Fifty years

On February 11th 1963 the poet Sylvia Plath took her own life, leaving behind her two small children and her unfaithful husband Ted Hughes who had deserted her for another woman a few months earlier. At the family home in Devon in October 1962, just as her marriage was breaking down, Plath wrote a series of powerful poems inspired by the hive of honey bees she had just acquired. Her bee poems, as they are known, are full of symbolism that can be seen as relating to her own crisis of identity,  loss, deposition  and foreshadowed death. ( It was probably no coincidence that Plath's German father had been an entomologist who wrote a monograph on bumblebees.)

I wanted my blip today to mark the anniversary of Sylvia Plath's death and as it happened I paid a visit with a friend to a biodynamic farm up in the hills. It was a moist misty day and everything was dripping, the ground was spongy with dampness and the trees were padded with clammy moss. Horned Welsh black cows munched on organic hay (the land has been treated only with natural fertilizers and no pesticides for the past 34 years),  bedraggled hens pecked in the mud and there, too, were bee hives, silently wintering. The bee keeper had supplied the bees with honey, not syrup, but was concerned they would not survive the cold. Sylvia Plath died during one of the coldest winters in living memory and did not live to taste the spring that followed it.

Wintering

This is the easy time,  there is nothing doing.
I have whirled the midwife's extractor,
I have my honey,
Six jars of it,
Six cat's eyes in the wine cellar,

Wintering in a dark without window
At the heart of the house
Next to the last tenant's rancid jam
And the bottles of empty glitters -
Sir So-and-so's gin.

This is the room I have never been in.
This is the room I could never breathe in.
The black bunched in there like a bat,
No light
But the torch and its faint

Chinese yellow on appalling objects -
Black asininity.  Decay.
Possession.
It is they who own me.
Neither cruel nor indifferent,

Only ignorant.
This is the time of hanging on for the bees  the bees
So slow I hardly know them,
Filing like soldiers
To the syrup tin
To make up for the honey I've taken.
Tate and Lyle keeps them going,
The refined snow.
It is Tate and Lyle they live on, instead of flowers.
They take it.  The cold sets in.

Now they ball in a mass,
Black
Mind against all that white.
The smile of the snow is white.
It spreads itself out, a mile-long body of Meissen,

Into which, on warm days,
They can only carry their dead.
The bees are all women,
Maids and the long royal lady.
They have got rid of the men,

The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors.
Winter is for women -
The woman, still at her knitting,
At the cradle of Spanish Walnut,
Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.

Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying.  They taste the spring.


Here are the bee poems with some more background.