Marianne Boruch: Plath’s Bees (July 1990)

Marianne Boruch traces the growth of Sylvia Plath’s bee sequence in Ariel from obsessive image to transcendent poetry. Using passages from early fiction as well as later letters and journal entries, Boruch shows us how Plath turned again and again to details of her actual experience of keeping a hive as she slowly developed her totemic image. Boruch argues that this lived experience of bee-keeping allowed Plath to ground her astonishing lyric sequence, “five poems written in one sleepless week,” in “the lucidity and vigor of narrative.”