The Bee Poems: Plath’s Desire to Recover a Self

Abstract

Plath wrote five Bee poems which were titled “Bees” and conceived of as a sequence in October 1962. They are unified by their subject matter, bees and beekeeping, and by their five line stanza pattern, though each poem works in its own unique variation of the general theme and form. They reveal a concern with self-assessment and redefinition, both personally and poetically and proceed by scrutinizing relationship between the speaker and her world. The sequence moves from community to solitude as the speaker settles her relations with others and with her own former selves. This research article aims to read the Bee poems as a parable of female self-assertion or narrative rite of rebirth, affirming the integrity of the creative self, and thus furnishing an alternative, more hopeful ending for Plath’s career.