Sylvia Plath Forum

Poetry Analysis/ Discussion



The Bee Meeting 

Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? They are
the
villagers-----
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.

Is it some operation that is taking place?
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?

I am exhausted, I am exhausted -
Pillar of white in a blackout of knives.
I am the magician's girl who does not flinch.
The villagers are untying their disguises, they are shaking
hands.
Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they
accomplished,
why am I cold.

3 October 1962


"The Bee Meeting" is a brilliant work in that its
controlling metaphor teeters on collapse. 

Joseph Sullivan
Toledo, USA
Thursday, February 4, 1999



"We interviewed him. 'What is your greatest interest?' He smiled. 'Bees,' he
answered. 'Yes,' we persisted, 'but what is your--your ambition?' He
smiled. 'Bees,' he said. 'We mean,' we patiently explained, 'what is your
passion -- that of which you dream?" He smiled -- opened his mouth . . .
But we fled, remembering Hamlet pointing to his head, and saying to
Polonius, 'B-z-z.'"
--- 1926 Boston University yearbook, interview with Professor Otto Plath
(source, Rough Magic, Paul Alexander)

When the spectral procession approached the altar, each couple separated,
and slowly diverged, till, in the centre, appeared a form, that had been
worthily ushered in with all this gloomy pomp, the death knell, and the
funeral. It was the bridegroom in his shroud! 
--- Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Wedding Knell"

At one point, Sylvia Plath apparently planned to gather her
magnificent bee poems under the title heading "Bees,"
envisioning a formal sequence that links it in my mind to
her only other formal sequence, the then-unpublished,
abandoned Roethke-esque "Poem for A Birthday," in which
the controversial "I" of Plath's poetry is regressed to the
primeval place of origin, dissolved and reassembled again
(in "The Stones"), enacting the obsessive Plathian
psychodrama of death and transfiguration. Here again, in
"Bees," Plath sets out on a similar journey, and emerges
triumphantly as a murderous queen bee. With the first
poem, "The Bee Meeting," this redemptive conceit (and the
grand plan of a sequence) seems, however, embryonic at
best in the poet's mind -- she gives us instead a devastating
portrayal of her situation (the dissolution of her marriage,
her sense of abandonment, jealousy, isolation, guilt, and
sexual obsolescence) and absorbs the reader in the
relentless psychologic! al pull of her own desire for death. 

As the poem begins, an unrevealed, mysterious
catastrophe seems to have occurred, rendering "I" a
veritable amnesiac who can only ask frightened, frantic
questions (Who? Which? What? Why?); stripped, not only
of knowledge, but of "protection" --- "nude as a chicken
neck" in her "sleeveless summery dress." (We can surmise,
from examining the poems Plath wrote immediately before
this one --- "Words heard, by accident, over the phone",
"Burning the Letters," "For a Fatherless Son," "The
Detective," etc. --- that this catastrophe was Assia Wevill.)
As in "Poem for a Birthday," "I" finds herself at a point of
origin; here, at the foot of "the bridge" (spanning the
primeval swamp? The longed-for waters of the
womb/tomb? The bridge stands ready for the crossing or
the jumping from, one is not sure which). "The bridge"
offers transition, a direct passage from one shore to the
next, and the contemplation of making the journey to that
far shore is the hidden matter of the poem. I surmise that
this "undiscovered country" falls into the same topography
as Emily Dickinson's ambivalent "Immortality." Like
Dante's pilgrim, however, "I" will be subjected to a radical
detour before her destination can be reached (a detour that,
in both cases, bequeathed to the world a classic work of
Western literature.) 

"Does nobody love me?" asks "I", one key to the mysterious
cloud of threat that hangs over the poem - "my fear, my
fear, my fear." Alvarez and others allude to pagan ritual,
which revolved so keenly around the question of fertility.
Fertility is indeed a primary issue at stake, burning in the
consciousness of this poet so quick to label her own work
"stillborn" and who is reeling in the aftermath of sexual
betrayal. Abandonment, sexual competition,
fertility/pollination -- these themes pulse throughout the
poem as the amnesiac speaker finds herself curiously
attuned, one woman telepathically linked to another, to the
minds of the old queen bee ("she must live another year,
and she knows it") and her virgin rivals. From an e-mail
correspondence with Janice Green, a professional
beekeeper:

"It has been long taught that when a new virgin queen hatches out in a hive
she fights the old queen and the best queen wins. It doesn't always happen
this way, however. Often the bees will tolerate the old queen and both will
lay eggs until the old queen gives out. If there are two virgins in the
colony, one might kill the other. This will most likely happen shortly after
the first virgin hatches. She will search out the other cells and kill the
queens before they hatch out."

A happy feminist utopia of communal egg laying does not
seem to be in the cards for this old queen, "hunted" from
within and without (Green suspects that the beekeepers
are "looking for the old queen to replace her with a new
queen . . . An old queen isn't very stable and is subject to
being replaced"), in "hiding" as the virgins sharpen their
knives like "King Lear's" bloodthirsty Regan and Goneril,
dreaming "of a duel they will win inevitably," their
encroaching coup d'etat. 

Also utmost on the minds of the new virgins is the "bride
flight,/ The upflight of the murderess into a heaven that
loves her." Plath is syntactically fuzzy here as to whose
blood they anticipate on their hands -- that of the old queen
or that of the male drones, or both? Janice Green writes:

"The virgin queens make one mating flight when the drones and most of
the worker bees fly up into the air. The queen must mate while flying, so
several drones will mate with her as she flies up into the air. (After which
the mated drones die.)"

We are thrust with "I" into the sexual jungle of Nature,
subject to the Darwinian law of tooth and claw. Like the
old queen, Plath has found herself the victim of a similar
collapse of an ancien regime -- abandoned by her husband
for the triumphant Assia Wevill (whose name helplessly
puts one in mind of the parasitic boll weevil), Plath stands
like Lot's wife, transformed into "a pillar of white" salt for
ruefully looking back at the apocalyptic destruction of
Sodom and Gomorrah (the dark, Plathian wit once again),
in a drama which ends in a "blackout of knives." 

Unable to root out the old queen, the beekeepers elect to
extend her life by removing the new queen cells in order to
prevent "swarming." ("Faulty beekeeper logic," says Janice
Green, and indeed a few poems later we have a "Swarm"
in full force). The queen's reaction (she "does not show
herself") is ambivalent - "is she so ungrateful?" An almost
disappointed air of impending obsolescence and mortality
hangs over the old queen's coffin-like hive (and over "I"
herself) as the poem comes to an end. 

"Strange, upsetting," writes Alvarez in "The Savage God"
concerning "The Bee Meeting." Like so many of Plath's
greatest poems, the poem has the quality of nightmare or a
painting by Magritte, in which the smallest object seems
fraught with hidden significance, vaguely reminding the
reader of something else. Often, after reading Plath, I
experience the disturbing sensation of trying to recall a
name "on the tip of my tongue." Whether consciously or
not, she often laces her work with clever clues to the cipher
of her poetic cryptograms. The "The Bee Meeting" is an
extraordinary case in point. 

Heir to the peculiar New England strain of daemonic
Coleridgian Romanticism typified by Hawthorne, Poe, and
Melville (see Camille Paglia, "Sexual Personae") and
extending in a debased form to such authors as Shirley
Jackson (whose classic 1948 New Yorker story "The
Lottery" I suspect was a minor influence on this poem) and
Stephen King, Plath pays witty homage to Hawthorne
throughout the poem: 

Is it the hawthorn that smells so sick?
The barren body of the hawthorn, etherizing its children.

As the astrological victim of an unfortunate Sun/Saturn
Square (in Freudian terms, the "guilt complex," Oedipal or
otherwise), it is not surprising that Plath reveals an affinity
to Hawthorne, the American Bard of Guilt -- particularly of
"secret guilt," the "terrible secret." The vague echo of
something unnamed that "upsets" us in "The Bee Meeting"
is quite akin to this quality of Hawthornian guilt. Whether
Plath was consciously aware of it or not, the poem uses
source material in Hawthorne (among others, no doubt) to
identify and enact an extremely unsettling but central
myth in the Plathian poetic universe, that of ritualized
incest. 

I find the crucial influence of at least four Hawthorne
"tales" in "The Bee Meeting"-"Young Goodman Brown,"
"The Wedding Knell," "The Minister's Black Veil," and
"Rappaccini's Daughter." The most blatant allusions to
these works occur in stanzas 4 and 5, but their subliminal
fragrance pervades the poem.

. . . 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 . . . 

I am the magician's girl who does not flinch.

In "Rappaccini's Daughter," a mad botanist, who plays
Adam to a beautiful garden of poisonous plants, performs
a diabolical experiment. In an effort to render his daughter
immortal, he transforms her into the human equivalent of a
poisonous flower, "nourished with poisons from her birth
upward, until her whole nature was so imbued with them
that she herself had become the deadliest poison in
existence. Poison was her element of life. With that rich
perfume of her breath she blasted the very air. Her love
would have been poison--her embrace death." "I",
wandering through this baneful beanfield in her Italian hat
(the beehives placed nearby to bring about pollination of
the crop), is the mad scientist's daughter, or perhaps in this
case the mad "beekeeper's daughter", whose breath means
contagion -- in Hawthorne, the girl's "terrible secret." (Cf.
"The Bee Keeper's Daughter", with its own "terrible secret",
humming with incestuous vibrations.) The daughter is
doomed, of course, to remain forever in her father's bower -
"I would fain have been loved, not feared," she cries to
Rappaccini as she dies at the feet of the mortal lover who
attempts to steal her away from her father with an antidote
that proves sadly fatal. In view of her veiled allusion to it
in "The Bee Meeting," it is interesting to speculate as to the
importance of this particular Hawthorne story to Plath,
particularly if one contemplates the incessant recurrence in
her poetry of "malignant" flora. The implicit reference to
the story in the poem suggests a keen identification on
Plath's part with the doomed girl of Hawthorne's tale ("the
magician's girl who does not flinch"), in whom a father's
"devilish science" has fundamentally altered her very
genetic makeup, making her the bearer of doom and death;
it suggests as well that the poet may have been
contemplating her own contribution to the marital
situation in which she found herself. 

Now they are giving me . . . a black veil that molds to my face . . .

This is Plath's most direct allusion to Hawthorne. In "The
Minister's Black Veil," a Puritan minister appears one
morning to his parishioners with a startling addition to his
wardrobe: a mysterious black veil, obscuring his face,
which creates a sensation among the villagers similar to the
speaker's (and the reader's) reaction to the mysterious
personages of "The Bee Meeting." 

"How strange," said a lady, "that a simple black veil, such as any woman
might wear on her bonnet, should become such a terrible thing on Mr.
Hooper's face!"

"Something must surely be amiss with Mr. Hooper's intellects," observed
her husband, the physician of the village. "But the strangest part of the
affair is the effect of this vagary, even on a sober-minded man like myself.
The black veil, though it covers only our pastor's face, throws its influence
over his whole person, and makes him ghostlike from head to foot. Do you
not feel it so?"

In Hawthorne's story, the veil symbolizes "secret sin, and
those sad mysteries which we hide from our nearest and
dearest, and would fain conceal from our own
consciousness, even forgetting that the Omniscient can
detect them." Again, the allusion in the poem to a secret
guilt (not entirely conscious, I think, on Plath's part) prods
the reader to delve far below the surface level of the piece
into the subterranean realm of psychological drives,
desires, and dreams. Hawthorne's Mr. Hooper, I suspect, is
emblematic to Plath of her own psychological problems:

With self-shudderings and outward terrors, he walked continually in its
shadow, groping darkly within his own soul, or gazing through a medium
that saddened the whole world . . .

And yet the metaphor of the "veil" suggests a growing
sense in Plath of her true poetic vocation: 

Among all its bad influences, the black veil had the one desirable effect, of
making its wearer a very efficient clergyman. By the aid of his mysterious
emblem--for there was no other apparent cause--he became a man of awful
power over souls that were in agony for sin. His converts always regarded
him with a dread peculiar to themselves, affirming, though but
figuratively, that, before he brought them to celestial light, they had been
with him behind the black veil. Its gloom, indeed, enabled him to
sympathize with all dark affections.

Plath is beginning to see herself, in her role as an artist, as a
"minister" of sorts, a notion which will later appear fully
voiced in her famous letter to Aurelia Plath of October 21,
1962, written nine days later, as the "swarm" of the Ariel
poems burst forth from within her:

"Don't talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person
out of Belsen -- physical or psychological-- wants is nobody saying the
birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has
been there and knows the worst, just what it is like. It is much more help
for me, for example, to know that people are divorced and go through hell,
than to hear about happy marriages. Let the Ladies Home Journal worry
about those."

If "Rappaccini's Daughter" and "The Minister's Black Veil"
offer the reader some insight into Plath's self-image at the
writing of "The Bee Meeting," two other Hawthorne tales
take us straight to the marrow of the poem's dramatic
action: "Young Goodman Brown" and "The Wedding
Knell." 

Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? They are the villagers . . 
. . . they are making me one of them.
They are leading me to the shorn grove, the circle of hives . . .
Smoke rolls and scarves in the grove . . .

Before "I" can set foot on "the bridge", she finds herself
intercepted. These sinister, smiling villagers, "gloved and
covered," wearing "veils tacked to ancient hats" ("ancient
hats" which link them to the old world of folklore, myth,
and pagan ritual) are resonant with an archetypal power
that extends from today's rampant alien abduction
scenarios back to the legendary tales of capture by witches,
ghouls, goblins, and fairies. They are Other, and they seek
to make the speaker "one of them." "I" finds herself a
distant cousin to Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown,
who undergoes his own satanic ritual initiation in the
woods at the hands of the pillars of Puritan Salem (cf. "The
rector, the midwife [an ancient practice long vulnerable to
associations with witchcraft], the sexton . . . the butcher, the
grocer, the postman."): 

In the interval of silence he stole forward until the light glared full upon his
eyes. At one extremity of an open space, hemmed in by the dark wall of
the forest, arose a rock, bearing some rude, natural resemblance either to
an alter or a pulpit, and surrounded by four blazing pines, their tops
aflame, their stems untouched, like candles at an evening meeting. The
mass of foliage that had overgrown the summit of the rock was all on fire,
blazing high into the night and fitfully illuminating the whole field. Each
pendent twig and leafy festoon was in a blaze. As the red light arose and
fell, a numerous congregation alternately shone forth, then disappeared in
shadow, and again grew, as it were, out of the darkness, peopling the
heart of the solitary woods at once.

"A grave and dark-clad company," quoth Goodman Brown.

In truth they were such. Among them, quivering to and fro between gloom
and splendor, appeared faces that would be seen next day at the council
board of the province, and others which, Sabbath after Sabbath, looked
devoutly heavenward, and benignantly over the crowded pews, from the
holiest pulpits in the land . . .

With his young wife, whom Hawthorne unsubtly dubs
"Faith," Brown is inducted by the Devil himself into the
massive coven, in a scene resembling a diabolical wedding.

Another diabolical wedding occurs in Hawthorne's "The
Wedding Knell." An aged woman, after jilting her lover in
youth and having widowed two other husbands, at last
consents to marry her original suitor. He, having been
driven mad over the intervening years with grief and
longing, frighteningly transforms their wedding into a
funeral rite: 

"But other husbands have enjoyed your youth, your beauty, your warmth
of heart, and all that could be termed your life. What is there for me but
your decay and death? And therefore I have bidden these funeral friends,
and bespoken the sexton's deepest knell, and am come, in my shroud, to
wed you, as with a burial service, that we may join our hands at the door
of the sepulchre, and enter it together."

The bride, under the sway of a sudden "irresistible"
yearning for the grave, replies: 

"Yes! . . . Let us wed, even at the door of the sepulchre! My life is gone in
vanity and emptiness. But at its close there is one true feeling. It has made
me what I was in youth; it makes me worthy of you. Time is no more for
both of us. Let us wed for Eternity!"

At a pitch too high to hear with human ear, both wedding
and funeral bells are ringing throughout "The Bee
Meeting," with its preponderance of white (white smock,
white hat, white flowers, white suit, white hive, white
pillar, white box), black, and the overwhelming presence of
clergy. Plath coyly mistakes Hughes ("that man in black")
for the sexton, and indeed on one level "The Bee Meeting"
presents us with the scenario of one husband officiating,
through his desertion, at the marriage of his wife to
another; the result, as Hawthorne puts it in "The Wedding
Knell", of a previous engagement: 

Father, bridegroom, in this Easter egg 
Under the coronal of sugar roses 

The queen bee marries the winter of your year. 
--- Plath, "The Beekeeper's Daughter"

Like the satanic Figure presiding over Goodman Brown's
evil nuptials (cf. "Daddy": "You stand at the blackboard,
daddy, In the picture I have of you, / A cleft in your chin
instead of your foot/ But no less a devil for that"), the
"surgeon" presiding at this "operation" appears
indistinctly, an "apparition in a green helmet/ Shining
gloves and white suit." The Lord of the Flies becomes the
Lord of the Bees, or the "Beinen-Konig" as Otto Plath was
dubbed by his schoolmates (Alexander, "Rough Magic", p.
13). 

Three days before writing "The Bee Meeting," Plath
composed the famous "A Birthday Present" (providing the
psychological "bridge" between "Poem for a Birthday" and
the "Bees" sequence). In it, Plath reveals that she, like the
Virgin Mary, is slated for an "annunciation" -- a mystical
insemination -- and that the unwrapped, mysterious
"birthday present" is, ideally, her own death. Here, in "The
Bee Meeting," like Mia Farrow in Roman Polanski's classic
1968 film "Rosemary's Baby" (based on the Ira Levin novel,
which owes its own debt to "Young Goodman Brown"), the
innocent "I", with "(her) fear, (her) fear, (her) fear", becomes
an apprehensive virgin being led to the deadly conjugal
bed itself. Surrounded by "blood clots," those "scarlet
flowers," defloration is in the air. A "blackout" occurs, and
the speaker returns to consciousness "exhausted . .
exhausted" (reminiscent again of contemporary accounts of
alien abduction, with their "lost time" phenomenon, and
medieval encounters with the faeries). With its distinctly
malevolent subtext of pollination and insemination, and
with an "annunciation" heralded by Plath not three days
before, it seems clear that, at the deepest level, the central
meaning of the poem is this: in the process of "The Bee
Meeting," the speaker is subjected to a ritualized,
incestuous form of coitus with her daemon, her father, "The
Bee God" (see Ted Hughes' "Birthday Letters") and is now
carrying their dark child in her womb. 

Following the "operation," like Hawthorne's (and Levin's)
coven of witches, the villagers "are untying their disguises,
they are shaking hands" over a job well done. The eerie
closing lines give the remarkable suggestion of
"I"struggling to orient herself in the aftermath of a rape:
"Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they
accomplished, why am I cold." "The Bee Meeting" closes
with the "white box" of the hive doubling as both coffin
and cradle. Is the promised "child" Plath's suicide (her
"rebirth") or the Ariel poems themselves? (cf.
"Thalidomide," with its monstrous embryo.). It might be
argued that the "Bees" sequence, with its "arrival" of a
womb-like "box" full of murderous bees, is not concerned
with the rebirth of Sylvia Plath in any literal sense, but
with the carrying to term of the collection of poems (a
swarm of words, stings, axes - cf. "Words") that would
ultimately bring about the poet's "Immortality." In the
poet's own words: " I am writing the poems of my life.
They will make my name." 

Stewart Clarke
USA
Wednesday, October 14, 1998 



Since I seem to be leading off, I'll put in a little background.
The actual bee meeting in North Tawton, Devon took place
at 6:30 pm on Thursday, 7th June 1962 -- hence 4 months
earlier than Wednesday, 3rd October, when this poem was
supposedly written. 

According to Janice Markey, "'The Bee Meeting' (CP,
pp.211-12)... is about what on the surface seems a very
routine event: the moving of a swarm of bees from one hive
to another. The female speaker/protagonist, however, sees
herself to be identified with the old queen with whom the
new virgins dream of fighting a duel which they will win.
When the swarm is moved, the speaker feels that it is her
own death which is portended: 'Whose is that long white
box in the grove, what have they accomplished, why am I
cold.' The routine event becomes a nightmare" ("A Journey
into the Red Eye," p. 116). 

Is this to be, as Alvarez and others have suggested, a
deadly ritual in which she is the sacrificed virgin? - a
fantasy of joining her beloved father? Sinister images
support that idea: the apparition of the surgeon, or perhaps
the butcher - the villagers, smiling like sadistic torturers -
the white hive, the speaker "exhausted--/Pillar of white in
a blackout of knives." And she is "the magician's girl who
does not flinch." Back we go to the inhumane surgeon, the
hospital operating room, the maimed victim theme that we
have seen in a number of earlier poems, in my mind
juxtaposed against the electroshock victim scene in The
Bell Jar and "The Hanging Man." 

The color white dominates the scene - white the color of
deception, of hidden violence and cruelty, Markey says.
I'm reminded of Joyce's Stephen Daedalus staring with
revulsion at a plate of cold white pudding, symbol of the
bland lifelessness, of the anti-life forces oppressing him -
forces diametrically opposed to art, imagination, creativity.

And yet for Sylvia the bees are eventually to represent her
queenly resumption of power, her renewal of flesh and
spirit after the "Wintering." 

Well, this much blather should set the quick wits in
motion! 

Jack Folsom
Sharon, Vermont, US
Tuesday, October 6th, 1998 



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