Foxgloves and Bees on the Booze

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Before the rain settled in for the weekend, we strolled over to the Central Park Conservatory Garden. The spring bulbs had already been dug up and were being given away last time we visited, and the new plantings weren’t in yet. Still, there was plenty to enjoy. The day was windy, and the foxgloves shivered too much for a good photograph—so I turned instead to language and poetry.

Foxglove

Where does the name come from? Foxhound, foxtrot, and foxhole make sense, but gloves for foxes? They do grow wild in the rough, shaded places foxes favor for dens, but foxes don’t wear gloves. The tubular bells climbing the stalk look like thimbles, and that resemblance inspired the German botanist Leonhart Fuchs to name the plant Digitalis, from the Latin digitus (“finger”), echoing the common German name Fingerhut—”finger-hat,” or thimble. Turns out that the etymology is hotly contested and steeped in folklore, myth, and mythology.

The Poets

Wordsworth, in one of his more preachy moods, uses the foxglove as an emblem of contented constraint:

Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room

Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth the prison, into which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is …

It’s a bit too neatly self-justifying. He goes on to praise the sonnet’s “scanty plot of ground” and assumes nuns, hermits, students, maids, and weavers are equally blithe about their confinement. One suspects many of them might have told him otherwise.  I’m a Wordsworth fan but it’s no accident that he features prominently in The Stuffed Owl, D.B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee’s celebrated anthology of bad verse—or verse by good poets at their worst. He even supplied its title.

Emily Dickinson is the antidote and she arrives like a snort of smelling salts.  Where Wordsworth’s bee murmurs serenely inside the foxglove bell, Dickinson’s bee is being thrown out of it:

I taste a liquor never brewed (207)

I taste a liquor never brewed –
From Tankards scooped in Pearl –
Not all the Frankfort Berries
Yield such an Alcohol! Inebriate of Air – am I –
And Debauchee of Dew –
Reeling – thro’ endless summer days –
From Inns of Molten Blue –
When “Landlords” turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove’s door –
When Butterflies – renounce their “drams” –
I shall but drink the more!

The poem is sly, irreverent, and wicked. Dickinson doesn’t just push back at Wordsworth’s pious contentment—she tips it upside down. The foxglove bell isn’t a place of serene murmuring; it’s a dive bar at closing time.

The Close-Up and the Sex Life of the Foxglove

Looking into a foxglove bell is one of the small wonders of the world. Searching for a photograph, I came across Ray Cannon’s wonderful post Bumblebees and Foxgloves, which explains exactly what is going on botanically: a speckled landing pad with guiding hairs, the whole shape perfectly engineered for bumblebees over millions of years of mutual adaptation. 

The post ends with a poem by Anne Stevenson that earns its place alongside Dickinson—not just capturing the plant’s botany but reveling in it:

The Miracle of the Bees and the Foxgloves

Because hairs on their speckled daybeds baffle the little bees,
Foxgloves hang their shingles out for rich bumbling hummers,
Who crawl into their tunnels-of-delight with drunken ease
…
Plunging over heckles caked with sex-appealing stuff,
To sip from every hooker an intoxicating liquor
That stops it propagating in a corner with itself.

Stevenson’s language is doing several things at once—”hooker” is botanically precise (it refers to the curved hairs inside the bell) while landing with exactly the comic weight she intends. The foxglove, it turns out, has engineered an entire economy of intoxication and cross-pollination, and Stevenson renders it with the same gleeful irreverence Dickinson brought to the bee. You can read the full poem here.

The featured image is Alfred James Munnings, A Landscape with Foxgloves in the Foreground;

17 thoughts on “Foxgloves and Bees on the Booze”

  2. Such a lovely post, I greatly appreciate your tone 😉I’ve not found a poem featuring foxgloves but many regarding bees (Carol Ann Duffy’s “The Bees”). Now you have me trawling through her book and others on my shelf.

    Foxgloves; I love them in my little garden as the bees love them too!

    Reply

    • I think they’re considered invasive in Washington, as they are not native, beautiful though they are. And of course people go into spasms about how poisonous they are and don’t touch etc.

      Interestingly during WW2 because of the pharmaceutical shortages in the UK – U-Boats and etc. – children were recruited to collect them and people did by the bushel to bolster drug supplies.

      Reply

  4. In botany we studied “seductive flowers” as our teacher called them, and you’re right the Foxglove is all about bees pollination and carnal knowledge!
    Wonderful piece; I like your snub of W and foregrounding Dickinson and Stevenson, both marvelous poets.

    Reply

    • Classic anthropomorphism, although it makes the botany a bit spicier. It’s always fun when you learn something from a poem. I just discovered that Darwin studied how far down the body we blush from another poem. Thanks for the comment. (I still like the stuffed owl W., but Dickinson and Stevenson bring some refreshing perspectives. )

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  5. A strident foxglove rises from our hardstanding at the rear and oft sprinklescseed fot the bi years ahead. Not so many this year..but its been acweird one in many ways…

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  7. really a wonderful treatise on one of my favorite flowers, although peonies still rate at the very top! Thank you for enlightening me and finding the wonderful poems that mirror or contest each other!

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  8. What an unexpected poetic treat. It’s swelteringly hot today in the UK (a temperature record for the month may be broken) and I’m further heated by this floral lasciviousness. Pitting Darwin against Wordsworth is very apposite.

    Reply

    • Completely rainy, cool day here in NYC. Good to know Brit folk had some sun for the Bank Holiday weekend. But too much heat is never a good thing. No doubt the advice about shedding clouts will again be apropos before the month is out.

      I love it when I learn something from a poem, and here we have three of them at it.
      Wordsworth and Dickinson with the philosophy and Stevenson with the Darwinian science.

      All we need is a little Blake to stir things up.

      Thanks for the comment John!

      Reply

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