The Arrival of the Bee Box

Sylvia Plath

Key Points
The key theme is the speakers longing to escape from her world. It is an intensely personal poem. Plath uses a lot of startling imagery. We see a dark, despairing mood. There is a sharp contrast between the vividness and vitality of the flowers and the dull, lethargic world for which the speaker longs.

 This poem describes the speakers unusual response to the arrival of a box of bees. It is a poem that can also be read on a symbolic level. There is no other person mentioned in the poem and the experience of viewing the swarm of bees is fascinating, compulsive and intense. The coffin, midget, square baby all suggest the negative, the abnormal. The bee box, within three lines, has become something strange and sinister.

 The first stanza works on the eye and the ear: lines 2-4 give us the shape, line five with its onomatopoeic din in it, gives us the sound. Though the box is locked it is dangerous and most of the poem records Plaths total fascination with the trapped bees: I cant keep away from it. There is no escape, but the speaker describes how she is drawn to the world of the bees within the box.

Language
The language is stark, straightforward, as in: There are no windows, so I cant see what is in there but then, in a series of powerful images, the bees become imprisoned, badly treated Africans and a Roman mob. Her thinking about them as black slaves prompts her to free them (How can I let them out?) I put my eye to the grid./ It is dark, dark,/ With the swarmy feeling of African hands/ Minute and shrunk for export,/ Black on black, angrily clambering./ The repetition in dark, dark and Black on black, the sensuous details of swarmy and shrunk, the energy of angrily clambering create a hidden, claustrophobic scene of heat, dark oppression and helpless desperation.

 The noise terrifies her and the image of the bees as an unruly Roman mob suggests chaos and danger. She saw them as Africans; she hears them as Romans: I lay my ear to furious Latin./ I am not a Caesar./ I have simply ordered a box of maniacs. It is then that she reconsiders her role. Though she viewed them as frighteningly noisy, she now views herself as all powerful, determining: They can be sent back./ They can die, I need feed them nothing. I am the owner.

 There is also a wonderful sense of the bees in their element not unnaturally locked in a square box but free to visit the glorious and lyrical laburnum and cherry trees. The contrast between the confined, crowded world of the box and the freedom that is possible causes the speaker to dwell on how it is possible for her to play sweet God. She is not a Caesar and therefore incapable of controlling a Roman mob but she is empowered and capable of releasing the bee prisoners: tomorrow I will set them free. Here the speaker is active, not passive.

 The speakers presence is felt throughout: ten sentences begin with I and I is used eighteen times in all. She in control, not a victim, and the furious, frantic energy of the bees will end because of her. The poem explores the possibility of power and control and the poem concludes: The box is only temporary.