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Land of Blood and Honey: In Thirst of Poetry
When Czeslaw Milosz speaks of the world deprived of poetry, it is a broken place, a landscape gutted of its vital organs. In his eyes, poetry is the sanctuary into which mankind gathers for strength and sustenance, like an oasis in the desert—the panacea for the thirsting wanderer. From poetry emerge the flooding waters of life, with all their waves of richness and passion, their intensity of hues, their sublime powers both to build and to destroy. The poetry of Pablo Neruda is itself like water—water that sings in its flow, seeping through the sweet loam of the earth, into the bodies of mankind. Neruda’s work is synchronous with all movements of nature, small and seismic, and in this he asserts that to move, to gather, to transform, composes what it means to be. Milosz describes poetry as the reclamation of existence, the declaration that to be means to live fully as an engaged individual, to appreciate all the things of this earth. In his poetry Neruda echoes this sentiment, because to him, each moment in nature is significant, and each of his movements is deliberate. Through Neruda’s poetry mankind comes to understand this notion of being, for his words inspire action, a plunge into the immeasurable depths—from within, a thirst is opened, a movement for something more, like the reach of the flowers for rain.
In “Ode to the Bee,” Neruda reveals in action the theory that poetry is rapturous with being, for through the bees, the speaker exhibits a sense of wonder at nature. The ode begins with the declaration, “Multitude of the bee!” (1). In this opening line, leading almost as an epigraph, the speaker is awed by the glory of natural abundance, the sheer number of bees, as he goes on to observe the bee entering “from the crimson, from the blue, / from the yellow,” describing the petals of flowers as nothing more than pure color (3-4). This is a deliberate movement into the raw, the unrefined, the elemental, where even poetry cannot define nature beyond that most primal part of existence, its hues. This is suggested further when the speaker describes the corolla, the inner sanctum of the flower, as “the softest / softness in the world”—as though it is some ineffable perfection of nature, as though even the texture of its petals cannot be captured in language, only through physical touch (5-6). What is most vivid in this stanza, however, is that as the bee emerges from the womblike folds of the corolla, “it exits / with a gold suit / and a number of yellow / boots” (11-14). In its pursuit of nectar, its exploration of the unknown in the flower, the bee is in a sense reborn. Through poetry, man explores his own vast unknown within, like the bee’s descent into the silken depths. The act of rebirth is a movement in and of itself, a transformation, and as the motif of movement recurs throughout the poem, it evolves into a higher representation of being.
As the bee drifts from flower to flower, the speaker describes its wings as “newly made of water” (24). This is the first in a multitude of associative leaps that define the ode, evoking the pliancy of its metaphors, one image slipping seamlessly into another, so that on a fundamental level Neruda’s language is in flux, like a river undammed. It is emphasized in this metaphor that wings of flight leap into the flow of water, further suggesting that Neruda’s is the poetry of movement. When the bee enters the fold of another flower, the speaker’s description takes on an erotic dimension as it “opens / the silken doors, / penetrates through the bridal chambers / of the most fragrant love” (27-30). Suddenly the act of the bee is more immediate, its relationship with the flower more carnal, more primitive, suggesting that pollination is a rhythm of sexual release, continuous. This speaks to what it means to be human in that both man and bee have a desire to break through, to be filled: an act against deprivation. What drives the bee in its desire is honey, “mysterious, / rich and massive / honey, dense aroma, / liquid light that falls in thick drops” (41-44). This substance, so sensuously described here, is like the liquid of life for bees, the lifeblood that sustains them in their harvesting of nectar, and most significantly, what brings them together.
This movement toward unity further parallels the nature of bees with the nature of man, and the role poetry plays in that relationship. The commune of the bees, the “collective / palace” of the hive, is like their shrine—a house of worship, where they come together as one (47-48). Buried within the hive is the honey, “the product / of flower and flight, / the nuptial sun, seraphic and secret!” (51-53). The alliteration connotes the smoothness of their movement—the working of nectar into honey—and the language itself fuses sexuality with religion, intercourse with congregation: the joining of two, and then the joining of many. The invocation of religion is present later when nectar is described as “quick / drops of / ambrosia,” referring to the food of gods, which furthers suggests divinity in their nature, a reverent hush drawn close around the bees (65-67). Like the bees in their pursuit of honey, for mankind the writing of poetry is a driving instinct, awakening that desire to imagine, to discover the world, opening from within that thirst for more. That search for meaning through poetry unites humanity—bodies in motion and voices crying out, like the “sonorous / numbers” of bees (60-61). Neruda celebrates the union of readership through his poetry, rapt with the multitude of bees as the speaker exclaims, “Sacred / elevation / of oneness, / palpitating / academy!” (55-59). Through the bees, Neruda reveals the sheer splendor of communion, the sanctity of coming together, and how that movement throbs, how it is unmistakably an act of being.
Again, the poem shifts nimbly from one associative leap to another as Neruda lingers over the landscape of his native Chile, painting of the city Osorno, “the sun nails its spears / into the snow, / volcanoes glisten, / the land is / broad / as / the seas, / space is blue” (73-80). The scope of the speaker’s perspective is wide, gazing across the ocean, across the earth, across time itself; in this, and through the sinuous enjambment, movement itself is like a living thing, pulling the ode forward. Amid the seismic motions of land and water, the speaker pauses to contemplate that elsewhere “there’s something / that trembles,” and it is the tremulous force of bees as a colony (82-83). The juxtaposition of the bees alongside the earth, the small against the large, suggests that to Neruda each moment, each movement is emphatic. The speaker declares “it is / the burning / heart / of summer, / the heart of honey / multiplied” (83-88). Images here connote an intensely physical, almost erotic surge, a primal energy absorbed into the bees. In this heart, the honey is like blood, for the bees produce it and derive strength from it—flowing within, it empowers them to that eruption of “flight and gold” (93). For mankind poetry itself is like blood, that vital liquid upon which all life is built, and in the act of writing, it is loosed from man’s own flesh for the sake of something beautiful. It is the centrifuge from which all desire and imagination emerges; like the bees with their honey, poetry intoxicates man, pouring into him what he was deprived of at birth.
Over and over in the ode, the speaker is in awe at the abundance surrounding him, “the gifts of the earth, / family of gold, / multitude of the wind,” and the bees form part of this landscape (106-108). Entering once more into focus are the flowers, as the speaker almost commands of the bees, “shake the fire / from the flowers, / the thirst from the stamens, / the sharp / thread / of smell / that unites the days” (109-115). This suggests desire, a lingering eroticism, as though the flowers long for the touch of the bees, the fulfillment that comes from their brief but perfect union. In a sense man is like the flower—stagnant, aching to be ravished, for his own dark layers to be unfurled through poetry. Neruda’s poetry is for the hungry, the thirsty, those who long for fulfillment—it is like an act of defiance, a stance against the world deprived of creativity, a reach beyond what is simply rendered. The speaker declares, “let honey / overflow in / infinite tongues,” and if honey is the lifeblood of the bees, flowing aplenty, imbibed into them, giving voice to those infinite tongues, poetry is that force of life for mankind (125-128). “Let the ocean become / a / hive,” the speaker says, affirming Neruda’s proximity to his subjects, as vastness of the ocean blends to vastness of the hive, leaping from a broad perspective to a narrow one (129-131). As the poem draws to its close, Neruda demonstrates once more his mastery of the associative leap, in which the earth is “a tower and tunic / of flowers, / and the world / a waterfall, a comet’s / tail” (133-37). These leaps, so concentrated on the cosmic, come to represent rebirth, a complete transformation in which the things of this earth gather into one, and the world itself cascades, indescribable but for its movement.
Neruda concludes his ode in an exclamation, as the speaker aptly describes all that has been seen throughout: “a ceaseless / burgeoning / of honeycombs!” (138-140). That verb, to burgeon, speaks perfectly to the cycle of this poem as it begins, steep and thin as its lines, and then as it flourishes, transforming into a work of depth, of many layers. That need to burgeon lies within the purpose of poetry itself—it is an act of growing, emerging, blossoming from within the self, a movement into something splendid yet natural, like the burst of some exotic flower. Neruda’s poetry is ruled by that spontaneity, that dive into the depths, which, like the water at the Fountain of Youth, might forever quench the thirst of mankind, the salvation from deprivation. His poetry is protean, defined by its associative leaps, its entwined metaphors, and its undulating enjambment, suggesting movement on every level. For him poetry is flow, union, transformation—that is what it means to be. Early in the ode, the speaker describes the bee as “perfect / from the waist,” and this admiration at the bee’s anatomy, its perfection as a design of nature, is central to Neruda’s poetic identity (15-16). His rapture with nature, here in wonder at the bees as they gather into one, is the aorta from which the blood of poetry stems. Because of man’s natural desire for movement, the flow of poetry cannot be dammed—it will always go on, so long as mankind is on the side of being and against nothingness, as Milosz says. For in its sustenance of the human soul, its movement toward union, poetry establishes irrevocably what it means to be.
Works Cited
Neruda, Pablo. “Ode to the Bee.” Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997. 121-129. Print.
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