Tuesday was Sylvia Plath’s birthday (October 27), and I’ve found myself thinking of and rereading her “bee poems”–“The Bee Meeting,” “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” “Stings,” “The Swarm,” “Wintering”–five poems she finished 53 years ago this month, just four months before her death in February 1963. Plath’s midwife taught her to keep bees, and Plath’s father’s study of bees hovers in the wings as I imagine her own investigation. (Her 1959 poem “The Beekeeper’s Daughter” presents its father figure as “maestro of the bees.”) Plath’s bee sequence concludes Ariel (despite holding a different position in the middle of Ted Hughes’s 1965 version of the manuscript, which remained the published order until 2004).
Three years ago on October 30, 2012, I joined a group of readers and writers (all women) to read at Prairie Lights Bookstore for a Sylvia Plath Memorial Reading organized by Jan Weissmiller, commemorating and celebrating the “50th Anniversary of the composition of one of the most read volumes of poetry of the 20th Century, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel poems.” In addition to “Nick and the Candlestick,” I read “Poppies in October,” written on the same day as “Ariel,” Plath’s 30th birthday, October 27, 1962. Here’s Plath herself reading the poem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlNP81tKdkQ
Oh my God, what am I / That these late mouths should cry open / In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.
Listening to the 2012 reading again, reading Plath again, I am again struck by the ways in which the actual details of Plath’s poems continually belie the mythology of the inward-looking poet (as if a poet chooses one direction for attention) writing about “herself” (as if that means one thing). The plurality of the natural world spills forth in beauty and terror everywhere–poppies, cornflowers, blackberries, trees, grasses, cold clouds, little weeds, mushrooms (“So many of us! So many of us!”), and bees.
Three years ago, Joyelle McSweeney closed the reading by singing, chanting, intoning “Edge” and “Wintering,” the final poem of Ariel:
Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas / Succeed in banking their fires / To enter another year? / What will they taste of, the Christmas roses? / The bees are flying. They taste the spring.
In the context of a poem and the context of a life, the final declarative sentences of the final line leave me aching. I think of Emily Dickinson’s identification with the natural world and its rhythms in her poems too:
My departing blossoms / Obviate parade.
. . .
In the name of the Bee — / And of the Butterfly — / And of the Breeze — Amen!
Dickinson’s bees are so often singular (seriously, check it out–“a clover and one bee,” “does not concern the Bee,” “Exhilarate the Bee,” “A single Clover Plank / Was all that saved a Bee / A Bee I personally knew / From sinking in the sky,” “Bee! I’m expecting you!” “We — Bee and I — live by the quaffing”). Plath’s bees are plural–save the singular queen looming large. Is there anything to be made of this? Honey, maybe. And Alec Finlay’s “Bee Bole,” with its “bee libraries”: “collections of bee-related books converted into nests for bees.”
Plath’s grave is in St. Thomas’ Churchyard in Heptonstall, West Yorkshire, about an hour’s drive from the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, where The Bee Library was installed from 2012-2014 (“The nests are not meant to last”). Plath’s Ariel was one of the 24 books included in the Yorkshire installation.
Now she is flying / More terrible than she ever was, red / Scar in the sky, red comet / Over the engine that killed her– / The mausoleum, the wax house.