Swarming Bees and Floating Signifiers in Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies

Abstract

ABSTRACT Margaret Cavendish’s seventeenth-century poem, “The Head of Man Compared to a Hive of Bees,” calls attention to the position of honeybees as floating signifiers in literature. In her short poem, she creates simile after simile, comparing bees to physiological, political, social, and literary concerns. Bees appear to be mere similes, divorced from their “real,” natural state, but Cavendish’s poem in fact reveals the fraught nature of bee similes. The lived reality of honeybees is a secondary concern to poets, Cavendish’s poem implies, for bees are more important as recognizable and polysemous symbols than as creatures with their own experiences and needs.