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Sylvia Plath and Stings

Stings is one of five special poems Sylvia Plath wrote in October 1962, at a time of great
emotional turmoil for the poet and mother of two.

The five poems, known collectively as the Bee Sequence, comprise The Bee Meeting, The
Arrival of the Bee Box, Stings, The Swarm and Wintering.

They each stand on their own as poems but read together form a comprehensive exploration
of Sylvia Plath's female identity at a time in her life when emotions were supercharged and
the future uncertain.

A mix of real life autobiography, metaphor and mythological story, Stings takes the reader
into the life of the hive through the eyes of a speaker who is personally involved in the
practicalities, yet crucially distant enough to widen the picture as she searches for a sense of
self, which comes in the shape of the Queen Bee.

The poet also used extracts from her journal in the poem, typically weaving them into a
dream-like partially surreal narrative set in the present.

The speaker explores the ambiguous role of the queen bee and thus the feminine power
within the hive. This power is also that of the female artist within society and specifically
Plath's vocation as a poet. The two male figures, bee-seller and 3rd person (father and Ted
Hughes) heighten the tension of the narrative.

In the summer of 1962 Sylvia Plath and fellow poet Ted Hughes were living in Devon,
England and actually did take a course in beekeeping whilst living there. Sylvia Plath wrote
to her mother in June:

'Today, guess what, we became beekeepers!'

She was looking forward to having some honey of her own eventually. By studying the local
bee populations in Devon, Sylvia had consciously connected to the legacy of her father, Otto
Plath, who died when Sylvia was only eight years old.

Otto Plath was an entomologist, an authority on bumble bees, and wrote a book about them in
1934, Bumble Bees and Their Ways, which is still regarded as a classic.

It's poignant to think that his daughter would follow a similar route and write a sequence of
poems 'unique in all the literature about bees.'

As summer turned to autumn in 1962 Sylvia Plath's life began to unravel. She discovered that
the love of her life, Ted Hughes, was having an affair with one Assia Wevill, wife of
Canadian poet David Wevill, who were renting the London flat owned by Sylvia and Ted.

There's no doubting Sylvia Plath's need to translate life into poetry. At this point in time with
her marriage in tatters she decided to move to London with her two children. All the time she
was working on her poems, in addition to being a full-time mother.
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She poured the emotional mix into some of the most profound poems over the next few
months, with Stings in particular focusing on her relationships with men.

Using extended metaphor and a dream-like persona, she explores the world of the hive in an
attempt to understand her own feminine identity. In the end she breaks out, becomes a queen,
a burning red comet, miraculous in flight.

First published in the London magazine in April 1963, Stings appeared in Sylvia Plath's
posthumous book of 1965, Ariel.

Stings

Bare-handed, I hand the combs.

The man in white smiles, bare-handed,

Our cheesecloth gauntlets neat and sweet,

The throats of our wrists brave lilies.

He and I

Have a thousand clean cells between us,

Eight combs of yellow cups,

And the hive itself a teacup,

White with pink flowers on it,

With excessive love I enameled it

Thinking 'Sweetness, sweetness.'

Brood cells gray as the fossils of shells

Terrify me, they seem so old.

What am I buying, wormy mahogany?

Is there any queen at all in it?

If there is, she is old,

Her wings torn shawls, her long body

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Rubbed of its plush ----

Poor and bare and unqueenly and even shameful.

I stand in a column

Of winged, unmiraculous women,

Honey-drudgers.

I am no drudge

Though for years I have eaten dust

And dried plates with my dense hair.

And seen my strangeness evaporate,

Blue dew from dangerous skin.

Will they hate me,

These women who only scurry,

Whose news is the open cherry, the open clover?

It is almost over.

I am in control.

Here is my honey-machine,

It will work without thinking,

Opening, in spring, like an industrious virgin

To scour the creaming crests

As the moon, for its ivory powders, scours the sea.

A third person is watching.

He has nothing to do with the bee-seller or with me.

Now he is gone
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In eight great bounds, a great scapegoat.

Here is his slipper, here is another,

And here the square of white linen

He wore instead of a hat.

He was sweet,

The sweat of his efforts a rain

Tugging the world to fruit.

The bees found him out,

Molding onto his lips like lies,

Complicating his features.

They thought death was worth it, but I

Have a self to recover, a queen.

Is she dead, is she sleeping?

Where has she been,

With her lion-red body, her wings of glass?

Now she is flying

More terrible than she ever was, red

Scar in the sky, red comet

Over the engine that killed her ----

The mausoleum, the wax house.

Analysis of Stings Stanza 1

Stings is set in the immediate present, the reader being right there next to the first person
speaker as the narrative begins. This present tense commentary is perfect for the act of
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delving into a bee-hive, an environment where you have to know what you're doing or risk
upsetting the bees in their home.

This poem, on the surface, is about an exchange of honey for clean combs. There are two
people in action, the speaker and a man in white who is smiling but without a name. Later on
it becomes clear that he's the bee-seller.

The bare hands of both suggest that this is a delicate operation that leaves them vulnerable
(cheese gauntlets notwithstanding) but the smile and the interaction means there is sufficient
trust between them.

This is a positive start but note the curious fourth line, where wrists gain throats and become
silken flowers. The speaker has noted the bare wrists and likened them to throats, exposed yet
brave, smooth like the lily flower skin, flower of death and beauty.

So the speaker is hinting at something beyond sweetness - perhaps sacrifice - which the
reader has to digest and hold on to.

The shortest line - He and I - must point to an important relationship in the poet's life, more
than likely that of father and daughter. This is Sylvia Plath's father Otto Path represented by
the bee-seller, the expert, the authority and such an influence on her psyche in real life.

Stanza 2

So the bee-seller is the father, Daddy, this time not someone to fear but someone to do
business with, who is good. They're working together on the one hive, with many clean cells
between them (worker bees clean out the old cells ready for the new), which implies they've
been through a lot.

With enjambment taking the reader directly from the first stanza, the business of sweet
exchange begins to take shape, numerically and figuratively. The eight combs may well stand
for the eight years Sylvia Plath lived until her father died, when she lost something
irretrievable.

The hive metaphorically is home and all things domesticated. In real life Sylvia Plath had
painted her hive in the belief that her life (with Ted Hughes, as part of an ideal family) would
be a home sweet home, full of good things.

Plath's commitment and passion were without doubt. She had so loved her father - he left
early - she was so in love with Ted Hughes - he abandoned and wronged her.

Again, the second stanza flows into the third and this tender, cooperative opening is complete
with a repeat of 'Sweetness'.

Stanza 3
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Here the reader experiences a shift in the mood. The honey exchange is over and the speaker
now concentrates on the brood cells, where the grubs and larvae grow, where either workers
or drones emerge.

The first signs of foreboding appear. The speaker fears these cells. They're like fossils, old
and without life. Could this be a reflection of Sylvia Plath's own mistrust of her self when it
comes to reproduction and the giving of birth? Of her own questions of what it is to be a
female, part of the collective brood?

That strange question of a 14th line...gone is the honey, gone are the cells...there's only in
idea of mahogany gone wrong. Mahogany is a hard wood used for the best furniture.
Beehives are made from the cheapest and lightest, often pine wood.

So the suggestion is that the bee-seller is trying to fob her off with rotten furniture. The bee-
seller, her father, isn't all he's cracked up to be. The speaker is so suspicious because of her
inner fears, she evens questions the presence of a queen.

Stanza 4

The speaker is uncertain but tentatively identifies with a queen who is old, beyond
repair...Rubbed of its plush...plush is anything that is soft and fluffy....and certainly has fallen
from grace.

There's no doubt that this image of the fallen queen is a disturbing reminder of Sylvia Plath's
inner feelings in connection with her femininity and femaleness. Could it be that her
excessive love for her children (she was known to be a highly doting mother) was offset by
her darker insecurities and Electra complex?

Stanza 5

Once more the last line of a stanza is enjambed. The speaker stands with other unmiraculous
women who are dull (drudges), almost slaves to the hive production.

Here the language is a bizarre mix of domestic and imagined life. The speaker relates to all
those women who have sacrificed their lives for the good of the family, working hard to
make life sweet.

Stanzas 6 and 7

Although the speaker is aware of her presence within this realm of the unmiraculous women,
the female society at large, she dreads it all, the soul-destroying existence as the sacrificial
mother.

Her strangeness has to be her oddball creativity, her personality, her energy, her eccentricity;
the blue dew could be the blood running under her dangerous skin.

Sylvia Plath had a thing about skin; it crops up in her poems, novels and letters and seems to
signify both life and death. She was also keenly aware that her mundane life as housewife
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and mother somehow was incompatible with her desire to make a name for herself through
her writings.

So she questioned if she would be hated by those ordinary mothers - the bees who have to go
out foraging on cherry and clover flowers.

Stanza 7

A definite turn occurs in this stanza, the speaker declaring herself in control. Of what
exactly? Is this control over the domestic issues? Her marital problems? Her muse? Her inner
decisions? her fears?

Perhaps all of these things she's going to put behind her and produce her own honey quite by
instinct. She will start afresh. She is no mere worker. No longer is she prepared to be a victim
but will now use her femininity, through art and creativity.

Some powerful images in this stanza spill over into stanza 8.

Stanzas 8 and 9

Half way through this stanza another person enters the scene. It's a male who is not connected
to the speaker or bee-seller. It's as if he has been dismissed or has been caught in a
compromising situation.

This male then is Ted Hughes, (some critics also see this 3rd person as a sort of Christ figure)
who in real life hurt Sylvia Plath with his extra-marital affair. The image is slightly bizarre -
part fairy tale, part real-life - of a man bounding (striding) away - echoes of the father in the
second stanza - leaving his slippers and white handkerchief behind as reminders of a former
blissful domestic life.

The handkerchief is taken from real life. When he and Sylvia were learning the art of
beekeeping, Hughes had forgotten to put on a hat and instead placed the white linen
handkerchief on his head. The bees managed to get in under this and actually sting him.
Sylvia with her proper hat on, continued unscathed.

That word scapegoat is both prophetic - Ted Hughes would be blamed by many following
Sylvia Plath's suicide some months after this poem was written - and apt, for the goat is a
creature of potency and virility.

Stanzas 10, 11 and 12

Stanza 10 continues with the description of the male onlooker (Hughes) who must have put
so much effort into getting results. What results are these? The two children they had
together? Or his poetical efforts? It's true, they were great literary rivals for a time.

The echo of sweet comes through in sweat, so there is positivity here. But once the bees get
hold of the male's lips there is no relenting. They sting him and die in the process. This is the
fate of the honey bee once it uses its sting.
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The speaker though is not like these suicidal bees - she is in control at this point - intent on
becoming the queen and forming her true identity.

They're onto his lips like lies and distort his face, turning him into a very different kind of
human.

With this male onlooker out of the way, the speaker is nearing the climax of this unusually
fraught narrative. First the self has to be recovered. Questions arise, as in the third and sixth
stanzas. There is uncertainty, but the image is crystal clear - that lion-red body and wings of
glass, strength and fragility, a see through blood.

And in the twelfth stanza this queen, this new self, finally rises and flies. It's the high point of
the whole Bee Sequence - the queen lives but in living has to die - despite flying regally over
the system (machine) that put her there in the first place.

Plath's Stings - Internal Rhyme

Stings has more than a fair share of internal rhyme, both near and full. This interlocking of
sounds throughout the poem brings rewards for the reader and sets up resonances and echoes,
helping to fuse the stanzas together.

For example, look at these related words and phrases:

cheesecloth...neat and sweet/clean...between/Sweetness,

sweetness/queen/unqueenly/eaten/seen/These/sea/bee-
seller/me/he/creaming/sea/features/sleeping.

combs/throats/combs/so
old/old/no/Though/only/open/open/over/control/Opening/scapegoat/Molding/Over

More Analysis of Stings - Literary/Poetic Devices

Stings is a free verse poem having 12 stanzas each of 5 lines, making a total of 60 lines of
varying length.

There is no set rhyme scheme and the meter (metre in British English) varies from line to
line.

Several poetic devices are used. Both alliteration and assonance create interesting sound
patterns for the reader.

Alliteration

When similar consonants are close together, bringing texture and interest to the sounds, as in
- comb of yellow cups

excessive love I enameled

at all
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dried plates with my dense

dew from dangerous

woman who

Here is my money

will work without

creaming crests

scours the sea

lips like lies

Scar in the sky.

Assonance

When vowels sound similar and are close together, in stressed syllables, as with:

white smiles

cheesecloth gauntlets neat and sweet

clean.. between

torn shawls

rubbed...plush

Blue dew

with...without thinking

Opening in spring

industrialised virgin

bee-seller..me

sweat...efforts

his lips.
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Stings Analysis:

A feminist poem written by Plath to highlight the relationship between her and her husband –
as can be seen from the ‗He and I‘

The structure of the poem is twelve 5 line stanzas – and enjambment is used throughout to
extend the thoughts of the speaker

In poetry, enjambment is the breaking of a syntactic unit or a clause over two or more lines
without a punctuated pause ( Wikipedia)

Poem shows her resentment towards men in her married life and also towards women who
sacrifice themselves for men

The opening of this poem is a very tender one which uses details such as ‗the man in white
smiles‘ ‗our cheesecloth gauntlets‘ ‗white with pink flowers‘

The repetition of the term bare handed shows the trust the Plath has in her husband (bee
keeper)

A thousand cleans cell between us – they seem to have been married quite a long time and the
word clean signifies their virtue and purity

‗eight combs of yellow cups‘ – eight is also mentioned later in this poem and refers to the 8
years plath and her husband were married

I believe the beginning of the poem talks about her former love and her perfect married life
until her husband committed an act of infidelity

‗White with pink flowers

with excessive love I enameled it,

Thinking, ‗Sweetness, sweetness‘

Plath here seems to show us that she put all her love and efforts into being a good wife and
mother and attempted to build a perfect life for her family

The ferocity of the later stanzas makes it quite easy to forget this tender opening but I would
like to draw our attention to the fact that this poem begins on a quite peaceful if not happy
note. At the beginning the use of ‗He and I‘ and the line ‗The throats of our wrists brave
lilies‘ lead us to believe that she does acknowledge a happy time with her husband.

‗Brood cells gray as the fossils of shells

Terrify me, they seem so old.‘

From this point onwards – there is a shift in the poem – from her recollection of happy
memories to the dismal reality
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The speaker talks of the ‗unqueenly‘ and ‗shameful‘ state she finds herself in –

‗her wings torn shawls‘ bees with torn wings are considered to be beneath the males as well
as those women with healthy wings . Plath is saying that she has fallen beneath everyone

‗Of winged, un-miraculous women‘ This is a paradoxical statement seeing as a women with
wings would most certainly be considered miraculous. The drudges then, I believe, may
represent women who‘s strangeness has evaporated over the years spent in service of others

‗ I am no drudge‘ Although she makes this statement, we can tell that a drudge is exactly
what she has been for many years. Plath states this followed by a contradiction ‗though for
years I have eaten dust and dried plates with my dense hair‘ This is an allusion to the Bible
in which Mary washes the feet of Jesus and proceeds to dry them with her hair. Even though
she claims to not be a drudge, for years she has carried out the domestic duties required of a
married woman.

Plath‘s ‗strangeness‘ and ‗dangerous skin‘ could refer to her individuality. Plath makes the
use of a metaphor here comparing her individuality to evaporating dew.

‗Will they hate me,

These women who only scurry,

Whose news is the open cherry, the open clover?‘

Plath seems to believe that her strangeness will not be accepted – by the submissive women
that ‗only scurry‘ – the submissive women that have lost their ‗strangeness‘ (individuality) –
in the service of men

‗Whose news is the open cherry, the open clover?‘

sexual imagery – Plath states that normal housewives focus only on womanly duties,
specifically reproduction and sexual intimacy.

Karen Ford: On "Stings"

The third poem of the Bee sequence, "Stings" (214-15) fulfills this prediction. Not only have
the bees been set free (they now dwell in and around their hive) but the speaker, too, we learn
in the first word of the poem, is "bare-handed." In some ways, "Stings" is another bee
meeting, but this time the speaker and the bee seller are equals--working together and
similarly attired for the job: "Bare-handed, I hand the combs. / The man in white smiles, bare-
handed." The short fifth line, containing only the pronouns "he and I," and the stanza break
that follows it with a gulf of white space, suggest the insularity and detachment of the two
workers. The basis of their relationship appears to be the orderliness of their work. There is
something sterile in their association yet also something undeniably tender:

Bare-handed, I hand the combs.

The man in white smiles, bare-handed,

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Our cheesecloth gauntlets neat and sweet,

The throats of our wrists brave lilies.

He and I

Have a thousand clean cells between us,

Eight combs of yellow cups,

And the hive itself a teacup,

White with pink flowers on it,

With excessive love I enameled it

Thinking ‗Sweetness, sweetness‘.

The imagery makes clear that there are no more battles, even parodic ones, as there were in
"The Bee Meeting." Taking up an image of armor from that poem, "Breastplates of
cheesecloth knotted under the armpits," "Stings" reworks it, infusing it with the tender
tidiness that characterizes these opening stanzas, "Our cheesecloth gauntlets neat and sweet."
Similarly, the ghastly image of feeling "nude as a chicken neck" finds its delicate counterpart
here in "The throats of our wrists brave lilies." The inside and the outside of the hive alike
exude domestic refinement and charm when they are compared to china teacups that are
"yellow" and "white with pink flowers." Everything about this passage is "sweet"--the
relationship between the workers, the honey, the hive, the paintings, and, most of all, the
speaker‘s former love.

"Stings" is so renowned for its ferocity that it is easy to forget this painfully tender opening.
The aspects that are said to give it vehemence--the speaker‘s refusal to remain a drudge (and
the jealousy among the female figures this decision supposedly sets off), the drudges‘ attack
on the scapegoat, and the queen‘s "violent" bride flight--are simply not enough to negate this
gentle beginning. Plath drafted and finalized "Stings" on the backs of her husband‘s own
writing work sheets. She began the poem two months before the burst of writing in October
that produced the Bee sequence when the pain of losing Hughes was probably sharpest.
Further, the earliest drafts of the poem were written on the reverse sides of several Hughes‘
poems about the birth of their first child (Van Dyne 159); these were pages that documented
their lost happiness. Thus, she began the poem in a period of acute pain and on the very
papers that could only serve to intensify her misery. The threat of stings in this passage
comes less from the bees than from the evocation of the "excessive love" the speaker recalls
as she performs her beekeeping tasks. The stings the scapegoat receives from the bees can be
nothing compared to the stings the poet experiences in writing under these conditions or those
the speaker evokes in remembering her former relation to the hive. At the very least, the
sensitive opening must give another resonance to the title that readers of the poem seem
reluctant to acknowledge.
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Additionally, that resonance ought to inform the other aspects of the poem. For example, the
speaker‘s attitude toward other women, represented by the beekeeper‘s relationship to the
queen and the drudges, is not at all condescending or competitive. Though she makes the
important disclaimer, "I am no drudge," she clearly has been acting the part of one for years.
She is sympathetic with the "women who only scurry" and worries that they will hate her for
refusing to continue scurrying herself. Virtually every critic who discusses the speaker‘s
relationship to the drudges quotes the paradoxical line that describes them but invariably
misses the paradox (or avoids it by eliding part of the line). The speaker says, "I stand in a
column // Of winged, unmiraculous women." At least half the quotations of this passage omit
the word "winged"; the rest treat the line as though it read "wingless unmiraculous women."
"Winged, unmiraculous women" is paradoxical because a woman with wings would be
miraculous; "winged" suggests flight, transcendence, loftiness. The drudges, then, are not
inherently ordinary; rather they represent women whose strangeness has evaporated in the
service of others, here of the hive and the queen, elsewhere of husbands and children, women
whose energies have been "pour[ed] . . . through the direction and force" of others. Their
attack on the scapegoat verifies that they are not utterly servile. The speaker recognizes this.

Even the description of the scapegoat is affected by the tone of the opening. The key word
from the first two stanzas, "sweet," unexpectedly appears again here: "He was sweet, // The
sweat of his efforts a rain / Tugging the world to fruit." There is an initially negative
connotation in the "sweat of his efforts," some sense that he has encouraged the world to fruit
(probably best read as having fathered her children or more generally having made her
blossom) and then left it in a state of vulnerability to suffer. Yet "sweet" and "sweat"
associate themselves through sound for a much more positive effect and reveal that the
speaker recalls him with tenderness.

Further, she alludes to the Cinderella story in her description of his disappearance: "Here is
his slipper, here is another, / And here is the square of white linen / He wore instead of a hat."
These lines acknowledge his vulnerability by feminizing him; he is Cinderella who leaves
behind her slipper or the coy woman who drops her hankie in an attention-seeking gesture. It
is not surprising that such descriptions are followed by the conciliatory phrase, "He was
sweet." It appears that she delegates revenge to the bees--"Molding onto his lips like lies, /
Complicating his features"--yet this simile hints that his own evils are his undoing. The bees
merely dramatize his crimes. His deceptions have complicated his features, have made him
seem altered. However, even his change is qualified by the Cinderella allusion, another tale
of personal transformation. Further confusing the purpose of the allusion is the speaker‘s own
implication in it; she, too, is a Cinderella figure: "for years I have eaten dust / And dried
plates with my dense hair." (These lines are laden with other allusions as well. The serpent‘s
punishment for tempting Eve was to eat dust; Mary Magdalene washed Christ‘s feet with her
tears and dried them with her hair.) Finally, calling him "a great scapegoat" overtly
acknowledges that she is transferring her own guilt to him. When he is chased off by the
bees, he carries away her sins as well as his (we recall from "The Bee Meeting" that her black
veil "mold[ed] to her face" like the bees here have molded to his); this is perhaps the source
of the feminine imagery.25
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Though some of these lines seem to establish a connection between the speaker and the
scapegoat, the passage is framed by the speaker‘s detachment. First she says, "A third person
is watching. / He has nothing to do with the bee-seller or with me." After the bees sting him,
an act which assures their death, she asserts, "They thought death was worth it, but I / Have a
self to recover, a queen." Her detachment is clearly a much more significant victory for her
than revenge would have been. If "Stings" is a vengeful poem, it is only ambiguously so.

The drafts of "Stings," however, disclose a much more brutal treatment of the scapegoat. The
speaker‘s self-possession in the final version is shown to be hard won as the scapegoat enters
the poem a stanza earlier and cuts a quite different figure:

He was sweet,

The sweat of his efforts a rain

[On the world that grew under his belly]

Tugging the world to fruit.

Now he peers through a warped silver rain drop;

Seven lumps on his head

And a [great] big boss on his forehead,

Black as the devil, and vengeful.

In this version, he begins to look more like the ominous male figure in "Daddy," a later poem
that indulges its speaker‘s resentment. That resentment surfaces here in the evidence that the
scapegoat has been recently beaten--he has bumps on his head. The drafts confirm that Plath
edited out a more vicious caricature of the scapegoat. Likewise, she deleted many elements
from the drafts that added tension and hostility to the poem--gagging repetitions, the idea of
desertion, and the specters of dead men. Noticeably, these are the kinds of elements that she
emphasized in "The Bee Meeting." "Stings," then, is a poem that self-consciously suppresses
excess; yet it is still a poem of tremendous energy and "terribleness."

Here the speaker, like the queen, is "more terrible than she ever was" because she confronts
tenderness, loss, anger, resignation, and release bare-handed--as the first word of the poem
asserts. And despite the way we generally read it, "Stings" is neither obsessed with maiming
the male figure nor with the violence of the queen‘s flight. She is, after all, a "red / Scar," not
a bleeding gash; thus, she embodies a wound that has already begun to heal. And even the
"red comet" that leaves such a fierce impression is nevertheless ambiguous--potentially (and
historically) a sign of good luck. (Like the red meteor in The Scarlet Letter, this comet is
susceptible to multiple readings, an intertextual resonance that Plath‘s poem exploits.)

It would be foolish to deny that the lion-red queen is the precursor of a group of terrifying
female images that Plath will create in the next few weeks and days. As the material miseries
of her solitary life bear down on her, her anger justifiably explodes. In "Fever 103o" (231-32)
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the woman is the lantern "going up" as "The beads of hot metal fly, . . . a pure acetylene /
Virgin / Attended by roses"; in "Ariel" 239-40) she is "the arrow, The dew that flies /
Suicidal, at one with the drive / Into the red / Eye, the cauldron of morning"; in "Purdah"
(242-44) she is "The lioness, / The shriek in the bath, / The cloak of holes"; and, most
famously, in "Lady Lazarus" (244-47) she is the phoenix figure who rises "with [her] red hair
/ And . . . eat[s] men like air." Though these poems postdate the Bee sequence and may
articulate Plath‘s final emotional perspective, they cannot be considered her concluding
poetic statement. Around Christmas 1962, after all the Ariel poems were written, Plath
carefully arranged them for the book placing the Bee poems last. "Stings," with its
contradictory emotional swings, is therefore a crucial part of her culminating poetic vision.

Finally, it is the sweetness that causes the sharpest pain in "Stings." Remembering lost
tenderness and "excessive love," catching a glimpse of the man who "tugg[ed] the world to
fruit," putting the hives in perfect order with another man, even standing with the honey-
drudges, watching the honey-machine, and witnessing the queen‘s ascension--each of these
has an element of sweetness that she cannot ignore.

The breakthrough of "Stings" is that it is intensely personal in its themes yet not excessive in
its final style. This new relationship between subject and style enables the poem to articulate
complex and ambivalent emotions without attempting to depict them as monolithic and
overwhelming. In this, it anticipates "Wintering," where the speaker adds resignation and
hope to the emotional range she has been developing throughout the sequence. In
"Wintering," the speaker faces the most difficult confrontation of all--that with herself. At
this point, however, having assessed her relationship to the community in "The Bee
Meeting"; to her art in "The Arrival of the Bee Box"; to her husband, children, other women,
and her own contradictory fictional selves in "Stings"; she next addresses her relation to
history in "The Swarm."

From Gender and The Poetics of Excess: Moments of Brocade.

Stings, 1962 (CP 214-215)

―Stings‖ (CP 214-215) written on 6 October 1962 is a poem about beekeeping. It is one of the
poems in the group of ―Bee Poems‖ which consists of ―The Bee Meeting‖, ―The Arrival of
the Bee Box‖, ―Stings‖, ―The Swarm‖, and ―Wintering‖. Plath‟s father was a bee specialist,
and later, Plath and Hughes also tried their hand in bee-keeping in their Devon home.

Ashley McFarland writes about the ―Bee Poems‖:

Throughout the "Bee Poems" bees serve as the metaphor for the female situated within a
society that limits her.

Bees lack ambitious, independent qualities: they work for maintenance; they are fixed in
immanence under the guidance of one queen bee—or the standing socioeconomic order. If a
bee stings, it dies, which certainly functions to comment on the powerlessness Plath felt
toward her own situation. (McFarland 260)
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In the poem the speaker who is a woman identify with the bee. She has become one of the
―Honey-drudgers‖ after becoming a wife. The woman has seen her ―strangeness evaporate‖
and she says:

I stand in a column

Of winged, unmiraculous women,

Honey-drudgers.

I am no drudge

Though for years I have eaten dust

And dried plates with my dense hair.

And seen my strangeness evaporate,

Blue dew from dangerous skin.

Will they hate me,

These women who only scurry,

Whose news is the open cherry, the open clover ? (CP 214)

While collecting honey with a man, probably bee seller, the woman remembers the queen and
wonders where she is. She understands that the queen must have become quite ―old, her
wings like torn shawls, her long body/Rubbed of its plush--/ Poor and bare and unqueenly
and even shameful‖. Inspite of being the queen, she has now lost her queenly qualities in her
old age. The speaker‟s identification with the queen comes from the fact that the woman has
undergone a transformation like the old queen bee from being someone special to a drudge
even though she claims that she is no drudge. Domesticity has made her a drudge even
though she is not one.

McFarland explains the change in the woman‟s situation:

The speaker mourns the loss of her previous identity, before marriage and children. She states
that she has "seen [her] strangeness evaporate," indicating that her individual essence has
been lost. Her "honeymachine/[…] will work without thinking," signifying the dull,
immanent qualities of domesticity and the frustration that she feels in being locked in to
them. The speaker feels as if her individuality has been compromised for the benefit of the
collective unit—not just her small family, but the expected way in which she is to function as
a married woman. (McFarland 263) But, she declares:

It is almost over.

I am in control. (CP 214)

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The speaker has more than death in her mind, she is thinking of recovering her former self of
glory and power, becoming more terrible and flying over the „mausoleum, the wax house‟
that killed her. The position of wife changes a woman into a drudge; it kills all her qualities, it
turns her from a queen to a slave, she will take her revenge on all who have wronged her just
like the queen bee:

They thought death was worth it, but I

Have a self to recover, a queen.

Is she dead, is she sleeping ?

Where has she been,

With her lion-red body, her wings of glass ?
Now she is flying
More terrible than she ever was, red
Scar in the sky, red comet
Over the engine that killed her
The mausoleum, the wax house. (CP 215)
The woman will recover her former glory, her own identity and power; she seeks the queen in
her own self and asks ―Is she dead, is she sleeping? /Where has she been, /With her lion-red
body, her wings of glass ?‖ Then, the queen bee rises ―More terrible than she ever
was…/Over the engine that killed her--/ The mausoleum, the wax house‖.

The poem is Plath‟s criticism of the female situation which considers women as only a
drudge. Her service to home and society is unacknowledged; rather the value of the female is
underprivileged, considering her as a ―honeymachine‖ who ―will work without thinking‖. It
is the engine of the society that ―killed her‖ and she will rise just like the queen bee which
flies like a ―red/Scar in the sky, red comet‖ over the ―wax house‖, the hive which killed her.
In the poem Plath exposes the limitations placed by the society on the female subject, and the
murdering of the individuality of the female human. The ambivalence that she feels in her
role of wife and home-maker is expressed along with the resentment of her situation.