The Arrival of the Bee Box Summary

The poem begins with the speaker receiving a deceptively simple-looking wooden box full of bees. It's heavy, square, and noisy. It's impossible to see much of anything inside it except a grid. The speaker watches the grid and sees bees scrambling over one another. She compares them to people crammed into ships during the slave trade. She wants to find a way to release them, since their noisiness reminds her of a mob in ancient Rome, which is distressing. She listens to them, comparing their sounds to Latin, and noting that she is no Roman emperor. She does not know how to subdue or understand them. The speaker begins to realize how much power she has over the bees, becoming overwhelmed. She considers returning them, and realizes that they will die if she does not feed them. She wonders if they would forget her, freeing her from responsibility, if she turned into a tree. She then takes note of trees around her: a cherry tree and a laburnum tree, both grand and beautiful. The bees, the speaker reflects, might ignore her if she wears her modest, spacesuit-like beekeeping outfit. In the end, they probably won't pose any threat to her; she decides that tomorrow, she'll let them go, making the box only a temporary container.