A mild winter has prompted the vegetation in Paris to wake up early. Since February, plum, cherry, and almond trees have been blossoming in France, and the buds on the hazelnut trees are releasing grains of pollen into the wind. Has grim winter really ended?
If the temperature is higher than twelve degrees Celsius, the bees become curious and depart their hives to gather pollen. It’s a signal that a new cycle is beginning. The drones bustle about in the hive, drawing on their reserves to feed the larvae. But what will happen if a cold snap comes? With so many hungry mouths to feed, will the reserves run out and the little colony die? A burst of life that comes too early can be hazardous for the bees. This sounds dark and theatrical, as if from a poem by Baudelaire, where the grit of life comes under the most meticulous pressure of language, and art results. Even though Baudelaire was wary of the lushness of nature (“I have always thought that there was in Nature, flourishing and reborn, something impudent and distressing”), I respect him for abandoning the decorum of the past.
I would like to do this, though as a poet I only see myself as a worker bee beside other worker bees who are metabolizing language, like nectar, into poetry. I try to do my work, even when this means invisibility. Like a bee, I take something raw and try to make something gold from it. At the flower market, when I buy sunflowers, I am followed home by giant, furry bumblebees, which are intoxicated by the sunflowers’ richly carpeted faces. I think they see me as one of their own.
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In a hive, the queen’s single function is to lay lots of eggs. She is different from the other bees because of her size and splendor. And she is surrounded by fifty thousand worker bees, who have many different functions or careers.
Among them are the cleaner, the builder, the fanner, the sentinel, the gatherer, the undertaker, and the packer. The cleaner is responsible for the general upkeep and tidiness of things. The nurse is occupied with the care of the larvae, which must be fed a thousand times and receive many “wellness visits.” The builder constructs the honeycombs. This is a collective effort, as the beautiful combs are fabricated from secreted wax, and is delicate, exhausting work. The fanner regulates the temperature of the hive, beating its wings together constantly to air out the hive and dry the nectar. The sentinel watches the entrance and protects the colony from its enemies from other hives, who desire to rob the reserves. You might say that it is like a poetry reviewer or critic. The gatherer supplies provisions for the hive by flying away to hunt for nectar, pollen, and water. It makes between ten and a hundred journeys each day. Some bees become gatherers straightaway, but others never reach this high function. Flying at a mad speed, the gatherer exhausts itself quickly and dies after only four or five days. Some poets are gatherers, like Sylvia Plath, for instance. The undertaker bees carry their dead brothers and sisters out of the hive.
Finally, the packing bee sips up the nectar and regurgitates it and sips it up again, repeating the process over and over, adding saliva enzymes of its own, until the nectar is dehydrated and changed into honey to be stored in the hexagonal cells (stanzas?), which are covered over with fine wax, like a cork, for good conservation.
At my desk, I am probably a packing bee, striving to put enough pressure on language to transform it into poetry, regurgitating my nectar again and again until honey is formed. I once had a beloved teacher who said verse (a late Old English word) reverses itself, and goes around and around. In contrast, prose (a Latin word) proceeds and moves forward without repetition.
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Near the end of her life, Sylvia Plath wrote a sequence of bee poems, and in a letter to her mother she said about them, “They will make my name.” Written in a single week in the autumn of 1962, when her marriage to the English poet Ted Hughes was breaking up, she placed them at the end of her important second book, “Ariel,” but two years later, when the book appeared after her death, Hughes revised this order, downgrading the bee poems to a less triumphant position in the collection.
In another letter, Plath wrote, “I know nothing of bees,” though her father was Otto Plath, an entomologist who’d published a book titled “Bumblebees and Their Ways” (1934). When she was a little girl living on the north shore of Boston, Plath’s father kept bee hives. She was only eight when her mother had to tell her of his death, and she replied, “I’ll never speak to God again!” Many years later, when she was living in Devon, England, with her husband and two young children, she described in her journal a visit to a meeting of the Devon beekeepers: “We were interested in starting a hive, so dumped the babies in bed and jumped in the car … We felt very new & shy, I hugging my bare arms in the cool of the evening … everybody was holding a bee-hat, some with netting of nylon … The men were lifting out rectangular yellow slides, crusted with bees, crawling, swarming. I felt prickles all over me, & itches … They were looking for queen cells— long, pendulous, honeycolored cells from which the new queens would come … I was aware of bees buzzing and stalling before my face. The veil seemed hallucinatory … ‘Spirit of my dead father, protect me!’ I arrogantly prayed.”
Plath’s bee sequence contains five poems that are unified by a cinquain (five-line) stanza pattern and a preoccupation with bees and beekeeping. The poems in “Ariel” have a harder, more abrupt freehand style than those in her first book, “The Colossus.” I don’t know which bee poem I like more, “The Arrival of the Bee Box” (in which Plath puts her ear to the box and hears “furious Latin”) or “The Swarm” (in which the bees, a symbol of feminine energy, are shot at—“Pom! Pom!”—by the men in her village), because they all contain many original lines and images: “The white hive is snug as a virgin” and “I would say it was the coffin of a midget / Or a square baby / Were there not such a din in it” and “The bees argue, in their black ball, / A flying hedgehog, all prickles.”
When I was a poetry student in college, Plath’s poems were not a good influence on me. I was nineteen or twenty, and still learning that a poem isn’t just self-expression. But, to a young man raised in a highly disciplined, military, Catholic household, she was like a blood jet. Still, almost forty years later, I admire this about her, especially when so much American poetry feels emotionally tepid and almost suburban. I believed then, and I still do, that a poem is organized violence. Like Baudelaire, Plath extended the boundaries of the lyric, taking the reader deep into the shadows of her sorrow during the final weeks and months of her life. Even today, in certain quarters, she is trivialized and dishonored because of the dangerously confessional aspect of her poems.
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The ancient Greeks associated lips anointed with honey with the gift of eloquence. Pindar, the ancient Greek lyric poet from Thebes, was reportedly stung on his mouth by a bee when he was still a youth, and this became the explanation for his verses. Horace, the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus, likened himself in his odes to the bees on Mount Matinus, in Apulia, his birth place, living off the dry hills and collecting thyme from flowers and shrubs. That the bees themselves made honey with their own bodies from nectar was not generally accepted knowledge in classical times; instead, it was thought that the honey was gathered directly from flowers and that the bees added distinct flavors of their own.
Here in France, bees, symbolizing immortality, were once an emblem of the sovereigns. Napoleon Bonaparte wore them embroidered into his regal garments and they ornamented many of his possessions. Surely the idea of a kingdom originates in nature with the bees. Perhaps the kingdom of poetry is not so different from that of a bee hive.
Some poets are like the Brother Adam bees (named after the Benedictine monk who bred them) that are kept in a hive on the roof of the sacristy of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, on the Île de la Cité. They are productive, resistant to parasites, and gentler than most, soft and brown. Each day, these bees visit seven hundred flowers, helping the plants within three kilometres of the Gothic cathedral to realize themselves fully. Other poets, like me, are solitary creatures, and more like the rough bees in the wild, which are short-tongued and carry their pollen snugly under their abdomens or attached firmly to their hind legs. Sometimes, when I hear the other bees buzzing, I think, “What else could love be but lots of buzzing, or hate?”
See more entries from Henri Cole’s ongoing Paris Diary.
Photographs courtesy of Henri Cole.
