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Curious Customs and Beliefs in Modern: Robin

In Tennyson's "Foresters" when Robin offers to caress her, Marian says, - "Quiet, good Robin, quiet!

You lovers are such clumsy summer-flies, For ever buzzing at your lady's face."

To which Robin gallantly replies, - "Bees, rather, flying to the flowers for honey."

Upon which, to her lover's displeasure, Marian sings, - "The bee buzz'd up in the heat. 'I am fain for your honey, my sweet.' The flower said, 'Take it, my dear, For now is the spring of the year.

So come, come!' 'Hum!' And the bee buzz'd down from the heat.

And the bee buzz'd up in the cold When the flower was wither'd and old. 'Have you still any honey, my dear?' She said, 'It's the fall of the year, But come, come!' 'Hum!' And the bee buzz'd off in the cold."

Jean Ingelow has given us a dainty picture of two lovers : - "An empty sky, a world of heather, Purple of foxgloves, yellow of broom; We two among them, wading together, Shaking out honey, treading perfume."

We remember Anacreon's pretty conceit about Love and the bee-sting, and we find Lessing in one of his poems Curious Customs and Beliefs modifying it somewhat:

As Love lay sleeping in the Golden Age upon a bright flower-field a bee lying in a rose leaf stung him. This modern Amor did not run crying to Venus but became wiser for what had happened. He lurked in roses and violets and when a maiden came to pick he flew out as a bee - and stung her! "Luxury is an enticing pleasure, a bastard mirth, which hath honey in her mouth, gall in her heart and a sting in her tail," says Quarles, using an ancient form of thought with which we are already familiar and which seems as much a favorite with the modern as with the ancient writers.

Dr. Watts thus uses an equally well-known figure in one of his lyrics, 一 "The rills of pleasure never run sincere; (Earth has no unpolluted spring,) From the curs'd soil some dang'rous taint they bear; So roses grow on thorns, and honey wears a sting."

It was Dr. Watts too who composed the most popular of all bee-songs, one with which every child is familiar. "How doth the little busy bee Improve each shining hour, And gather honey all the day From every opening flower!"

Naturally many of our modern poets agree with Horace and Martial in extolling solitude, accompanied by bees, as where Samuel Rogers says, "Mine be a cot beside the hill; A beehive's hum shall soothe my ear; A willowy brook that turns a mill, With many a fall, shall linger near."

Keats in his sonnet "O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell," sings : - "Let me vigils keep 'Mongst boughs pavilioned, where the deer's swift leap Startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell."

The bee is as much at home in modern literature as in ancient, and it would be difficult to find a poet who has not given it place in his song.

In "Paradise Lost" Milton finds room for it: - "Awake! the morning shines, and the fresh field Calls us; we lose the prime, to mark how spring Our tended plants, how blows the citron grove, What drops the myrrh, and what the balmy reed, How nature paints her colors, how the bee Sits on the bloom, extracting liquid sweet."

Modern poets, as we have already seen, do not scorn the conceits of the ancients, and Holmes in his song on Bryant's seventieth birthday gives a new dress to Martial's epigram of the bee entombed in amber. "In his own verse the poet still we find, In his own page his memory lives enshrined, As in their amber sweets the smother'd bees, - As the fair cedar, fallen before the breeze, Lies self-embalmed amidst the mouldering trees."

Tennyson in "Eleänore" thus beautifully uses the poetical conception so common to the ancient writers, of favored ones being fed in infancy by the bees : - "Or the yellow-banded bees, Thro' half-open lattices Coming in the scented breeze, Fed thee, a child, lying alone, With whitest honey in fairy gardens cull'd - A glorious child, dreaming alone, In silk-soft folds, upon yielding down, With the hum of swarming bees Into dreamful slumber lull'd."

Curious Customs and Beliefs But there is a pleasure in the bee for its own sake that is modern and that bursts forth as joyously as did the song of the bee, among the old Hindus.

An English poet sings : - "The wild bee reels from bough to bough With his furry coat and his gauzy wing, Now in a lily cup, and now Setting a jacinth bell a-swing, In his wandering."

And thus Emily Dickinson:- "His labor is a chant, His idleness a tune.

Ah, for a bee's experience Of clovers and of noon!"

Nora Perry sings : - "So sweet, so sweet the roses in their blowing, So sweet the daffodils, so fair to see; So blithe and gay the humming-bird a-going From flower to flower, a-hunting with the bee.".

In his "Ode to Delia" Burns sings :- "The flower-enamoured busy bee The rosy banquet loves to sip."

While in "Tam O'Shanter" Maggie the mare runs for her life, - "As bees bizz out wi' angry fyke, When plundering birds assail their hyke."

But it is in Burns' poem "Thou Fair Eliza" that one of the prettiest of modern bee-adorned stanzas is found. "Not the bee upon the blossom, In the pride o' sinny noon; Not the little sporting fairy, All beneath the summer moon; Not the minstrel, in the moment Fancy lightens in his e'e, Kens the pleasure, feels the rapture, That thy presence gives to me."

Very naturally the superstitious belief in bees as augurs extended far and wide, and it has persisted even to modern times. When at a Polish election of kings a swarm of bees settled upon the banner of Woiwoden Wisniowicky this turned the election in his favor.