The Bee Meeting Lyrics

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About

Genius Annotation

Two major themes inform the ‘Bee Poems’. Plath had an interest in the Greek philosopher, Plato, who records Socrates teaching that poetry emanates from ‘honey-springs’ (honey being the food of the gods), and that the best poems are written by ‘divine dispensation’, so the poet produces poetry through inspiration, as a bee produces honey.

The second theme evokes the opposite, the controlling figure of her father, Otto Plath, a German-speaking biologist specializing in entomology and author of Bumblebees and Their Ways (1934), who died when she was eight. Underlying much of Plath’s work is the theme of her relationship with her father. She both loved and hated him and, in her confusion, struggled to assert her identity. Some of the themes and emotions in her poem “Daddy” are revisited here.

Plath wrote ‘The Bee Meeting’ in October 1962 after she and her husband, Ted Hughes, had legally separated. This was also the month in which Plath wrote twenty-five poems, thought by many to be her best work. This is the first of a sequence she originally called “Bees,” in which the narrator recaptures her emotional stability, and sense of self and control of her own life through her identification with the queen bee. The life cycle of bees centres around the queen — a metaphor for regenerative life; birth, death and rebirth.

Note also that the title is ambiguous. Is this a meeting of bees themselves, or of the people who are involved in the keeping of them?

The sequence consists of five poems: “The Bee Meeting”, “The Arrival of the Bee Box”, “Stings”, “The Swarm”, and “Wintering”. With the exception of “The Swarm,” the bee poems draw on her struggles with her self and identity.

Throughout the ‘Bee’ sequence unexpressed violence is implied by the queen’s method of mating. The mate, chosen from drones who pursue her nuptial or, as Plath calls it, bride-flight. The drone impregnates the queen and the moment he does so his abdomen splits open, losing the entrails which the queen then totes behind her as proof that she has guaranteed the future of the hive. This is particularly relevant to ‘The Swarm’, which deals with the violence of the Napoleonic period of history.

Structure
The poem consists of eleven stanzas of five lines each, typical of Plath. The lines are of uneven length to reflect the meaning. There is no regular rhyme scheme, though Plath uses a range of poetic devices, including assonance, consonance, alliteration. Notably she uses anaphora in stanzas three and five (for example repetiton of the question ‘which is’ in paragraph three) and parallel syntax.

Language and Imagery
The bees with their queen represent regeneration and new life. However, Plath is caught in a frightening milieu of villagers who conjure fear and alienation. Notably, they are protected, she is not and therefore she is vulnerable to injury. Plath, like the queen bee in her life-cycle, will be usurped.

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