Telling the Bees
John Greenleaf Whittier
5 There is the house, with the gate red-barred,
6 And the poplars tall;
7 And the barn's brown length, and the cattle-yard,
8 And the white horns tossing above the wall.
9 There are the beehives ranged in the sun;
10 And down by the brink
11 Of the brook are her poor flowers, weed-o'errun,
12 Pansy and daffodil, rose and pink.
13 A year has gone, as the tortoise goes,
14 Heavy and slow;
15 And the same rose blows, and the same sun glows,
16 And the same brook sings of a year ago.
17 There 's the same sweet clover-smell in the breeze;
18 And the June sun warm
19 Tangles his wings of fire in the trees,
20 Setting, as then, over Fernside farm.
21 I mind me how with a lover's care
22 From my Sunday coat
23 I brushed off the burrs, and smoothed my hair,
24 And cooled at the brookside my brow and throat.
25 Since we parted, a month had passed, --
26 To love, a year;
27 Down through the beeches I looked at last
28 On the little red gate and the well-sweep near.
29 I can see it all now, -- the slantwise rain
30 Of light through the leaves,
31 The sundown's blaze on her window-pane,
32 The bloom of her roses under the eaves.
33 Just the same as a month before, --
34 The house and the trees,
35 The barn's brown gable, the vine by the door, --
36 Nothing changed but the hives of bees.
37 Before them, under the garden wall,
38 Forward and back,
39 Went drearily singing the chore-girl small,
40 Draping each hive with a shred of black.
41 Trembling, I listened: the summer sun
42 Had the chill of snow;
43 For I knew she was telling the bees of one
44 Gone on the journey we all must go!
45 Then I said to myself, "My Mary weeps
46 For the dead to-day:
47 Haply her blind old grandsire sleeps
48 The fret and the pain of his age away."
49 But her dog whined low; on the doorway sill,
50 With his cane to his chin,
51 The old man sat; and the chore-girl still
52 Sung to the bees stealing out and in.
53 And the song she was singing ever since
54 In my ear sounds on: --
55 "Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence!
56 Mistress Mary is dead and gone!"
1858.
The place Whittier had in mind was his birthplace. There were bee-hives on the garden terrace near the well-sweep, occupied perhaps by the descendants of Thomas Whittier's bees. The approach to the house from over the northern shoulder of Job's Hill by a path that was in constant use in his boyhood and still in existence, is accurately described in the poem. The `gap in the old wall' is still to be seen, and `the stepping stones in the shallow brook' are still in use. His sister's garden was down by the brook-side in front of the house, and her daffodils are perpetuated and may now be found in their season each year in that place. The red-barred gate, the poplars, the cattle yard with `the white horns tossing above the wall,' were all part of Whittier's boy life on the old farm. Even the touch of `the sundown's blaze on her window pane' is realistic. The only place from which the blaze of the setting sun could be seen reflected in the windows of the old mansion is from the path so perfectly described .... All the story about Mary and her lover is wholly imaginative.
There are many corollary practices associated with the telling of the bees, one of the most important being the "heaving up" of the hives. This practice requires that on the day of the funeral as the funeral party is preparing to leave the house the hive and coffin are both "heaved" or lifted at the same moment.
Coming a little nearer, Plato's doctrine of the transmigration of souls holds that the souls of sober quiet people, untinctured by philosophy come to life as bees. Later than Plato comes Mahomet, who admitted bees, as souls, to paradise; and Porphyry said of fountains; "They are adapted to the nymphs, or those souls which the Ancients call bees." There is a strange story told in My School and Schoolmasters which goes as follows:
A friend and I lay on a mossy bank on a hot day. Overcome by the heat my friend fell asleep. As I watching drowsily, I saw a bee issue from the mouth of my sleeping friend, jump down to the ground and crossed along withered grass stubs over a brook cascading over stones, and enter through an interstice into an old ruined building. Alarmed by what I saw, I hastily shook my comrade, who awakened a second or two after the bee, hurrying back had re-entered her mouth. My friend, the sleeper, protested at my waking her saying that she had dreamt that she had walked through a fine country and had come to the banks of a noble river, and just where the clear water went thundering down a precipice, there was a bridge all silver which she crossed and entered, a noble palace on the other side. she was about to help myself to gold and jewels when I woke her and robbed her of this fate."There are similar histories from other places; in one the sleeping person was moved by a companion. A few moments later, a bee returned to the spot and scurried hither and thither in terror looking for the sleeping form, but failed to know it. When the sleeper was nudged in his new resting place, he was found to be dead.
This belief that the bee is a soul of one departed is undoubtedly the origin of the belief of "Telling the bees," for souls of the departed, are they not in communion with God?