Apology for Her

Apology for Her
Be rendered by the Bee —
Herself, without a Parliament
Apology for Me.


     -F959, J852, 1865

The poem enacts the very problem it raises: an apology is offered, but we can’t quite determine who has given it, or whether it is even necessary. 

My take on the poem was inspired by a comment from Moon on the poem preceding this one, F958, which featured a quote by Dickinson: 'To "thank" you - shames my thought!'

If thanking someone can shame one's thought, then so, perhaps, can apologizing.

Apology for Her
Be rendered by the Bee —

The Bee will render her own apology. This implies to me that the Bee needs no apology. The Bee pollinates and the Bee stings. That’s just what the Bee does. 

And likewise the Bee's apology (or lack of one) will suffice for an apology from the poet.

 Herself, without a Parliament

Apology for me.

The poem offers an apology while questioning the grounds on which one might be required. Perhaps it was originally sent with a flower, an offering of beauty, for which the Bee, especially, need not apologize. 

     -/)dam Wade I)eGraff

P.S. I made a fortuitous discovery while doing a Google search for "parliament bee." 

There is a famous allegorical poem called The Parliament of the Bees. This must be what Dickinson is alluding to in her poem. 

From Britannica.com: "John Day was an Elizabethan dramatist whose verse allegory The Parliament of Bees was published posthumously in 1641 and probably written near the end of his life. This exquisite masque, which is actually a series of pastoral eclogues, is about “the doings, the births, the wars, the wooings” of bees. The bees hold a parliament under Prorex, the “Master Bee,” and grievances are presented against the bumblebee, the wasp, the drone, and other insects whom the author uses to represent various human types. The satirical allegory ends with a royal progress of the fairy king Oberon, who dispenses justice among the bees."

An excerpt from Day's poem that is perhaps relevant to Dickinson's:  

"Go go idle drone,

Thou enviest bees with stings

Because thine is gone.

This Bee sucks honey from the bloomes of sin:

Bee't nere so ranke or foule, he crams it in.

Most of the timber that his state repairs

He hew's out o'the bones of foundred players :

They feed on Poets braines, he eats their breath.

Die. Most strange conception !—life begot in Death."

          

P.P.S. I would love to hear your reading of this poem.