Thinking sweetness, sweetness. Womanhood, Poetry and Tenderness

Welcome gentle souls,

Recently I found myself returning to the phrase ‘sweetness, sweetness’, words that carry both tenderness and ache. It conjured up the opening lines of Big Mouth Strikes Again by The Smiths, the frustration for Morrissey that his sharp humour was often misunderstood by the music press with his words always being taken out of context. Or the art of putting your foot in it by saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, how often have we found ourselves there?

However it is also a fragment from Sylvia Plaths poem ‘Stings’ in which she uses the metaphor of an aging beehive and Queen bee to explore something much deeper, a reflection on womanhood, exhaustion, expectation and identity. The sweetness she hoped for, her expectation of the beehive ( her marriage) slowly reveals itself to be decaying and wormy (her marriage to Ted Hughes was clearly on the rocks).

The queen bee…’if she is there, she is old, her wings torn shawls, her long body rubbed of its plush, she is unqueenly and shameful…I stand in a column of winged, unmiraculous women, honey drudgers, I am no drudge.’

Plath should be the Queen Bee not the worker bee, she feel she’s been robbed of her dignity and her ability to write and create.

However from earlier drafts of Plath’s poem, the bitterness of the failed marriage loses its grip, she realises that carrying resentment only hardens the heart that carries it.

There is transformation in the poem too, there is a declaration of independance:

‘ I am in control,

Here is my honey machine,

It will work without thinking..’

How often do we remain trapped in old hurts, replaying wounds long after the moment has passed.

To live soulfully is not to deny pain, but to meet it with awareness. To release what doesn’t nourish us any longer, to soften where we can. Not always the easiest to do, but like a bee emerging from the hive, we can be tired but we are also wiser, and we can still carry a trace of sweetness…sweetness.

Until next time,

Blessings,

Stephanie

 Stephanie