Dancing the Nectar Vector: Bees in Poetry

Between home, tube, office, tube, home it's sometimes easy to forget which month we're in. One interesting effect of the hive for me is an increased awareness of the seasons and weather. I thought it would be a good idea to mark the first day of Spring with the bees so I asked Southbank Centre poet in residence Lemn Sissay to come and read them a poem. They’re a cultured colony, and even more so after some fine detective work by Chris McCabe from the Poetry Library (situated only a couple of floors below the Hive) who stepped up to the oche in superlative fashion and searched for bees in verse. He kindly agreed to share his findings:

Riffling through The Poetry Library collection for poems on bees – positive, celebratory poems – for Lemn Sissay to read for the first day of Spring on the Royal Festival Hall roof my first thought was towards Sylvia Plath's bee poems from Ariel. Bees in an SS swarm – hierachical, aggressive – or like slaves. The conventions of beekeeping are like a secret code that only those in the know can fathom – the secret sect of a village community to which she feels alien. The only moment of jubliation for the worker bees is when Ted gets seriously stung (“the bees found him out/Moulding onto his lips like lies..) which Ted inverted in his response in Birthday Letters:



When you wanted bees I never dreamed
It meant your Daddy had come up out of the well

Sylvia’s dad Otto was a bee expert – his book ‘Bumblebees and their Ways’ – sounds like something Sylvia might have written if she had gone the way of Enid Blyton. In Tuesday’s free Guardian booklet Margaret Drabble introduces Plath saying: “The bee poems are some of her finest, and she valued them highly; the black danger and honey sweetness of the hives and swarms gripped her imagination as a symbol of the mixed sources of productivity and power”. Her poem ‘Wintering’ ends with a perfect ushering in of the bees for new season:

The bees are flying. They taste the spring.

Looking for poems on bees I found that jouissance and bees don’t go – image after image of stinging suicidal bees, of charging swarms and clusters of bees like sentries.

An Australian poet I particularly like, Andrew Taylor – who usually writes in the upbeat tradition of O’Hara and the New York poets – has written a poem called ‘The Death of Bees’. Abstract, dark, he begins: “why do bees drown in swimming pools”. As with so many poets, and people, the view seems to be that we are not in nature with them but against them, often followed by a simmering guilt over what we do to them. This poem does contain the gorgeous line “legs little prayers”, picturing the black hairy legs anointing and crossing themselves.

Muriel Spark’s ‘The Rout’ – applying her eye for a good story as well as a poetic connection – opens with a story from a newspaper stating that a battle between bees and wasps had taken place in a church in Leicester. The bees had been storing their honey under the roof but it had started to trickle down the walls – the smell attracted the wasps, who started to kill the bees to eat the honey. Spark makes the comparison with Cromwell and the English Civil War:

What’s wasps?-
A species of bees, or bees

A sort of wasps?

My personal favourite is Les Murray’s from ‘Tranlsations From the Natural World’ which – though almost impossible to read fluently and create sense – captures the sound, buzz and rapture of the bees in swarm:

Next, grid-eyes grown to gathering rise where a headwind bolsters
hung shimmering flight, return with rich itchy holsters
and dance the nectar vector.

Edwin Morgan can always be relied on for joyousness, fun and some light surrealism. In his ‘Tales from Baron Munchausen’, Munchausen talks of shepherding bees like sheep and one escaping up some sickle. Luckily he has some seeds for a bean-stalk, which collapses to the floor – “luckily the bee lived to sting another day”

Other strange findings: there are 17 references to bees in Emily Dickinson’s poems! She was infatuated:


bees, that thought the summer's name
Some rumor of delirium
No summer could for them

Peter Didsbury’s ‘A Bee’ continues the surrealism – a man buys turmeric for weeks in different shops (to keep up his cover) so that he can dress himself yellow as a bee “running and buzzing / doing the bee-dance”. As with most of these bee poems the bees are metaphors for something else – in this case the showy over-indulgence of being a poet: “Words they use in this hive”.

The breakthrough poem was ‘For a Beekeeper’, by the Irish poet Pat Boran: a wonderfully upbeat eulogy for the beekeeper’s day. The antithesis of Plath in its embracing of Summer and a new day, yet in the ending, there is all the release and loss of self that comes with being taken over by the power of an obsession that is almost outside of the self:


You rise in the morning, the residue
Of dream-honey on your eyelids…

There is barely time to shine your shoes

when, already at the window, the first drone
beckons you to court.

It is a pleasant surprise to find the bees civilized, just, and for a change, in control.

The most exciting find was, finally, and astonishingly, Ted Hughes – author of the majestic and moribund mythology of Crow , and famed for his voyeuristic detailing of lamb’s heads being lopped off at birth – who wrote a tremendously jubilant poem about bees, picturing them around the hive like bridesmaids:

At a big wedding
The bees are busy.
Everywhere there are bridesmaids
Almost brides.

The fumbling, mumbling
Priestly bee, in a shower of petals,
Glues Bride and Groom together with honey.

Sylvia relished the bees being on her side as her marriage fell apart whilst Ted, in this later poem, seems to imagine them sticking it back together.