Justin Lin

A Hive of Emotion: Weighing the Bee Poems
“The human mind always makes progress, but that progress is in spirals.” French scholar Madame de Stael once made this statement in reference to the voracious intellectual searching of the Enlightenment but is applied here as the summary of the mind of Sylvia Plath. Throughout her life, Plath turned to her poetry as an outlet for her troubled mind, which causes many of her poems to draw parallels to the emotional timeline of her life. Plath was able to shape the waters of her flooded emotional well into specific and significant symbols embodied by a plethora of imagery that ranges from the Colossus of Rhodes to the Holocaust. Plath’s images of bees in “The Arrival of the Bee Box” and “Wintering” embody the evolution of Plath’s ideals.
Strangely, Plath’s Bee poems do not open with “The Arrival of the Bee Box” but with a gathering of individuals at a “Bee Meeting.” Upon reading both; however, one realizes that the placement of a “Meeting” before “The Arrival” is far more logical. Within “The Bee Meeting,” Plath gathers the fragments of her emotions as “the agent for the bees.” As Plath steels herself for “The Arrival,” she desperately masks “[her] my fear, my fear, my fear.” ("Meeting" 10) “The villagers” ("Meeting" 1) in “The Bee Meeting” are actually the bees themselves, with bees, in effect, the avatars of Plath’s emotions thus setting the stage for “The Arrival of the Bee Box.”
While “The Arrival of the Bee Box” is a comparatively short piece and never explicitly mentions bees except in the title, “Arrival” is easily manifested in live bees. The foundation of “Arrival” was set by “Meeting” where the bees represent the various aspects of Plath’s emotions, and then in “Arrival,” when the “clean wood box,”("Arrival" 1) a parallel to Plath’s neat, idyllic exterior is received, it appears as “the coffin of a midget.” ("Arrival" 3) The bees, Plath’s emotions, are contained by the “clean wood box” much like real bees would be interred in an artificial hive. The small size of the midget represents repressed and shrunken emotions that are now dead, stifled and suppressed by Plath’s keeping up of appearances, manifested in the clean wood box. Fortunately, the poem allows Plath to reconcile with herself, ending with “Tomorrow I will be a sweet God, I will set them free./The box is only temporary.” ("Arrival" 35-36) This ultimately places Plath back into a position of power, setting the bees, and her emotions, free to break the social bonds that restrain her.
Once these bonds are broken, Plath progresses through her remaining Bee poems expanding and extrapolating her emotions until she reaches “Wintering” the last poem in the sequence. Here, Plath’s references to be imagery such as “I have my honey,/six jars of it” ("Wintering" 3-4) serve to show the emotional sustenance her poetry has given her. In “Wintering” she invokes that fact by showing the final moments of her emotional state. Plath meant “Wintering” to be her final poem and as thus imbued the poem with references to her end. The gradual blooming of the flowers, the lifeblood of bees, in “Wintering” in combination with phrases of suffering such as “Possession. It is they who own me.” ("Wintering" 18-19) and “Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.” ("Wintering" 50) paint a picture of a woman who yearns to be free from others, frozen in one location as bees are bound to their fields. Plath eventually finds the strength to release her spirit and ends with a hopeful image, “The bees are flying. They taste the spring.” ("Wintering" 55)
As “The Arrival of the Bee Box” gave images of Plath’s emotional avatars meeting and steeling themselves for a deep exposé, “Wintering” gives that exposé and ends on a high note. The disparity between the Bee Poems and Plath’s other poetry show her peaceful end and emotional settling. Poetry was Plath's vehicle for emotional expression and the Bee Poems were her hopeful death note.
Word Count: 645