The Society of Early Americanists Newsletter,

Vol. 11, n. 2

The Muse's Mercury

Why does Freneau specify a honeybee in his final revision of "On a Bee Drinking from a Glass of Wine," which first appeared in the 6 September 1797 issue of Time-Piece and which might have initially been modeled after Thomas Gray's moralistic "Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Cold Fishes"? By the time the twice revised version appeared in Poems (I 809), the retitled "On a Honey Bee, Drinking from a Glass of Wine and Drowned Therein" was attributed to Hezekiah Salem, a persona used elsewhere by Freneau to represent a "defrocked Connecticut parson." Freneau had been raised as a Calvinist and had even prepared for the ministry, but by 1774, he had declared "the study of Divinity" to be "the Study of Nothing" and the ministerial profession to be "little better than that of a slothful Blockhead!"

Hezekiah (alluding to the 13th Old Testament king of Judah) recalls Puritan naming practices, and the surname is likely meant to allude to both the New England town and its well-remembered witchcraft scandal. Do both names suggest a Puritan narrator? Does the fact that he is drinking wine while he lectures an insect as if it were a fellow human imply his inebriated state of mind? Does his revised comment to the bee, "Will I admit you to a share" of the wine, irreverently allude to the Puritan practice of restricting participation in the Lord's Supper, which includes sacramental wine? Are the added references to the threat of "king-birds," the "Pharaoh," and "a sea of red" intended to recall the early flight of the Puritans from royal persecution and the parallel they drew between their Atlantic crossing and the Israelites at the Red (Reed) Sea? On the one hand, the narrator seems to be a dramatization of Mandevillean anti-clericalism, whereas on the other hand, his views seem to reflect pious thought corrupted by the Mandevillean defense of luxury in The Grumbling Hive (I 705), later included in Fable of the Bees (1714). The symbolic use of the bee to represent exemplary industriousness (inverted in Freneau's poem) was popular before the 18th Century. Shakespeare's King Henry the Fifth, for instance, mentions that "the work of honeybees, / Creatures that by a rule in nature teach / The act of order to a peopled kingdom." Puritans knew this tradition, as is evident in the "Mole-hill" poem included in the 1673 London edition of Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom. Did Freneau also know Christian interpretations of the bee as a natural type for spiritual meanings, as when Roger Williams says that the "Soul is Bee-like" (cf. The Cambridge Platform, Jonathan Edwards' "Images and Shadows of Divine Things," and James Hervey's Meditations)? But a honeybee is specified, finally in Freneau's revision. Freneau's contemporaries believed that

the honeybee immigrated (perhaps with the Puritans) to the new World: "The honey-bee is not a native of our continent .... The Indians concur with us in the tradition that it was brought from Europe; but when, and by whom, we know not" (Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia); "The bee, / A more adventurous colonist than man, I With whom he came across the eastern deep, / Fills the savannas with his murmurings" (William Cullen Bryant, "The Prairies). (European honeybees, said in Washington Irving's A Tour of the Prairies and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville to be the heralds of civilization, were indeed introduced in North America by settlers from Europe.)

In short, is the fate of the honeybee in the poem meant to satirize the fate of Puritanism-both represented as arriving on "vagrant wing" and simply "miss[ing their] way?" The Puritans were hardly immune from ridicule in certain 18th-century circles. Or is Freneau's "On a Honey Bee," a perennial favorite of anthologists, only an Enlightenment lesson on moderation or temperance that compares "men [and] bees" in the manner of, say, Bernard de Mandeville? If so, is such an alleged Gray-like moral oddly compromised by both an equivocating humorous tone and an unreliable narrator? And if the poem is intended as a lesson, why would the author bother to specifically designate a honeybee in his revision of the poem?