Mona Van Duyn’s “A Time of Bees”: The Half-Rhyme of Men Being Men
A Time of Bees by Mona Van Duyn : The Poetry Foundation
“A Time of Bees” by Mona Van Duyn (1921–2004, our first female Poet Laureate) might seem daunting as we
look at it on the page. Her lines are long; there are two pages of them, and
maybe there’s something a little intimidating about stanzas that are consistently (rigidly?)
five lines long. It’s a good time to practice what I’ve preached before: look for small gifts
along the way, in single images, or find in single lines the hints of larger
ideas, even if we must wait to see if they ever expand and cohere. All the
while we’re hoping the whole is worth our patience. (Ditto the length of my
post).
It would also be easy to overlook Van Duyn’s use of form in “A
Time of Bees.” I first noticed the uniformity of the five-line stanzas. Then I
saw that quite a few of the line breaks, the enjambments, came at odd places
(emphasizing some interesting meanings in individual lines, apart from their meanings
in the poem as a whole). In a few lines, chosen randomly, I counted syllables
and listened to stresses, but found no consistent pattern. Eventually, however,
I saw the half-rhymes, in lines 1,3,5 and sometimes in lines 2 and 4. Some are
so subtle, so “halved,” that we might call them eighteenth rhymes; but the
rhyme becomes more definite as the poem goes along, and it’s reasonable to
claim a rhyme scheme of ababa.
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| Sneaky Crawling |
Why does this matter? Rhyme and meter can be merely
decorative, and they often create comedy, as in limericks. To a poet, they can be
as much a risk as a weapon. But in the hands of serious writers, they suggest the poet’s
tendency toward perceiving and valuing order in her subjects and her world
view. A sense of music is another likely result of rhyme and meter, but not so
much when the form is as understated as Van Duyn’s, where the rhyme is hanging by a
thread.
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| Half-Rhyme? |
So is she just a sloppy, half-hearted formalist? I don’t
think so. The poem centers on the menacing but perhaps alluring way men tear
things apart as they pursue a prey, an enemy, in order to repair and make
things right and safe. Yes, that sounds a little pre-feminist, but in casual
conversation, I’ve heard a number of intelligent women confess to finding
muscle, sweat, labor and combat appealing. Some brainy women like seeing the
torque of a man as he rips at things in order to fix them—to build, make,
create. Isn’t that the end to which he’s been evolving?
And maybe the sweaty stuff becomes more appealing as
technology evolves away from our need for physical labor on the home front. Let
the robot do it. Or let the men, women and children from afar do it. For better
or worse, our airplane drones even show the potential for an evolution away from
physical combat.
Wouldn’t the law of supply and demand tell us that, as hunks
thin out in the work force, giving way to I.T. guys and lab techs, the appeal
and the price of hunks will grow more dear? I’d guess gym memberships are at an
all-time high and will continue to grow, unless some dire upheaval returns us
to an economy of agriculture and heavy industry.
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| Frontal |
But she’s not a dumb woman, and she’s aware that this is
something like a double-edged sword. Shall she be cold and mechanical about
being rid of the nuisance bees? Or shall she sympathize with an animal that was
only doing what it was designed to do? She is so honest that she does both:
they writhe, some of them, but who cares?
They
go to the garbage, it is over, everything has been said.
But
there is more. Wouldn’t you think the bees had suffered
enough?
Love, labor and war make tenuous what she
thought she thought—and valued. She’s a bit uncertain, so there is in Van
Duyn’s poetic structure an air we might call tenuously formal—rhymes that
almost challenge the definition of rhyme. And her clinging to a symmetrical
five-line stanza gives way at the end to a single line that highlights a “grubby softness” that “wants to
give, to give”—which is surely a
reference to women as well as infant bees.
Such a world, such a mind, an experience such as this bee
hunt, is surely not as neat and orderly as tidy, self-conscious, exact rhyme or
meter would imply. Yet there is some kind of order in Van Duyn’s world of
partially-evolved cave dwellers. If someone wants to call her rhymes crude, it’s all right because the world
she’s presenting and accepting is also crude—in part. Eroticism is crude. Survival is crude. It’s about tearing
things up to get to the bottom of things, where enemies live.
Still, the couple reads “books on bees” and later they bring
home a scientist friend, for “they need/the idea of bees” (what an expression,
by the way!). But in the end, understanding is secondary to elimination. There
are only two forces: the squirming of bees with some life left in them and,
with a remarkable adjective, the “unpleading” male’s need to kill them all,
permanently, to protect home and hearth.
There is nothing to plead about here; he is doing the
necessary work.
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| Hiding Its Head in the . . . Sand? |
Van Duyn denies us our penchant for simplistic dichotomies.
She won’t let her gender, or any of us, say, “I’m all brain, beauty, and spirit. I am not a savage. I am
lofty. God made me in his image.”
To which Van Duyn calmly replies, “Don’t be silly. That
sweaty, aggressive, murderous, rampaging, repairing man makes me aware of my
own softness. I accept it. Maybe I even like it, and I’m honest enough to say
so.”
“A Time of Bees” presents a rough-hewn, physical, even
bestial world that continues to call to us, contain us, define us. It has a
kind of order, but it’s a brutal order, and trying to prettify it with loud,
exact rhymes or overly sweet music, would miss the point, would be a lie.
*
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