The bookends of Rae Armantrout’s ‘Bees’¹ prompt two seemingly unrelated questions. The title primes us to expect a poem about bees, but for most of the poem, we find ourselves asking, “Where are the promised ‘bees’?” Secondly, the last phrase of the poem is an invitation to “Come in”, which makes us wonder, “Where is in?” Rather satisfyingly, both questions find their resolution in the same concepts, which we will try to tease out.

Existence and Uniqueness

If not being (something)
…

The introduction to this poem is very abstract, and (annoyingly) not about a place or object at all. It would be careless to rush through short poems like this one, so let’s take things phrase by phrase. This line sneaks the title of the poem in sonically, an idea which will prove crucial as we progress through the poem. The verb “to be” is usually a copula, meaning it functions to connect noun-like objects together, for example “My pet is a poodle” or “Dinner wasn’t great”. However, this word can also just declare existence, for example in saying “To be, or not to be…” This, combined with the gerund form of “being”, means that the subject and object are all but discarded.

We can say then that the first three words of ‘Bees’ unsettle the titular creatures in at least three ways: by dealing with an abstract action rather than anything physical; by using that action even more abstractly, as a noun (i.e the concept of doing) rather than an action acting concretely; and by going even more abstract through a negation of this concept. If “being” is difficult to conceptualise and talk about, then “not being” is even more ungrounded.

The claim of the speaker, however, is that this abstracted entity, no matter how perplexing it is, exists nonetheless. This claim is made through the parenthetical “(something)”, which acts to define or qualify the phrase that came just before. What’s powerful here is that we don’t see “If not being (which itself is something)”. We are missing a copula completely. “Not being” is by definition distinct from “being”, so seems allergic to a copula.

So what we have now are two things that are “something”: being, and not being. The speaker has turned nothing into something, which will lead to interesting consequences. In mathematics, there’s a common style of argument called unique existential quantification, which is a fancy way of saying that there is exactly one object satisfying some rule. The way we make these arguments is to first show that an object exists, then to show that any two of these entities must be the same (uniqueness: the object). Our speaker is doing something similar. Having established two exhaustive possibilities, our two ‘bees’, we will find a way to conclude they are the same. Let us see how this is accomplished in line two:

…not being (something) is the same as being, …

This is strange. We expected to see a convincing justification, but instead both states are simply asserted to be the same, glued together with hope.

Comforting if True

The first word of the poem, ‘if’, gives half of our resolution to this puzzle. There is ambiguity in this word, because it could act as a hypothetical, or could function similarly to the word “since”. For example, “I am thirty years old, and if I’m thirty, then I am definitely older than you,” where the fact that the utterer is in fact thirty enables the ‘if’ to be stronger than mere hypothetical conjecture. Through this example, then, we see that ifs only act as since’s when the antecedent (or “starting claim”) is true. When we pretend “not being […] is the same as being,” we can explore some implications. If we can then justify that not-being and being truly are the same, then our implications all automatically follow. Luckily, the speaker has already argued that this is the case, through the word “something”. In suggesting “not being” is “something”, we suggest that it “is”, in the existence sense. After all, the only way to ‘be something’ (be happy, be green, be in a house, etc) is to first exist.

So then, this is not strictly a metaphysical claim but an exploration of language. We can’t speak about ‘nothing’ without making it into something. What then, does the speaker do with this established “truth”? What are the personal implications? Stanza break. Drum roll.

then I will live forever.

Of course! Mortality is ceasing to be living beings, so death is not being. So, by the power of the language realm, death is something. So death is being. Everything is and nothing is and our speaker has figured it all out!

Nothingness is Desolate

Our speaker now draws our attention to one of the most fundamental symbols of nothingness in the English language: shadows. Shadows have names and are treated as entities that follow us and (metaphorically) hold our fears and deep secrets, as threats. At the most fundamental level, though, shadows are the absence of light. Shadows are defined by their not-ness, because they are where light is not. In addition, shadows are tireless. We get expressions like “you were my shadow throughout that party”, and “I will shadow the CEO all day” from this property. If there is light and an object there is a shadow. So even here we see something resembling immortality. But crucially, rather than pairing immortality with bustling activity, this forever-nothingness is colourlessly empty. It exists but in a borrowed, pseudo-existence, and despite having a shape (“Round shadow..”) and location (“…inside the sunflower’s // corona”) , it doesn’t do anything; it can only not-be.

And it gets even worse: the only way to do the act of not-being is for there to be such a thing as being, and the only way for a shadow to not-exist is for there to be an object that truly, fully does. Thus, the hope of the previous stanza has been deflated. Not-being may be possible, even indefinitely so, yet it lacks the animation and activity of being.

Incomplete Comfort

If I lived forever
would the present’s noose

be looser?

By repeating the exact structure of the end of stanza 1, Armantrout resumes the implication trail, this time with significantly less confidence. Just like an object intercepts a light ray and robs the ground of light, the speaker has discovered that not-being may require existing in perpetual darkness. Now, the assured “I will live forever” gives way to a more desperate question.

There is great irony in the idea that despite escaping the consequences of death, the speaker’s existence is outlined by the threat of it. The issue is that not-being would be a hollow form of “life”. This means that death is still ultimately bad news, and the most that can be hoped for is a loosening of the threat, that the consequences of dying would be less severe than they seemed before.

Furthermore, even this concession may not be possible; the “If” that started this poem looms like a dark cloud (casting a shadow, if you will). If we have any reason to doubt our antecedent, then this house of cards falls, and not-being becomes a full death again.

Busy Bees

Finally one of our core questions finds its answer, albeit in a surprising form. We see that the bees have been around all along; it was their existence which caused the necessary obstruction to create the shadow. We can say then that the bee is to the shadow as being is to not-being.

With this in mind, we can explore the portrayal of both characters in a new light. The shadow gets the word “moon”, acting almost like a compressed metaphorical adjective. The moon is a great pairing for the shadow: it exists in contrast to the sun and points to night (that is, not-day). Similarly then, the shadow exists in contrast to the hotter, brighter, more active bees, described here as “angry.” This is interesting. So far, not-being has been the negative state, and being has been the ideal, yet now we see that the state of existence is not peaceful but agitated. This makes sense in light of the third stanza, where we saw that being is disturbed by the threat of non-being. Bees have to survive. The speaker has to survive. Both are uneasy.

Now we are ready to approach the final line. The word “confined” is ambiguous: it could be that the bees are trapped (by their environment, mortality, the shadow, etc), or the shadows (in being defined solely by the shape and choices of the bees). Interestingly, both interpretations fit perfectly with the web of ideas we have uncovered thus far. The bees are burdened by the need to continue being, and the shadow is trapped because it can only barely exist, without agency, defined by the bees. There is a mutuality to this entrapment: the things that live spend their lives thinking about not dying, and the things that are dead spend their not-existence thinking about the things that do exist. So then, neither side of this divide is really free.

To Bee or Not to Bee²

Now we reach the challenging invitation: ‘Come in.’ We have just discovered that both states confine, so is there any positive way to take this invitation? It seems unlikely. This stanza is a powerful disruption, reflected by the form. So far each stanza has had a sense of cohesion. They all end with similar vowel sounds, they have each been one sentence in length, and they all ended with an amphibrach, that is, a weak-strong-weak stress pattern (“fo-RE-ver”, “co-RO-na”, “be LOO-ser”). This final stanza is a departure on all counts. It contains two sentences, the former ending in an iamb (“con-FINED”), and the latter acting like a spondee (“COME IN”), with near equal stress on both words. With the emphasised nasal consonants, ‘i’ vowels, and closed syllables, this stanza is also quite different to the sound palette that came before.

So then, the sound, stress, and sentence structure all point to this final invitation being disruptive. We find further disruption when we consider what the sentences say. This is the first time the speaker has involved the reader, and this is the first time anyone has had to make a decision. Up until this point, the poem has been largely about internal deliberations. The speaker looks out at the world and the future, trying to conclude whether it all looks grim or hopeful. This is the first time that the speaker and reader must decide which path to embrace: the drab stasis of death, or the harsh agitation of life.

There is so much in the phrasing here. Without more context about the speaker or what comes after this imperative, we can only guess whether this is a command or an invitation, a gift or a trap. We can imagine being in the world of the poem, with the speaker is addressing us, asking us to consider everything we have heard, the passionately questioning voice of stanzas 1 and 3, and the cold perception in stanza 2, and make the choice to enter into the tension, to embrace the uncertainty that comes with being, with the threat of non-being, and with everything in-between.

Notes and References