Summary
The speaker receives a box full of bees. It is square and small, like a tiny coffin. It also makes a huge amount of noise. It is dangerous, and the speaker has to keep an eye on it all night. She can't leave it alone. But she also can't see anything inside of it, except for a gridlike pattern packed with swarming bees. She compares the bees to the hands of people packed into slave ships. She wants to let them out, but isn't sure how. They frighten her, because they seem to be yelling like a mob in ancient Rome. Not only does the speaker not understand their Latin-like language, but she's nothing like Roman emperors. Her authority is baseless—she's merely ordered a box full of threatening, unpredictable animals. She considers sending them back, or even letting them die of starvation. She wonders how hungry they are, and whether they would forget her or harm her were she to release them and transform into a tree. She then describes a few trees—a laburnum and a cherry tree.
Analysis
This is a strange, mysterious, and complicated poem. Its internal dynamics shift from moment to moment, reflecting the speaker's complex and fluid relationship to the bees. One way to understand it is by tracking the many shifts in power between the speaker and her bees that occur throughout the poem. These shifts in power occur inside the speaker's head rather than in the external world. Externally, nothing changes throughout the poem. The speaker's basic situation—possessing a closed box full of bees—is the same from the first line to the last. But her perception of the power relations between herself and the bees is constantly in flux.
When the poem begins, there's a straightforward relationship between the speaker and the bees—that of an object and its owner, with the owner possessing agency and the object lacking it. The bees, during the first stanza, aren't mentioned at all. Instead, the speaker describes the box containing them. She emphasizes its simplicity and utility. The internal rhymes of "square" and "chair" ground the poem in repetition, increasing the sense of security and familiarity. However, the speaker's metaphors for the object she owns grow stranger—she first compares the box to a chair, then to a midget's coffin, and then to a square baby. These increasingly unusual comparisons hint at the oncoming shift in power dynamics. That shift is precipitated by the speaker's mention of the box's noisiness, which closes out the work's first stanza.
In the following stanza, the speaker begins to dwell on the dangers that the box poses. She is beholden to the box, both because she feels emotionally drawn to it and because she fears letting it out of her sight. Now, it seems, the box contains power over the speaker (or at the very least threatens to overtake her, making it necessary to keep a close eye on it). Meanwhile, while the box first seemed simple and understandable, it is now revealed to be very mysterious. The speaker can't see or understand its content, and this intrigues her, putting her under the box's power. Her sentences here are short, simply structured declaratives, showing that she sees her obligations to the box in non-negotiable and direct terms. However, at the end of the second stanza, the speaker reflects on the box's self-contained nature by noting that there is "no exit." By choosing to use the word exit, rather than "entrance," she emphasizes not the fact of her own exclusion, but the fact of the bees imprisonment. This moment foreshadows yet another shift in power dynamics, as the speaker dwells on the bees' physical confinement.
This is a major shift, making the power dynamics between the speaker and her bees far more explicit. In the poem's third stanza, the speaker compares the bees to people crowded into a ship during the slave trade. This is a dramatic, exaggerated metaphor. It reveals just how much the speaker is struck by the bees' powerlessness. It also suggests that she sees herself, the person imprisoning them, as a kind of villain or evildoer rather than a mere authority. While this comparison stresses the speaker's enormous power and the bees' powerlessness, it also reveals that the speaker's feelings are chaotic and intense, making her somewhat powerless in the face of her own guilt and confusion. Her sentences here are syntactically more complicated as well as more lushly descriptive. The speaker's language and imagination appear to be running away with her, so that, even as she becomes aware of her own control over the bees, her control over herself decreases. Once again, the stanza's final line shows a shift in power, this time back to the bees. The speaker refers to them as "angrily clambering." This suggests that she sees them as angry or even vengeful, and has reason to fear them.
In the next stanza, the speaker rhetorically asks how she might go about releasing the bees. This question bridges two emotional states: her feeling of guilty control, which makes her want to compassionately free the bees, and her feeling of powerless fear, which makes her want to be free of them. She compares the bees' collective voice to that of a Roman mob. Yes, she concedes, the individual insects cannot hurt her. But as a whole, like a mob, they are powerful and could bring her harm. They frighten and disgust her. The power now lies with them, because of their collective anger, noisiness, and strength. An exclamation point and the phrase "my god" show that the speaker's fear is intense and visceral. Midway through the poem, she is trapped—not in a box but in her own indecisiveness. She wants to end the situation by letting the bees go, but she does not know how. This in itself reflects her ambivalent relationship to power. She has enough of it to free the bees, but she doesn't have enough to do so with any feeling of confidence.
