In our everyday lives, bees are important to us primarily for their utility value: honey, food, beauty products, and recreation. In this poem, bees have been ordered to wait in their bee-box until humans are ready for them. Bees are made to follow the patterns of modern technology where nature can always be further divided and ordered: “Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for further ordering” (pp. 53-56). Our encounter with these poetic bees draws us towards an ethical issue about the ways humans have been unable in Heidegger’s terminology to “let things be.” Instead, we have challenged and demanded that objects and other people stand by (bestehen) and wait for further ordering and restructuring. Plath suggests that being passive and letting things be requires an active willingness to engage with phenomena. This poem shows that releasement and freedom are events that happen to gendered and raced individuals. (Heidegger’s writings on releasement miss this crucial point). We witness this most poignantly in the final stanzas where the speaker’s sex manifests itself: There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,/ And the petticoats of the cherry.
These stanzas also situate the speaker as white. This completes the framing of the poem as far as race is concerned. We begin the poem with the presence of these imported African bees, shipped by dark African hands and end with the speaker’s blond presence.
