The Arrival of the Bee Box by Sylvia Plath Flashcards
Context
- Written September 1962 after the disastrous Ireland trip which resulted in Plath returning to Court Green, Hughes living in London and the marriage over.
- One of the many poems wrote by Plath when she was rising at 4am
-In summer 1962, Plath and Hughes had begun keeping a hive of Italian hybrid bees at Court Green.
Subject
Poem describes the tension between the speaker and her chaotic mind, along with her inability to control her thought patterns.
Form and Structure
Form
- Dramatic monologue
- Plath exerts persona of the bee-keeper who exerts the type of control over bees that she lacks over her own life or that men exert over women in society.
Structure
-Regular quintets- suggest the control of the speaker.
-Note emphasis placed on the last line,
“The box is only temporary.”
-Freedom is promised, the tone is hopeful.
Language Techniques
Symbolism- boxes
-Frequently used by Plath in her poetry, used as an analogy for the unconscious and the dangers of breaking into the closed spaces of our minds.
-Once the box is open we can unleash forgotten horrors.
-Clear allusion to Hesiod’s recording of the myth of Pandora’s Box @ 700BC
Bees
-bees can be read as a metaphor for the swarming, fertile but potentially destructive chaos that the poet senses within herself.
-bees also connected with the father figure in plath’s work and all of the complexities of losing a father at an impressionable age.
-feminist reading-the bee is the speaker’s separate identity-a queen bee.
Imagery- colour imagery
“African hands…Black on black…”
-Plath makes use of a slave metaphor here, and the speaker identifies with such slaves.
Language-repetition
“I lay…I am…I have…”
-In this stanza repetition evokes an incomprehensible disorder- like the Colossus who dominated her unconscious.
-The language of power
“Tomorrow I will be sweet God…”
Here the voice of the poem plays with patriarchal power prolonging enslavement of black creatures.
