Poem of the Day: ‘Telling the Bees’

The ritual of telling the bees after a death, with its obscure and ancient origins and its grief-signifying action, is precisely the kind of thing many poets find irresistible.

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Poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons

EDITED BY JOSEPH BOTTUM

Oct 24, 2023, 08:44 AM ET

Attentive Sun readers may wonder, at first glance, whether today’s Poem of the Day is a rerun. Last November, in fact, we did run a poem entitled “Telling the Bees,” written around 1900 by Lizette Woodworth Reese (1856–1935), a past poet laureate of Maryland. Today’s poem, by the same title, was written in 1858 by John Greenleaf Whitter (1807–1892), whose reputation in American letters, as poet, editor, essayist, and abolitionist, was well established by the 1850s, when Reese was born.

That there would be two poems with this title and subject shouldn’t surprise us all that much. Poets, as the Irish writer Billy Mills (b. 1954) has pointed out, have not been silent on the subject of bees. The ritual of telling the bees after a death, with its obscure and ancient origins and its grief-signifying action, is precisely the kind of thing many poets find irresistible. Every poets who haven’t written a poem on this theme either wish that they had or wish that nobody else had done it first (or both). That Whittier had done it first did not deter Reese, whose later poem makes an interesting revision of Whittier’s.

There are some similarities beyond the shared title. Both poems, in quatrains, establish a pattern of tetrameter lines disrupted by shorter ones — in Whittier’s case, trimeter, while Reese’s stanzas resolve on a dimeter refrain. More centrally, both poems narrate a terrible epiphany: learning of a loved one’s death by overhearing the news as it’s told, by a servant, to hives of bees.

Beyond this, the poems diverge. They tell the same story, and yet they don’t. Reese’s poem offers a stripped-down glimpse into a saturated moment of grief, as experienced by a child whose small, secure, familiar setting of house and garden is undone by news of a loss that the foraging bees will carry into the wider world. It’s a lyric poem whose potency lies in its simple presentation of images and the emphatic repetition of its refrain.

Whittier’s longer poem is a narrative that blurs past and present. A man’s return to a familiar place, Fernside Farm, is superimposed onto an earlier return, like a Photoshop effect showing the same scene both touched and untouched by the passage of time. Of a piece with the American Gothic tradition of its era, the narrative reads like a kind of homespun Twilight Zone episode. The returning suitor’s expectations and assumptions are built up, detail by detail, only to be overturned in an instant of awful realization.

Even the form, stanzas that establish a pattern of alternating tetrameter and trimeter, disturbs the reader’s metrical expectations with an unsettling fourth tetrameter line. From the beginning we sense that something is wrong, a sense magnified as we stop to consider “her poor flowers,” overrun by weeds. The suitor’s foreboding, and ours, grows with the whining of the beloved’s dog on the doorsill. Finally, his confirming eye falls on the old grandfather, alive and nodding by the door, as the little servant girl chants to the bees her devastating song, “Mistress Mary is dead and gone!”