Poetry Thursday

Elaine T mentioned John Greenleaf Whittier, and actually I did remember a nice short poem by Whittier. I think this is one I encountered in high school. I should perhaps add that I always read most or all of the poetry included in any book we were required to buy for a class, not just the assigned poems, so I generally don’t remember which poems were assigned — only which I liked. I was unimpressed by super long unrhymed poems and skipped over those in favor of poems like this:

Telling the Bees

There is the place; right over the hill
   Runs the path I took;
You can see the gap in the old wall still,
   And the stepping-stones in the shallow brook.

There is the house, with the gate red-barred,
   And the poplars tall;
And the barn’s brown length, and the cattle-yard,
   And the white horns tossing above the wall.

There are the beehives ranged in the sun;
   And down by the brink
Of the brook are her poor flowers, weed-o’errun,
   Pansy and daffodil, rose and pink.

A year has gone, as the tortoise goes,
   Heavy and slow;
And the same rose blows, and the same sun glows,
   And the same brook sings of a year ago.

There ‘s the same sweet clover-smell in the breeze;
   And the June sun warm
Tangles his wings of fire in the trees,
   Setting, as then, over Fernside farm.

I mind me how with a lover’s care
   From my Sunday coat
I brushed off the burrs, and smoothed my hair,
   And cooled at the brookside my brow and throat.

Since we parted, a month had passed,—
   To love, a year;
Down through the beeches I looked at last
   On the little red gate and the well-sweep near.

I can see it all now,—the slantwise rain
   Of light through the leaves,
The sundown’s blaze on her window-pane,
   The bloom of her roses under the eaves.

Just the same as a month before,—
   The house and the trees,
The barn’s brown gable, the vine by the door,—
   Nothing changed but the hives of bees.

Before them, under the garden wall,
   Forward and back,
Went drearily singing the chore-girl small,
   Draping each hive with a shred of black.

Trembling, I listened: the summer sun
   Had the chill of snow;
For I knew she was telling the bees of one
   Gone on the journey we all must go!

Then I said to myself, “My Mary weeps
   For the dead to-day:
Haply her blind old grandsire sleeps
   The fret and the pain of his age away.”

But her dog whined low; on the doorway sill
   With his cane to his chin,
The old man sat; and the chore-girl still
   Sung to the bees stealing out and in.

And the song she was singing ever since
   In my ear sounds on:—
“Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence!
   Mistress Mary is dead and gone!”

***

This poem refers to a custom of telling the bees about important life events, particularly deaths, so the bees could join the household in mourning. I have no idea how widespread this custom really was, but apparently it was a real custom in various areas.

While on this topic, one of my favorite novels involving bees is Chalice by Robin McKinley. I think a lot of the story is pretty predictable, which only goes to show that you may really enjoy a story even if you can pretty much predict the important events. This is a warmly comforting story even though some fairly unpleasant things are going on.

I was trying to capture some aspects of the tone and the worldbuilding of Chalice when I wrote The Keeper of the Mist, and didn’t really succeed, I think. I got the sense of, how to put this. The sense of a place that is small and self-contained and surrounded by a much bigger and much more dangerous world. But my story went off in a completely different direction and didn’t wind up being especially warm and fuzzy. I do like it, it’s just not the story I set out to write.

No bees in my story, but I do have wyverns — though only glimpsed from afar.