Ashleigh Sims

“A Self to Recover, a Queen”: Sylvia Plath’s Queen Role in the Bee Poems
“I am writing the best poems of my life.” This is what Plath wrote to her mother after completing the bee poems. When Sylvia Plath and her husband divorced she owned bees and wrote five poems about the bees, the poems became to be known as the bee poems. These poems were very important to Sylvia as shown by the place of honor she awarded then in the back of her final collection of poems, Ariel. Although the order was changer after her death by her ex-husband, Ted Hughes, the bee poems are still a very important collection of Plath’s writing. In the bee poems Stings and The Bee Meeting Sylvia Plath’s use of feminine imagery compares herself to the bees using queen and virgin imagery.
Plath uses virgin imagery in The Bee Meeting and Stings in opposing situations to show both a protected and welcoming imagery. In The Bee Meeting she writes, “The white hive is snug as a virgin / Sealing off her brood cells, her honey, and quietly humming” (34-35). These lines describe the comfort and safety of the hive. The word virgin is used in this poem to show that the hive is protected from the outside. However, in Stings Plath uses the word virgin in an opposing manner than in The Bee Meeting. This is shown in the line, “Opening in spring like an industrious virgin” (35). By placing the word industrious within the line Plath has reversed the meaning of virgin from meaning protected to being open and inviting. This shows the two choices Plath toyed with in her youth. She debated with herself whether it was better to stay a virgin until she was married or not to and therefore be experienced when she decided to get married.
Plath related herself to the bees and compares herself to the queen. She disassociates herself from the regular bees in Stings saying, “I stand in a column / Of winged, unmiraculous women, / Honey drudgers. / I am no drudge” (20-23). She has been doing a drudge’s job and is physically with the other bees but she isn’t anything like them. When Plath invokes the queen, she is actually taking about herself. In Stings she writes, “They though death was worth it but I / Have a self to recover, a queen.” (51-52). These lines first discuss the bees that sting the man and therefore die once they sting him. She separates herself from them, instead relating herself to a queen bee, higher in status and smarter that the other bees who mindlessly killed themselves. This again relates to her real life, because the bees are essentially committing suicide by stinging the man because bees can’t survive without a stinger and they can’t grow anymore. She disconnects herself from these suicidal bees and she realizes that her death wouldn’t be worth it. This is different from many of her other poems in which she discusses suicide as something that she is good at and has done multiple times. She also asks herself questions relating to the queen in both poems. In The Bee Meeting Plath asks, “the queen. / is she hiding?” (42-43) and “The old queen does not show herself, is she so ungrateful?” (50). In Stings she questions, “Is there any queen at all in it?” (15) and “Is she dead, is she sleeping?” (53). In both of the poems a queen bee is missing from the hive. This is a relation to Plath’s life, these poems were an awakening for her, something totally different from her other poems. This is reflected in the poem, the missing queen is Plath’s former self, the suicidal, destructive self. She is a new queen, before her new self was like a drudger bee, hidden behind the power of the old queen, but when the queen left with her husband, the new queen arose. She became a new person, capable of writing beautiful poems, completely unlike from any of her previous work.
The two poems Stings and The Bee Meeting are two of the five unique bee poems of Sylvia Plath. These poems were written at a special time in her life during her divorce a few months before her suicide. These poems show a unique side of her that isn’t shown in any of her other poems. They deeply reflect her life’s experiences and her new view on them due to her divorce.
Word Count: 730