The Bee Meeting Lyrics
The rector, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees.
In my sleeveless summery dress I have no protection,
And they are all gloved and covered, why did nobody tell me?
They are smiling and taking out veils tacked to ancient hats.
I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me?
Yes, here is the secretary of bees with her white shop smock,
Buttoning the cuffs at my wrists and the slit from my neck to my knees.
Now I am milkweed silk, the bees will not notice.
Thev will not smell my fear, my fear, my fear.
Which is the rector now, is it that man in black?
Which is the midwife, is that her blue coat?
Everybody is nodding a square black head, they are knights in visors,
Breastplates of cheesecloth knotted under the armpits.
Their smiles and their voices are changing. I am led through a beanfield.
Strips of tinfoil winking like people,
Feather dusters fanning their hands in a sea of bean flowers,
Creamy bean flowers with black eyes and leaves like bored hearts.
Is it blood clots the tendrils are dragging up that string?
No, no, it is scarlet flowers that will one day be edible.
Now they are giving me a fashionable white straw Italian hat
And a black veil that molds to my face, they are making me one of them.
They are leading me to the shorn grove, the circle of hives.
Is it the hawthorn that smells so sick?
The barren body of hawthorn, etherizing its children.
It is the surgeon my neighbors are waiting for,
This apparition in a green helmet,
Shining gloves and white suit.
Is it the butcher, the grocer, the postman, someone I know?
I cannot run, I am rooted, and the gorse hurts me
With its yellow purses, its spiky armory.
I could not run without having to run forever.
The white hive is snug as a virgin,
Sealing off her brood cells, her honey, and quietly humming.
Smoke rolls and scarves in the grove.
The mind of the hive thinks this is the end of everything.
Here they come, the outriders, on their hysterical elastics.
If I stand very still, they will think I am cow-parsley,
A gullible head untouched by their animosity,
Not even nodding, a personage in a hedgerow.
The villagers open the chambers, they are hunting the queen.
Is she hiding, is she eating honey? She is very clever.
She is old, old, old, she must live another year, and she knows it.
While in their fingerjoint cells the new virgins
Dream of a duel they will win inevitably,
A curtain of wax dividing them from the bride flight,
The upflight of the murderess into a heaven that loves her.
The villagers are moving the virgins, there will be no killing.
The old queen does not show herself, is she so ungrateful?
About
Two major themes inform the ‘Bee Poems’. Plath had an interest in the Greek philosopher, Plato, who records Socrates teaching that poetry emanates from ‘honey-springs’ (honey being the food of the gods), and that the best poems are written by ‘divine dispensation’, so the poet produces poetry through inspiration, as a bee produces honey.
The second theme evokes the opposite, the controlling figure of her father, Otto Plath, a German-speaking biologist specializing in entomology and author of Bumblebees and Their Ways (1934), who died when she was eight. Underlying much of Plath’s work is the theme of her relationship with her father. She both loved and hated him and, in her confusion, struggled to assert her identity. Some of the themes and emotions in her poem “Daddy” are revisited here.
Plath wrote ‘The Bee Meeting’ in October 1962 after she and her husband, Ted Hughes, had legally separated. This was also the month in which Plath wrote twenty-five poems, thought by many to be her best work. This is the first of a sequence she originally called “Bees,” in which the narrator recaptures her emotional stability, and sense of self and control of her own life through her identification with the queen bee. The life cycle of bees centres around the queen — a metaphor for regenerative life; birth, death and rebirth.
Note also that the title is ambiguous. Is this a meeting of bees themselves, or of the people who are involved in the keeping of them?
The sequence consists of five poems: “The Bee Meeting”, “The Arrival of the Bee Box”, “Stings”, “The Swarm”, and “Wintering”. With the exception of “The Swarm,” the bee poems draw on her struggles with her self and identity.
Throughout the ‘Bee’ sequence unexpressed violence is implied by the queen’s method of mating. The mate, chosen from drones who pursue her nuptial or, as Plath calls it, bride-flight. The drone impregnates the queen and the moment he does so his abdomen splits open, losing the entrails which the queen then totes behind her as proof that she has guaranteed the future of the hive. This is particularly relevant to ‘The Swarm’, which deals with the violence of the Napoleonic period of history.
Structure
The poem consists of eleven stanzas of five lines each, typical of Plath. The lines are of uneven length to reflect the meaning. There is no regular rhyme scheme, though Plath uses a range of poetic devices, including assonance, consonance, alliteration. Notably she uses anaphora in stanzas three and five (for example repetiton of the question ‘which is’ in paragraph three) and parallel syntax.
Language and Imagery
The bees with their queen represent regeneration and new life. However, Plath is caught in a frightening milieu of villagers who conjure fear and alienation. Notably, they are protected, she is not and therefore she is vulnerable to injury. Plath, like the queen bee in her life-cycle, will be usurped.
Q&A
Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning
- 1.Morning Song
- 2.The Couriers
- 3.Sheep in Fog
- 5.Lady Lazarus
- 6.Tulips
- 7.Cut
- 8.Elm
- 11.Berck-Plage
- 12.Ariel
- 13.Death & Co.
- 14.Lesbos
- 16.Gulliver
- 17.Getting There
- 18.Medusa
- 21.Mary’s Song
- 23.The Rival
- 24.Daddy
- 25.You’re
- 26.Fever 103°
- 27.The Bee Meeting
- 29.Stings
- 30.The Swarm
- 31.Wintering
- 32.The Hanging Man
- 33.Little Fugue
- 34.Years
- 36.Totem
- 37.Paralytic
- 38.Balloons
- 39.Poppies in July
- 40.Kindness
- 41.Contusion
- 42.Edge
- 43.Words