Bees

The reference to bees early in the poem is delivered as a short throwaway line: “raising potatoes / and keeping bees?” (Lines 11-12). However, bees were immensely important to Sylvia Plath; prior to her death, she took up beekeeping in Devon at her new home and achieved a period of peace and calm that had eluded her for most of her life. Her father, Otto Plath, was also a bee expert who published a respected text on the practice of caring for them. Sylvia wrote a short collection of poems about her relationship with her bees and saw them as a celebration of life.

Taxi Cabs

Cabs were a mainstay of America in the mid-twentieth century, when this poem is set. Within the poem, they are given a slightly different context: “In Boston / the dying / ride in cabs” (Lines 27-29); this is later alluded to when the...