Sylvia Plath's "Wintering"

All of these "bee poems" gave me quite a headache upon first reading. And not just for the in-depth interpretation; the simple surface reading caused confusion, and I found myself re-reading passages again and again to try to understand where Plath's mind was at, or rather where she wanted mine to be at when I read these works.

The second and third readings of the poems made life a little easier. I began to look past the superficial interpretation and metaphors and try to understand more deeply what Plath was actually writing about. In her poem "Wintering", which is about the process of wintering a hive (i.e. making it ready for winter) started to unfold before me as an analogy for her dying marriage and family.

The poem begins with, "This is the easy time, there is nothing doing." This starts off the poem (and from now on, I will be using the metaphor of wintering a hive to actually refer to Plath's marriage/family) with the idea that she has excepted that her marriage is dying, that he has cheated on her, that this is something she needs to put away and forget for a while. It's the "easy time", the time of acceptance. She has gotten what she can out of the marriage and accepts that it will be no more. "The midwife's extractor" to extract "my honey." Those are the good time of her marriage with Hughes, and no she must assign them to the basement, the back of her mind.

"Wintering in a dark without window/At the heart of the house" literally refers to the cellar, but in this interpretation are the dark depths of her memories, her mind. "The last tenant's rancid jam/And the bottles of empty glitters--" could refer to other lost loves, or hopes, or dreams that have wasted away. Although I said this was a poem of acceptance, it is not without her usual currents of depression. Think of acceptance as another way of saying "giving up."

The room she has "never been in", the room she "could never breathe in" indicates her suspicions of her mind. She knows that she has problems, and every once in a while the light from a faint torch may illuminate things, but she would rather put it "out of sight and out of mind." The only time she acknowledges the dark corners of her psyche is through her poetry, which is often difficult to navigate through, and would need much more than a torch to light the way.

The "black asininity" is probably a direct reference to Hughes, and his "asinine" affair which brought her world down around her. "Decay" of the marriage, but "possession" of responsibilities. She knows that even though she wants to just give up and die, "It is they who own me" refers to her children, and she knows that she owes them something. That her husband failed and she must try, even though they are the last thing that she wants to confront.

They are "ignorant" of what is going on around her, to her. The "bees", as in all the bee poems, refer to her children. "This is the time of hanging on for the bees..." At the time this poem was written, shortly after the affair was found out, the children were very young. She likens them to bees, that don't necessarily know their owner or who fees them (and she they- "So slow I hardly know them"), they just "File like soldiers/To the syrup tin." She knows that she is depriving them of motherly affection ("the honey I've taken"), and instead whittles down her responsibilities to her children in this wintering of her life by simply making sure they are fed. "Tate and Lyle keeps them going," which refers to a generic food brand popular at this time. They live on this, instead of their mother's "flowers."

The next stanza was a bit harder to interpret. This could be referring to the idea of "angry bees buzzing in your head" and not allowing you to think. "Mind against all that white." It's as if she's confused, and can't think straight about her future, and instead would like to "blank out" her mind and almost ignore it. (Meissen apparently refers to porcelain, which just emphasizes the purity of the white snow, the appeal of it.)

"On warm days/They can only carry their dead." The dead ideals? When you finally clear out your mind and get rid of the unnecessary? "The bees are all women... They have got rid of the men." She is now essentially swearing off men because of Hughes, which she refers to them all as "blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors." The women are the intelligent, the strong, the ones who suffer through the wintering and survive. But is it survival? Or is it giving up? Is it the numbness of the hurt which caused you to be "too dumb to think."?

The hive is now the mind, body, and soul... the family. Will it survive? Will she survive this wintering in order to "enter another year?" She's not sure... but "the bees are flying./They taste the spring." In this sense these bees could either be her children, too young to know the ordeals of the past, and able to and willing to face the future, or her thoughts... her thoughts could finally be resurfacing from the cold dark depths and looking towards a new beginning.