The Swarm 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.

In ‘The Swarm’ the bees have two identities. Firstly, they are an allusion to the Napoleonic troops invading the whole of Europe and terrorising conquered peoples. Secondly, they are the victims of war, both the conquered people of Europe in the early nineteenth century and the holocaust victims of the twentieth century. Like the bees frightened out of their hive by thunder or by a predator, the victims of war can be frightened out of their homes and starved.

The story of Napoleonic aggression is interwoven with the behaviour of the bees, an important aspect of which is violence. It should be noted that Napoleon Bonaparte’s emblem was a bee, though this is not the only basis for the association.

Throughout the ‘Bee’ sequence unexpressed violence is implied by the queen’s method of mating. The mate is 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.

Plath had often expressed an interest in history, particularly the Napoleonic period. Her marriage had failed by the time this poem was written and she identified with Napoleon’s wife, Empress Josephine, who had been abandoned and divorced in favour of a young Austrian princess. Josephine had born two children to her first husband but was beyond the age of child-bearing, a source of deep disappointment to Bonaparte, who wished to found a dynasty.

This poem departs from Plath’s usual subject matter in its historical approach. But it nonetheless relates to her personal situation and her inner being; her self. She expresses through its imagery her anger, frustration at her lack of power, by focusing on historical victims of injustice and violence. ‘The Swarm’ is different from the others in the ‘Bee’ sequence, yet it still deals with the issues of male dominance and the cultivation of female authority. The defeated male figure, Napoleon, whom she refers to contemptuously, gives this poem a unique balance between the personal and the historical subjects she chose.

Structure
Like all the poems in the sequence there are stanzas of five lines each known as quintains — here twelve of them. They are with a few exceptions unrhymed, though she also uses assonance and consonance and internal rhyme. As usual the lines are of uneven length, carefully constructed, and using enjambment and caesura to enhance the meaning. A good example is in stanza eight,

Language and Imagery
Plath’s dense, complex imagery evokes the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century. An interesting aspect is the use of repetition as in ‘pom, pom’, ‘Waterloo, Waterloo’, and ‘mass after mass’, ‘the pack, the pack’ etc. She also uses alliteration, as in ‘somebody is shooting at something…’ All these emphasise and reinforce the descriptions of violence and excess.

Finally, it is interesting to note that the repetition is a linguistic quirk also used by Shakespeare in Hamlet. Clearly this gives emphasis, but it also gives the character of Hamlet his individuality and distinctiveness. For example, Hamlet says ‘Thrift, thrift, Horatio’ when explaining why leftovers from the funeral supper have been used for the wedding that followed. He says to Polonius ‘You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I more willingly part withal—except my life, except my life, except my life’. He refers to ‘too, too solid flesh’, exclaims ‘fie, fie’. There are many others. Plath may too be giving this poem, with its atypical historical context and unusual repetition, its own distinctiveness

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