Attentive Sun readers may wonder, at first glance, whether today’s Poem of the Day is a rerun. Last November, in fact, we did run a poem entitled “Telling the Bees,” written around 1900 by Lizette Woodworth Reese (1856–1935), a past poet laureate of Maryland. Today’s poem, by the same title, was written in 1858 by John Greenleaf Whitter (1807–1892), whose reputation in American letters, as poet, editor, essayist, and abolitionist, was well established by the 1850s, when Reese was born.

That there would be two poems with this title and subject shouldn’t surprise us all that much. Poets, as the Irish writer Billy Mills (b. 1954) has pointed out, have not been silent on the subject of bees. The ritual of telling the bees after a death, with its obscure and ancient origins and its grief-signifying action, is precisely the kind of thing many poets find irresistible. Every poets who haven’t written a poem on this theme either wish that they had or wish that nobody else had done it first (or both). That Whittier had done it first did not deter Reese, whose later poem makes an interesting revision of Whittier’s.

There are some similarities beyond the shared title. Both poems, in quatrains, establish a pattern of tetrameter lines disrupted by shorter ones — in Whittier’s case, trimeter, while Reese’s stanzas resolve on a dimeter refrain. More centrally, both poems narrate a terrible epiphany: learning of a loved one’s death by overhearing the news as it’s told, by a servant, to hives of bees.

Beyond this, the poems diverge. They tell the same story, and yet they don’t. Reese’s poem offers a stripped-down glimpse into a saturated moment of grief, as experienced by a child whose small, secure, familiar setting of house and garden is undone by news of a loss that the foraging bees will carry into the wider world. It’s a lyric poem whose potency lies in its simple presentation of images and the emphatic repetition of its refrain.

Whittier’s longer poem is a narrative that blurs past and present. A man’s return to a familiar place, Fernside Farm, is superimposed onto an earlier return, like a Photoshop effect showing the same scene both touched and untouched by the passage of time. Of a piece with the American Gothic tradition of its era, the narrative reads like a kind of homespun Twilight Zone episode. The returning suitor’s expectations and assumptions are built up, detail by detail, only to be overturned in an instant of awful realization.

Even the form, stanzas that establish a pattern of alternating tetrameter and trimeter, disturbs the reader’s metrical expectations with an unsettling fourth tetrameter line. From the beginning we sense that something is wrong, a sense magnified as we stop to consider “her poor flowers,” overrun by weeds. The suitor’s foreboding, and ours, grows with the whining of the beloved’s dog on the doorsill. Finally, his confirming eye falls on the old grandfather, alive and nodding by the door, as the little servant girl chants to the bees her devastating song, “Mistress Mary is dead and gone!” 

Telling the Bees
by John Greenleaf Whittier

Here 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!”

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.