The Beekeeper's Daughter
The Beekeeper's Daughter - meaning Summary
Control Enacted Through Nature
The poem uses lavish floral and bee imagery to dramatize a fraught, intimate bond between the speaker and her father. The garden’s sensual abundance frames power, domination, and ambiguous eroticism as the father—likened to a beekeeper and maestro—presides over queenship and reproduction. The speaker positions herself simultaneously as subjugated daughter and witness to generative violence, culminating in a chilling image of a queen bee marrying "the winter of your year." The father figure echoes Otto Plath.
Read Complete AnalysesA garden of mouthings. Purple, scarlet-speckled, black The great corollas dilate, peeling back their silks. Their musk encroaches, circle after circle, A well of scents almost too dense to breathe in. Hieratical in your frock coat, maestro of the bees, You move among the many-breasted hives, My heart under your foot, sister of a stone. Trumpet-throats open to the beaks of birds. The Golden Rain Tree drips its powders down. In these little boudoirs streaked with orange and red The anthers nod their heads, potent as kings To father dynasties. The air is rich. Here is a queenship no mother can contest --- A fruit that's death to taste: dark flesh, dark parings. In burrows narrow as a finger, solitary bees Keep house among the grasses. Kneeling down I set my eyes to a hole-mouth and meet an eye Round, green, disconsolate as a tear. Father, bridegroom, in this Easter egg Under the coronal of sugar roses The queen bee marries the winter of your year.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.