Ekim's English Journal

 Sylvia Plath expresses a desire to be in control. She feels she has to deal with a dangerous situation. At first she is not in control. She begins to panic. She has a debate with herself and then she makes a calm decision about freeing the bees.

The story of the poem concerns a task with a bee box. In the first part she states that it looks like ‘square’, like a midget’s coffin, heavy and noisy: 

‘such a din in it’

The word ‘coffin’ suggests death. The overall description of the bee-box is strange and disturbing. ‘Locked, Dangerous, Little Grid, No Exit.’

The bee box both frightens and attracts Plath. She stares in at the bees through a wire grid. ‘Little grid’. The box is ‘locked’ because its contents are ‘dangerous’. Yet Plath ‘can’t keep away from it’, showing confusion. She examines the box and considers opening it. But she is faced with the threat that what is inside may injure her. Yet, she feels she has to ‘to live with it overnight’.

 Angry slaves that seek release and revenge: ‘Black on black, angrily clambering’.

There is a blackness that she associates with ‘the swarmy feeling of African hands’. She is in a state of alarm, she may be injured. She fears the strength of the contents, the buzzing noise puts her off releasing the bees. Described as an aggressive Roman mob, cannot understand what the bees are saying ‘I lay my ear to furious Latin’,  ‘unintelligible syllables’.

 ‘small, taken one by one, but my god together!’ shows us a fear of being attacked by these ‘minute’ creatures which are one as a whole, a swarm.

 ‘I am not a Caesar’. She means she is not all-powerful. She also means that she doesn’t have to understand the bees’ linking in to the fact that she used the bees’ language as Latin. Also shows us the fact that she needs to be careful with the bees and the fact that she is not an all powerful Caesar, shows us her fear of being damaged by these animals.

‘I have simply ordered a box of maniacs’. Believes she can send these maniacs back the same way they came to her.

She starts to calm down, her nerves steady, she is less “panicky”. 

She notices she can starve them to death and ignore them, she is more powerful then these bees, she has an advantage, a power over them:

‘They can die, I need feed them nothing’.

Maniacs are not as bullying or as strong as a Roman mob, they do not know what they are doing. They are far less threatening than an army of vengeful African slaves who want revenged, who have been taken away from home and forced to work for someone they do not know.

 Plath’s imagery shows that her state of panic is gradually reducing.

At the end of the fifth stanza, Plath begins to feel powerful again, she notices her advantages, she is in a calm state and controls the situation, in a negative sense:

‘I am the owner.’ ‘God’ 

She believes that  the bees are ‘hungry’ rather than ‘angrily clambering’ she can see herself freeing them, ‘undid the lock’.

They will ignore her, especially if she stands there like a tree. She believes that the bees will go towards the source of their honey, what they want and need. They will fly towards flowering plants:
‘There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades.’ ‘The petticoats of the Cherry.’

Plath accepts her role as beekeeper, comes to realization of a leader. She realises she will wear her protective beekeeper’s ‘suit’ and ‘veil’. She will be covered from the harm these bees would afflict upon her otherwise. 

She is now coming to terms with her task.

‘I am no source of honey so why should they turn on me?
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free’.

 Realises her power and her strengths.

By freeing the bees she will be a ‘sweet God’. This is a pun, she notices the bees are attracted to sweet honey, so will these bees now be attracted to their ‘sweet God’. 

She concludes by saying the bees will be freed.