Sunday, January 1, 2012

The Life of the Bee - Maurice Maeterlink


Intrigue has prompted me to find out more about the new arrivals, so this book, seemingly waiting in my bookcase for this moment, is now providing a rather florid insight into the hidden workings of the hive. Written in 1901, The Life of the Bee by the Symbolist poet and essayist Maurice Maeterlink does not purport to be 'a treatise on apiculture, or on practical bee-keeping'. Far from it, in writing of the 'spirit of the hive' the language is that of rapture and heroics. What startling synchronicity, since I have just finished reading A.S. Byatt's Possession, a story situated in just the same era -that is the late 19th century and the Romantic Poets. 

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