They make me regret I am not a Bee -
-Fr808, late spring 1864
This poem was sent as the opening lines of a thank you card for a gift of wisteria from Emily’s aunt Lucretia Bullard. The entire letter runs thusly,
The lovely flowers embarrass me,
They make me regret I am not a Bee -
Was it my blame or Nature's?
Thank you, dear Aunt, for the thoughtfulness, I shall slowly forget -
The beautiful Plant would entice me, did I obey myself, but the Doctor is rigid.
Will you believe me grateful, who have no Argument?
Truly,
Emily.
Was it my blame or Nature's?
Thank you, dear Aunt, for the thoughtfulness, I shall slowly forget -
The beautiful Plant would entice me, did I obey myself, but the Doctor is rigid.
Will you believe me grateful, who have no Argument?
Truly,
Emily.
The thing about Emily’s letters is that they were full of poetry and it’s often hard to tell where the prose stops and the verse begins. This letter is a good example. Can the “poem” really be separated from the letter? I’m not so sure. Franklin decided to do it here, probably because he was charmed by this couplet. But there are dozens of other metrical “couplets” in letters that he did NOT include, and you can see many brilliant examples of these in a terrific book I discovered in my school library, “New Poems of Emily Dickinson.”
One short “poem” (extracted from a letter) I remember reading in that book is, “Emerson’s intimacy with his ‘Bee’ only immortalized him.” Dickinson is referring to Emerson’s great poem “The Humble-Bee,” but the sentiment in that one liner is similar to this couplet. Emerson becomes immortalized because he captures in that poem “intimacy” with the bee. Dickinson wishes to me be more intimate, but because she is human, and, especially because of the circumstances under which this poem was written, she cannot. This is a condition she finds embarrassing.
Dickinson wrote this letter when she was in Cambridge undergoing treatment for her eyes, which is why she says about the gift of the wisteria: “The beautiful Plant would entice me, did I obey myself, but the Doctor is rigid.” (See end note.) She is embarrassed to be so removed from nature, and wishes she could be enticed by the wisteria to go out. She would “slowly forget” what flowers were like, cooped up inside, if it were not for her Aunt’s thoughtfulness.
One short “poem” (extracted from a letter) I remember reading in that book is, “Emerson’s intimacy with his ‘Bee’ only immortalized him.” Dickinson is referring to Emerson’s great poem “The Humble-Bee,” but the sentiment in that one liner is similar to this couplet. Emerson becomes immortalized because he captures in that poem “intimacy” with the bee. Dickinson wishes to me be more intimate, but because she is human, and, especially because of the circumstances under which this poem was written, she cannot. This is a condition she finds embarrassing.
Dickinson wrote this letter when she was in Cambridge undergoing treatment for her eyes, which is why she says about the gift of the wisteria: “The beautiful Plant would entice me, did I obey myself, but the Doctor is rigid.” (See end note.) She is embarrassed to be so removed from nature, and wishes she could be enticed by the wisteria to go out. She would “slowly forget” what flowers were like, cooped up inside, if it were not for her Aunt’s thoughtfulness.
When I was searching online for information on this couplet, I came across a post on The Emily Dickinson Museum's FaceBook page which asked for interpretations of it. There were some pretty interesting ones, but one recurring idea that I found can be seen in this comment by Jennifer Berne, “My interpretation: Emily is embarrassed when thinking about flowers because she relates to and desires to take on the creatively active "male role" of the bee who pollinates the flower, rather than relating to the "female role" of the flower in being passively pollinated. I think it is a poem about gender-identity discomfort.”
Seeing as this was a thank you note to Dickinson’s aunt, I would doubt that Dickinson was thinking of "gender-identity discomfort” here. This is a good example of why extracting a poem from a letter might be problematic?
The main thing I take from the couplet, and the letter, though, is that Dickinson can’t fully attend to either the flowers, nor to her aunt, as she wishes she could.
I like that last line of the letter, “Would you believe me grateful, who have no argument?” In the context of the letter I think she might be saying here, “I’m grateful, if you can believe it, for the doctor’s rigidity, and I have no good argument against his orders.” She also might mean, "Would you still think I'm grateful for your invite, even though I've got no good argument against my doctor for coming to see you?" I'm not totally sure. But the reason I like the line is that, taken by itself, it could mean other things, including the idea that we would live in gratitude if we only didn't argue so much against doing so.
-/)dam Wade l)eGraff
Note:
From Thomas Johnson: "This note ED wrote probably in 1864, when she was in Cambridge undergoing treatment for her eyes. It acknowledges thoughtful attentions from her Aunt Lucretia. The above was written after receiving flowers, said to be wistaria; it was therefore presumably written in May. Evidently an invitation to call was declined. Mrs. Asa Bullard was Edward Dickinson's eldest sister, and the Bullards resided in Cambridge, at 24 Center Street."
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