THE ARRIVAL OF THE BEE BOX BY SYLVIA PLATH
Introduction
Plath was finally sure of her genius in mid-October 1962, just after completing the Bee sequence, when she wrote to her mother that she was able to start a brand new life: “I am a writer . . . i'm a genius of a writer; i've got it in me. i'm writing the simplest poems of my life; they're going to make my name”. Though the poems that may ultimately make her name came some days later–”Daddy,” “Ariel,” and “Lady Lazarus,” among others–she obviously felt that the Bee poems were ones on which she could build her poetic reputation.
There is no doubt that she considered the Bee poems her culminating poetic statement additionally to her best work. She placed them at the top of her second book of poems, giving them precedence over the opposite poems within the volume. If we've only recently discovered the importance of the Bee sequence, it's partly because Hughes demoted it to the center of the book when he put together his version of Ariel and partly because the sequence contradicts the parable of Plath as suicidal poet churning out her greatest poems to fulfill a frighteningly literaldeadline.
Plath wrote the five Bee poems, which she initially titled “Bees” and conceived of as a sequence, in but every week in October 1962 as her marriage was breaking apart. they're unified by their subject material, bees and beekeeping, and by their five-line stanza pattern, though each poem works its own unique variation of the final theme and form. They reveal a priority with self-assessment and redefinition, both personally and poetically, and proceed by scrutinizing relationships between the speaker and her world. The sequence moves from community, in “The Bee Meeting,” to solitude, in “Wintering,” because the speaker settles her relations with others and along with her own former selves. This trajectory from an external preoccupation with others to an inward concern for the self has formal reverberations. Plath’s characteristic stylistic excess eases during the course of the sequence because the speaker retreats from the pressures of the external world, especially the planet of gender conflicts, to the inner rhythms of her own exigencies. because the influence of the outside world diminishes, the stylistic agitation seems to abate additionally.
Plath’s Ariel culminates within the Bee sequence because these five poems record her most vital vision and embody the farthest development of her poetics. The Bee poems reveal Plath shaping a brand new aesthetics that's vitalized by the fashion of excess she had cultivated for thus long–but one that's also discovering other energies. The manuscripts show her revising in favor of excess in “The Bee Meeting” and, to some extent, in “The Arrival of the Bee Box”; by “Stings,” the third poem within the sequence, however, they document an endeavor to reduce stylistic excesses. within the final poem, “Wintering,” we hear a wholly new poetic voice and confront a subtle new poetics.
The fact that the Bee sequence contradicts our received notion of Plath’s poetry accounts for its failure to “make [her] name.” As every modern poetry anthology attests, her reputation rests on her most excessive poems, “Daddy,” “Ariel,” and “Lady Lazarus.” it's a stimulating paradox that the foremost frequent charge leveled against her work–that it envisions only violence and self-destruction–remains untroubled by the ultimate ease and hopefulness of the Bee sequence. Critics bemoan Plath’s single-mindedness but limit their reading to the poems that confirm it.
CRITICAL APPROACHES
I
The first stanza of “The Arrival of the Bee Box” provides, in some measure, a corrective to the excesses and exaggerations of “The Bee Meeting.” The speaker is now able to answer her own earlier question about the box; after all, overcoming her former passivity, she even takes responsibility for it, “I ordered this, this clean wood box.” Seeing it more clearly in her present state of mind, it's not the long, white virgin’s coffin feared to be for her but a prosaic “clean wood box” that she herself owns. As if to demonstrate the unequivocal reality of the box, she says it's “Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.” the selection of “chair,” the classroom philosopher’s favorite object for exhibiting the “real,” is nice humored and appropriate. Further, the rhyming phrase, “square as a chair,” gives aural substance to the box, and also the word “square” suggests honesty, directness, and exactitude. In three words, then, she has overturned the hallucinatory tone of the primary poem.
Yet her fine control over words diminishes rapidly, and she or he concocts a fast succession of wierd metaphors for the box–”I would say it absolutely was the coffin of a midget / Or a square baby.” The subjunctive “I would” testifies that she is aware even before she generates them that her metaphors are contrived. These self-conscious tropes preview the many metaphors and similes that this poem will hazard. Even when she claims to depart off making metaphors, she slips immediately into another variety of verbal play, “I would . . . were there not such a din in it.” The humming sound created by the three short i’s of “din in it” attests to irrepressible linguistic production. But the difference between “The Arrival of the Bee Box” and “The Bee Meeting” is that here the speaker remains fully aware that she is using poetic language to shape her experience.
In fact, one could read this as a poem about poetic language. If the box represents form and also the clamor within it represents content, then “The Arrival of the Bee Box” may best be read as a poem within which the speaker explores the link between her “asbestos gloves” and her incendiary subject material. during this view, the 2 aborted metaphors, the coffin of the midget and therefore the square baby, is understood as descriptions of poetic content that becomes malformed or remains undeveloped when cramped into conventional structures. during this sense, her first attempts to explain the box were accurate. “The box is locked” because its contents are “dangerous,” yet the speaker “can’t keep from it.” As she examines the box and considers opening it, she is faced with the threat that what's inside may destroy her.
This is a box she has approached elsewhere in her poetry. In each case it seems to represent the conflict between rigid outer forms and a suppressed inner life. It is, of course, the long, white box she fears in “The Bee Meeting” that may trap her in an exceedingly premature grave; but it's also the hive hold in an earlier poem, “The Beekeeper’s Daughter”. There, during a line she is going to recycle for “The Arrival,” the daughter of the beekeeper, just like the present speaker, tries to seem into the box: “Kneeling down / I set my eye to a hole-mouth and meet an eye fixed / Round, green, disconsolate as a tear.” the attention of the daughter recognizes within the eye of the queen a mirrored image of her own dejection. Both are isolated by their special bond to the father/beekeeper and trapped by structures of power within which they're defined completely by their relevancy him. Here, however, the bees are “furious” instead of disconsolate, and he or she can see nothing of them. When the hassle to work out fails, “I put my eye to the grid. / it's dark, dark,” she must take recourse in listening, “I lay my ear to furious Latin.” Here again, as in “Words heard,” the persona finds her own voice by hearing the voices of others.
Naturally, then, she begins to make metaphors for the sound in a trial to know it. Over the course of the following three stanzas she proposes three analogies for the contents of the bee box, all a picture of power and oppression. First it reminds her of “the swarmy feeling of African hands / Minute and shrunk for export, / Black on black, angrily clambering.” Here her role in reference to the box is that of victimiser or colonizing exporter. the facility of the colonizer (exporter/poet) over the colonized (African hands/poems) leads to the diminution of the latter, which are “Minute and shrunk for export”; the contents of the box are yet again imagined as dwarfed and deformed because the whole notion of containment through forms is repeatedly called into question. The bees (and, we are able to infer, the poems) resent their captivity and agitate to flee. during this analogy, she is true to feel that the bees are dangerous. Next “It is sort of a Roman mob, / Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!” Echoing again that line from “The Beekeeper’s Daughter,” she says, “I lay my ear to furious Latin.” Relinquishing power over this mob because she cannot understand them, she admits, “I am not Caesar.” Almost inadvertently, these first two metaphors for the din within the box employ exemplary instances from history of domination: the traffic, white colonization of non-white countries, and autocracy. These political structures, then, are associated with the formal structure that controls and contains content. this is often the role she rejects in claiming to not be Caesar. Finally, she tries to talk more directly, but even this effort produces a metaphor: “I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.” This line may be a continuation of her preceding disclaimer: i'm not a tyrant who wants to dominate the bees; I simply ordered a bee hive, but it's clad to be over I bargained for. Further, however, it too offers a metaphor of power relations–the mental asylum–this time one that the speaker can perhaps identify with more easily since, in “The Bee Meeting,” she felt herself becoming the maniac within the box
Realizing now that she is obliged to the box a minimum of for the night, she senses the danger she is in and toys first with the concept of abdicating her power, “They may be sent back” (the passive construction isn't accidental), then immediately with the concept of exerting it, “They can die, i want feed them nothing, i'm the owner.” Clearly, the poem views such power as corrupting, for as soon as she assumes the position of authority (“I am the owner”), she becomes conscious of her total control (“They can die”).
Fortunately for the bees, the role of the autocrat isn't one she relishes; thus, rather than executing her control over them, she wonders “how hungry they are”–a line that reveals she is perhaps not able of withholding food from them. (Even the syntax of the road that proposes to not feed them is contorted to throw emphasis on the likelihood that she is going to take care of them: the affirmative phrase “I have to feed them” comes first then, as an unconvincing afterthought, the negative word “nothing.”) Indeed, she would really like to feed them, or better, to line them free, but she cannot tell how they're going to treat her if they're liberated. Turning again to the protective myth of Daphne, she tries to imagine freeing them without harm to herself: “I wonder if they might forget me / If I just undid the locks and stood back and changed into a tree. . . . / they may ignore me immediately.” These lines are literally quite strange. She doesn't wonder if the bees will attack her but if they're going to “forget” her, as if her connection to them is more profound and binding than that of a customer who has just purchased a hive. Likewise, the selection of the word “immediately” suggests a priority with duration instead of with the approaching event of their assault. This language also indicates that she has some prior connection to the bees. within the reading i'm pursuing, this connection parallels a career of writing that shuts up her imaginative vitality in rigid forms. The bees, then, represent her own repressed feelings, and she or he dreads the chance of being overcome by her own memories and outrages. Would she ever be ready to forget the slights and injustices? Would the sentiments immediately consume her? The “unintelligible syllables” causing the commotion within the box are the sounds of her own anger and fury, and it's her inability to articulate an outrage that she will be able to nevertheless hear that “appalls [her] most of all.”
The allusion to Daphne during this poem isn't merely a picture of the speaker’s isolated problem; rather it represents other women yet. She recognizes precedents for the metamorphosis: “There is that the laburnum, its blond colonnades, / and also the petticoats of the cherry.” Here for the primary time, she detects the traces of other women in these trees, their blondness, and their petticoats. To refuse the metamorphosis is to try to stay within the world as she is, a particularly vulnerable position for a lady (even more so for a lady writer). It necessitates protective gear that's hardly less alienating than bark and leaves, a “moon suit and funeral veil.” Moreover, the gear that's meant to guard her human vulnerability seems instead to dehumanize her (the moon suit suggests her strangeness).
In the last effort to seek out some way to release the bees without risking injury, she reasons that since she is “no source of honey,” they need no cause to attack her. Yet she overlooks the irony that whoever liberates the bees must inevitably be exposed to danger. this time is conveyed through the verbal play on “honey” and “sweet”: “I am no source of honey / So why should they activate me? Tomorrow i'll be sweet God, i will be able to set them free.” Ironically, by being sweet she is going to be just like the honey that the bees are after; after all, it's her sweetness–her desire to assist and her willingness to release the bees–that makes her so vulnerable. On all levels of the poem, the beekeeper opening the box, the girl giving vent to repressed emotions, or the poet uncovering her real subjects, the liberator will likely get hurt.
“The Arrival of the Bee Box” is that the only poem within the sequence that exceeds the five-line stanza pattern. It closes with an additional line–significantly, a line about the shape that the shape of the poem isn't ready to contain–that asserts “The box is simply temporary.” This final utterance not only announces the inevitable displacement of the box but also outstrips the formal boundaries set by the poem (and the sequence). The speaker will release the bees. The content will exceed the shape. More important, of course, the hand that penned the apocalyptic last line will remove its asbestos glove.
II
In “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” Plath writes an omnisciently authorial and colonizing “I.” The poem begins with the claim “I ordered this, this clean wood box.” With this line, Plath introduces us to the speaker as commander and requisitioner. The speaker imparts that the box is “locked” and “dangerous” which she cannot see into it. within the third stanza, when she puts her “eye to the grid,” the speaker discerns layers of blackness and darkness that she associates with “the swarmy feeling of African hands.” At this moment within the poem, the box metaphorically becomes a vessel carrying slavelike creatures from Africa, “Black on black, angrily clambering.” within the following stanza, the speaker, having somewhat adjusted to the visual aspects of the black on black creatures, proclaims that the noise they create appalls her. She describes their language as “unintelligible syllables” and expresses fear of them as a mass. during this role as a white spectator of the opposite, Plath’s speaker expresses utter disgust with Otherness. She diminishes her fear of this threatening collective by assuring herself that “they will be sent back.” in the end, she asserts, these creatures are her commodities: “They can die, i would like feed them nothing, i'm the owner.” We read the poem in concert within which Plath experiments with the assorted roles endowed upon white peoples and thereby explores how she, as a woman, most closely fits the assorted molds of whiteness.
Immediately upon having soothed herself by proclaiming her ownership of and, therefore, power over the black creatures within the box, she permits herself a flash of compassion within which she “wonders how hungry they're.” during this white role, the speaker envisions herself as a provider for Others. the following line swiftly undercuts her moment of tenderness by shifting the white role from that of caretaker to it of self-preservation. during this new role, the speaker wonders whether the black creatures would forget her should she set them free. Concern about their forgetting her suggests that she might want credit and homage for freeing them, and additionally, she might want them to overlook her mistreatment of them. Upon wondering about their ability to disremember her, she suggests that they could be much more drawn to a laburnum, which she personifies as blond and feminine. during this white role, she vacillates between wanting credit for her liberal compassion and wanting the protection of knowing that other, more superlative white women, the exotic blondes, exist to distract the black creatures aloof from desiring her.
In the last stanza, the speaker explores the last word white role, that of God: “Tomorrow i will be able to be sweet God, i'll set them free.” Van Dyne suggests that in “Arrival of the Bee Box,” Plath is “mimicking male hierarchies” and “toying with the liberty that male authority might bring”. Broe, too, recognizes Plath’s play with power, but she claims that ultimately the speaker concedes to the ability of the creatures when she promises within the last line that the box are going to be temporary. the very fact that the poem ends with the creatures still boxed and with freedom rescheduled for tomorrow doesn't signify a concession nor mere mimicry of male authority. The white female speaker in “Arrival of the Bee Box” displays a determined complicity of her own in prolonging the enslavement of black creatures
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