The River of Bees by W. S. Merwin

I love W. S. Merwin. He captures something fundamentally important about poetry for me: that it’s beautiful. If you’re going to read one poem today, I would suggest ‘The River of Bees’ since it is a poem that exemplifies this point, whilst also highlighting a big problem with much poetry, which is its inaccessibility. I’d say it is still worth the read for the beauty alone, but context does make the poem more accessible, and whether that hurdle is a problem I’ll let you decide.

In fairness, taking ‘The River of Bees’ outside of its intended context, which is midway through the collection ‘The Lice’, doesn’t do it any favours. But to be honest, even within the collection, I’ve had to read a fair few papers to get even a cursory understanding of what Merwin might have been trying to say. And this was worth it, because I now realise just how relevant Merwin and other writers from the 60s are to us today; the parallels to the Vietnam War and the MAD situation are pretty commonly discussed. But I also wouldn’t have realised that the blindman was likely Homer or the oracle Tiresias. Homer is my choice since it was he who in a story was tricked by a riddle about lice, so that plus a man who “…stood singing / Of what was older” makes the most sense to me. I also didn’t know that bees are mentioned throughout antiquity to indicate hard work and industry (Virgil dedicating an entire book of his Georgics to them), and also as creatures that exist in the liminal space between life and death. That you have to be that well-versed in the classics in order to access the surface-level meaning of the poem does not lend itself to widespread enjoyment, at least in my opinion. Which is a shame, since the poem is so nakedly beautiful in the way it reads; the construction and placement of phrases on the page, with all their unpunctuated ambiguity, draw me in every time.

One other thing. My dreams don’t tend to have sound, which I believe is not uncommon, but since ‘The River of Bees’ is a dream poem, it caused an interesting situation. It wasn’t until I showed someone else the poem that they pointed out how loud and chaotic a river of bees would actually be. Imagine the bees flowing like a river, agitated and angry — their buzzing would become almost deafening. And it is from this river that we find the “…noise of death drawing water”; it feels kind of on the nose for all the noise and chaos in the news these days.