Wild Bees

The poem opens with rural summer imagery. The poet references Ophelia, the central female character of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” which may allude to the widespread artwork featuring Ophelia on riversides. The reference also evokes “The Lady of Shalott,” the heroine of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, who has been featured in classical art. John William Waterhouse’s painting depicts the Lady of Shalott drifting in a boat on the river. Comparisons can be drawn between these women; both died as they journeyed down a river.

Baxter’s poem shifts to the speaker’s perspective as they watch the bees flying back and forth “in passionless industry” (Line 5), gathering pollen and bringing it to their hive for manufacturing. This turning point is marked by an em dash in line 3 rather than a comma. This gives the reader a visual cue that the lens through which they’re viewing the story is changing. The speaker shows admiration for the bees, for their beauty and speed. The tree, by contrast, is rotting and foreboding. The em dash in line three foreshadows how the poem will descend into chaos and darkness.

The second stanza begins with a dangling subordinate clause—“but” (Line 7)—which creates a sense of immediacy. The poem moves into an evening in January, which contrasts with the summer days explored at the poem’s opening. The month is “ripe” (Line 8), an adjective normally reserved for summer fruit. This creates a sense of juxtaposition and contrast.

In stanza two, the speaker evokes a foreboding image, how they and their friends are “gloved and masked to the eyes like plundering desperadoes” (Line 9). This elevates the poem’s sense of excitement and adventure. We are put in mind of treasure hunts and musketeers, a game within the natural world. In contrast to the multi-syllabic “plundering desperadoes,” the next clause is stripped down and simple: “To smoke them out” (Line 10). Each word is a single syllable, creating a subtle shift in language. The game continues, but it is done with a very real weapon—“smoke.”

The friends bide their time underneath the “wounded sky” (Line 11), an image which juxtaposes beauty with danger. The phrase references a sunset streaked blood-red. The light, implied to be in abundance in earlier lines, is pulling back.

The third stanza creates a sense of urgency and rhythm with repeated vowel and consonant sounds. The bees attack through “darkening air” (Line 14), which has a double meaning: the sky darkening towards nightfall, and the sky darkening with the crowd of bees—an extension of an earlier image of the bees “clustering black at the crevice” (Line 5). The repetition of sounds bring the reader to the heart of the battle between man and nature. This is a stanza of constant action and movement.

The battle continues to rage through grand scale metaphors of mythological fallen cities, the smoke used to attack the hive reflected in images of Troy and Carthage burning. As the battle comes to a close, the speaker reflects on “A job well botched” (Line 21). The simplistic structure of this line parallels the earlier shift in tone, “To smoke them out” (Line 10). Four words with one syllable each symbolize a turning point in the narrative at both junctures. After line 21, the poem slows down considerably, as the speaker is left to examine the damage they and their friends inflicted.

As soldiers in this war, the friends are the ones left standing—but the victory is bittersweet. In attacking the hive, they have ruined most of the honey they were after and killed most of the bees. The reader sees the universal futility of war—not just in the specific instance of the poem.  Destruction is the only certainty when rising against nature.

In the final, fifth stanza, the poem has an introspective tone. The speaker examines the fallen grace of the bees’ industry and, perhaps, their own childhood innocence. The speaker’s memories begin to blur: “A hive burned on a cool night in summer” (Line 27). The reader knows that the hive was burnt in January, but the speaker’s retrospective blurs memory. The speaker holds these memories close, knowing that those days are ones they can never get back; however, through revisiting them, they can keep them preserved and continue to learn from them.