arrival of the bee box
... “Arrival of the Bee Box,” among other poems, is a pivotal poem in her career that references two specific attempts and foreshadows her third final breakdown. ... The introduction of the bee box immediately presents to the reader Plath’s conflicting feelings toward the contents inside. ... ” Her inability to manifest the contents of the box into a visual image strengthens the notion of the box as a representation of her mind. ... At first, she recalls her relationship to the box as that of a slave trader: With the swarmy feeling of African hands Minute and shrunk for export, Black on black, angrily clambering. (lines 13-15) She depicts herself with power over the exported contents, or “African hands,” dwarfed and contained within a static box. From this passage, we can infer that the bees, her suicidal thoughts and depression, resent their captivity as they are “angrily clambering,” restricted within the box, and thus her being.