Today’s Poem: Telling the Bees

John Greenleaf Whittier’s journey through enchantment to grief

Charles Napier Henry, Telling the Bees, 1897 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Telling the Bees

by John Greenleaf Whittier

Here is the place; right over the hill
  Runs the path I took;
You can see the gap in the old wall still,
  And the stepping-stones in the shallow brook.

There is the house, with the gate red-barred,
  And the poplars tall;
And the barn’s brown length, and the cattle-yard,
  And the white horns tossing above the wall.

There are the beehives ranged in the sun;
  And down by the brink
Of the brook are her poor flowers, weed-o’errun,
  Pansy and daffodil, rose and pink.

A year has gone, as the tortoise goes,
  Heavy and slow;
And the same rose blows, and the same sun glows,
  And the same brook sings of a year ago.

There’s the same sweet clover-smell in the breeze;
  And the June sun warm
Tangles his wings of fire in the trees,
 Setting, as then, over Fernside farm.

I mind me how with a lover’s care
  From my Sunday coat
I brushed off the burrs, and smoothed my hair,
  And cooled at the brookside my brow and throat.

Since we parted, a month had passed, —
   To love, a year;
Down through the beeches I looked at last
  On the little red gate and the well-sweep near.

I can see it all now, — the slantwise rain
  Of light through the leaves,
The sundown’s blaze on her window-pane,
 The bloom of her roses under the eaves.

Just the same as a month before,—
  The house and the trees,
The barn’s brown gable, the vine by the door, —
  Nothing changed but the hives of bees.

Before them, under the garden wall,
  Forward and back,
Went drearily singing the chore-girl small,
  Draping each hive with a shred of black.

Trembling, I listened: the summer sun
  Had the chill of snow;
For I knew she was telling the bees of one
  Gone on the journey we all must go!

Then I said to myself, “My Mary weeps
  For the dead to-day:
Haply her blind old grandsire sleeps
  The fret and the pain of his age away.”

But her dog whined low; on the doorway sill,
  With his cane to his chin,
The old man sat; and the chore-girl still
  Sung to the bees stealing out and in.

And the song she was singing ever since
  In my ear sounds on: —
“Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence!
  Mistress Mary is dead and gone!”

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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 understandably irresistible. Poets who haven’t written a poem on this theme either wish that they had or that nobody else had done it first (or both). That John Greenleaf Whitter (1807–1892) had done it first, in 1858, did not deter Lizette Woodworth Reese (1856–1935) , whose later poem by the same title makes an interesting revision of Whittier’s, and is worth taking a moment to visit.

In Today’s Poem, by Whittier, the narrative 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 — though it might be more accurate to say that his efforts at denial grow and grow — only to be overturned in an instant of awful realization.

John Greenleaf Whitter, 1885 (Wikimedia Commons)

Even the form, abab quatrains whose pattern is almost common measure, disturbs the reader’s metrical expectations with an unsettling tetrameter b-rhyme line to end each stanza, instead of a closure in trimeter. Although there’s something peculiarly lulling about that hyper-repeated tetrameter, from the beginning we may sense that things are off somehow.

This sense magnifies as we stop with the speaker to consider “her poor flowers,” overrun by weeds, and that weird reversed image of the sunlight through leaves outside the beloved’s window, which we register first as “rain,” with its accompanying gloom, before we realize that it isn’t. 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!” 

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