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Emily Dickinson
The Reigning Queen of Bee Inspired Poetry
By: Ross Conrad
From the industrious hum of the hive to “the golden angels of agriculture” moniker, bees lend themselves readily to poetic imagery. While there are a lot of notable poets that have relied on the humble honey bee as their muse, from what I can tell, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) appears to hold the record for publishing the greatest number of poems about, or relating to bees.
Often considered to be one of America’s greatest poets, Dickinson penned close to 1800 poems during her lifetime. When she died in 1886, she was considered an eccentric by locals and was a relatively unknown poet. This was at least partly due to Dickinson’s reclusive nature which caused her to naturally shun public notoriety and attention. She even wrote a bee inspired poem about the topic of fame:
“Fame is a bee.
It has a song –
It has a sting –
Ah, too, it has a wing!”
– Emily Dickinson*
Whether due to her desire for privacy or the fact Dickinson lived during a time when women were afforded few rights and little respect, or both, less than a dozen of her poems are believed to have been published during her lifetime. As was customary at the time, the poems were all published anonymously and possibly without her permission. Unfortunately, she left no instructions about what to do with the large catalogue of poetry she left behind following her death. This led to her manuscripts taking a winding and somewhat convoluted road to publication: a road filled with scuttlebutt and inter-family squabbling.
“His Labor is a Chant –
His Idleness – a Tune –
Oh, for a Bee’s experience
Of Clovers, and of Noon!”*
– Emily Dickinson
Following her death, Emily’s younger sister Lavinia decided to publish Emily’s poetry. Lavinia approached Emily Dickinson’s sister-in-law Susan Huntington Dickinson and a mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson for help in the publishing effort.
Susan Dickinson apparently dragged her feet and did not act fast enough for Lavinia’s liking, and Higginson was apparently too busy to help make much progress. To fulfill her vision in a timelier manner, Lavinia approached Susan’s friend, Mabel Loomis Todd, the young wife of an Amherst College astronomy professor. Unknown to Lavinia, Mabel was involved in a love affair with Emily Dickinson’s brother Austin Dickinson, who was married to Susan.
Mabel Loomis Todd enlisting Thomas Wentworth Higginson as co-editor, and the Poems of Emily Dickinson was completed in 1890, four years after Emily’s death. The two made changes to the poems that often consisted of unconventional capitalization and punctuation. (I have endeavored to present all of Emily Dickinson’s poetry appearing in this article in its original form) Todd and Higginson regularized punctuation, added occasional titles (Emily apparently rarely gave her poems titles), and sometimes even altered the wording to improve clarity and meter. Three more volumes of poetry were published in 1891, 1894, and 1896.
In 1898 a nasty lawsuit between the Dickinson and Todd families occurred over a piece of land. With her love spurned, Mabel Todd’s involvement with the Dickinson family ended. For more than thirty years Mabel kept the rest of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and letters that were in her possession locked up in a wooden chest.
“What shall I do when the Skies a’chirrup
Drop a Tune on me –
When the Bee hangs all Noon in the Buttercup
What will become of me?”*
– Emily Dickinson
After Mabel Loomis Todd stopped working on Dickinson’s poems, publishing activity of Dickenson’s poems ended. It wasn’t until Emily’s niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, who after her mother Susan and her aunt Lavinia died, inherited the remaining Dickinson manuscripts that remained in her family’s possession and decided to publish them. Martha edited and published six volumes of Dickinson’s poetry and two biographies. She wielded a softer editorial touch than her predecessors. She also did not create titles for the untitled poems and kept their original rhymes intact.
“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.”*
– Emily Dickinson
In response to Martha’s publishing efforts, Mabel Loomis Todd was motivated to resume publish her aunt’s poetry with the help of her daughter Millicent. This resulted in most of Emily Dickinson’s poems finally being put into print, however, no single edition featured them all. That changed when literary scholar Thomas H. Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson, in 1955. Johnson relied on Dickinson’s original manuscripts rather than using any of the previously published versions, and tried to more accurately presented the poems as Dickinson had written them. Dickinson’s unconventional punctuation and use of slant rhyme (imperfect rhymes where the sounds of words are similar but not identical such as in “worm” and “swarm”) has influenced countless poets and song writers over the years. Johnson also arranged the poems in chronological order, studying changes in Emily’s handwriting to do so, since the poet rarely dated her work.
A New York Times 1998 report describes evidence uncovered by researchers examining the original manuscripts using infrared technology that at least eleven of Dickinson’s poems had been censored to remove the name “Susan”. Apparently, Emily had dedicated these poems to her sister-in-law, Susan, and this was something that Mabel Loomis Todd was not willing to endure. (Weiss, 1998).
My personal review of Johnson’s book The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, indicates that the poet wrote at least 80 poems rich in both observation and metaphor that directly mention bees or Bumble bees in the singular or plural. In my research for this article, I also came across lines of bee poetry credited to Dickinson that was not in Johnson’s work, suggesting that the “Complete” poems of Emily Dickinson, is perhaps not quite as complete as one would hope.
This count does not include poems that the poet wrote that refer to bees indirectly without specifically mentioning the word “bee” or “bumble bee.” Here is one example:
“Where Ships of Purple – gently toss
On Seas of Daffodil –
Fantastic Sailors – mingle –
And then – the Wharf is still”
– Emily Dickinson*
A quick review of Dickinson’s work reveals that there are at least two poems that appear to meet the definition of being indirectly about bees. Since I did not take the time to read all of her 1,775 published poems carefully, and analyze their meaning, I cannot say there are not more to be discovered. This brings the grand total number of bee poems that Emily Dickinson published to at least 82.
“The Pedigree of Honey
Does not concern the bee –
A clover, any time, to him,
Is Aristocracy –”*
– Emily Dickinson
So what explains Emily Dickinson’s fascination with bees? I did not come across anything that suggested that Emily Dickinson or her family ever kept bee hives on their property. However, the Dickinson family is known to have maintained an extensive garden and small orchard on their property where Emily would have had ample opportunity to observe bees going about their business.
Emily Dickinson is unique in the world of famous published poets in that all her work was published posthumously by others. After scanning the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson it is likely that some of the published poems were incomplete and still in progress. For example, there are lines that are repeated in more than one of her published poems, suggesting that the poet may have had multiple, but different, drafts of a single poem that she had been working on at the time of her death.
Some poems are absolute genius
And some are rather tame
She never had the chance to curate her work
It was all published just the same
Ross Conrad keeps bees and writes terrible poetry in Middlebury, Vermont
Special thanks to Executive Director, Jane Wald and the rest of the Emily Dickinson Museum staff for their invaluable assistance in helping me research this article.
*THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942, by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965, by Mary L. Hampson. Used by permission. All rights reserved
References:
Johnson, T.H. (1955) The complete poems of Emily Dickinson, Kalyani Publishers, New Delhi, Digital Library of India Collection, West Bengal Public Library, published 1960: accessed August 1, 2025 Free Download, and Streaming: Internet Archive
Weiss, Philip (1998) Beethoven’s Hair Tells All, The New York Times. archive accessed August 1, 2025 https://archive.ph/20200326042600/https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/29/magazine/beethoven-s-hair-tells-all.html
