Weekend Words: Bees
It's pollen season, big time, and Weekend Words turns its attention back to bees.
It’s pollen season, big time, and Weekend Words turns its attention back to bees:
“The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Like trains of cars on tracks of plush
I hear the level bee:
A jar across the flowers goes,
Their velvet masonry
Withstands until the sweet assault
Their chivalry consumes,
While he, victorious, tilts away
To vanquish other blooms.
His feet are shod with gauze,
His helmet is of gold;
His breast, a single onyx
With chrysoprase, inlaid.
His labor is a chant,
His idleness a tune;
Oh, for a bee’s experience
Of clovers and of noon!
—Emily Dickinson, “The Bee”
“He said the pleasantest manner of spending a hot July day was lying from morning till evening on a bank of heath in the middle of the moors, with the bees humming dreamily about among the bloom, and the larks singing high up overhead, and the blue sky and bright sun shining steadily and cloudlessly.”
—Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
“You’ve never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.”
—Jean Cocteau
“A girl must be like a blossom
With honey for just one man.
A man must be like honey bee
And gather all he can.
To fly from blossom to blossom
A honey bee must be free,
But blossom must not ever fly
From bee to bee to bee.”
—Rogers and Hammerstein, “The Song of the King,” The King and I
“That which is not good for the beehive cannot be good for the bees.”
—Marcus Aurelius
