slides, crusted with bees, crawling, swarming. I felt prickles all over me, & itches. . . . They were looking for queen cells – – – long, pendulous, honey-colored cells from which the new queens would come. . . . I was aware of bees buzzing and stalling before my face. The veil seemed hallucinatory. . . . “Spirit of my dead father, protect me!” I arrogantly prayed.
Plath’s bee sequence contains five poems that are unified by a cinquain (five-line) stanza pattern and a preoccupation with bees and beekeeping. The poems in Ariel have a harder, more abrupt freehand style than those in her first book, The Colossus. I don’t know which bee poem I like more, “The Arrival of the Bee Box” (in which Plath puts her ear to the box and hears “furious Latin”) or “The Swarm” (in which the bees, a symbol of feminine energy, are shot at—“Pom! Pom!”—by the men in her village), because they all contain many original lines and images: “The white hive is snug as a virgin” and “I would say it was the coffin of a midget / Or a square baby / Were there not such a din in it” and “The bees argue, in their black ball, / A flying hedgehog, all prickles.”
When I was a poetry student in college, Plath’s poems were not a good influence on me. I was nineteen or twenty, and still learning that a poem isn’t just self-expression. But to a young man raised in a highly disciplined, military, Catholic household, she was like a blood jet. Still, almost forty years later, I admire this about her, especially when so much American poetry feels emotionally tepid and almost suburban. I believed then, and I still do, that a poem is organized violence. Like Baudelaire, Plath extended the boundaries of the lyric, taking the reader deeper into the shadows of her sorrow during the final weeks and months of her life. Even today, in certain quarters, she is trivialized and dishonored because of the confessional aspect of her poems.
THE ANCIENT GREEKS associated lips anointed with honey with
