The Arrival of the Bee Box Essay Questions

What might the bees represent in this poem?

This poem is open to interpretation, as the symbolic significance of the bees remains deliberately vague. The bees have been interpreted as representing the speaker's own anxieties and fears, and have also been interpreted as representing her creative talent. Other readers view the bees as representatives of patriarchal oppression or other social inequities. Overall, the bees represent something the speaker is simultaneously fearful of and drawn to. Moreover, they appear to symbolize something over which she has a limited, but intoxicating, amount of power and control.

Identify and analyze two metaphors in the poem.

At one point in the poem, the speaker uses a metaphor to compare the bees to enslaved people transported in a ship. Later, though, she uses a different metaphor to compare them to an angry mob in ancient Rome. These two metaphors display her complicated feelings about the animals. The first portrays them as victimized, subjugated individuals robbed of agency by outsiders. This metaphor shows that the speaker feels that she has power over them—too much power, in fact. The second metaphor, however, positions the speaker as vulnerable precisely because of her lonely yet powerful position—she feels she is at the mercy of the bees' collective anger.