Analysis of Beehive B-Flat Rhapsody

About this poem

This poem, written creatively as a melodrama, was composed lyrically and experimentally to combine a one-stanza 5-5-5-5-5 metered free verse unrhymed quintain with a four-stanza 5-7-5-7-7 metered Japanese-style free verse unrhymed tanka poem, with the aim of amplifying the busy buzzing sound of a bee’s hive or a hornet’s nest, creating symphonically in the bees-waxed eardrums of an aged forlorn lovestruck wandering drone of a lackluster traveler, a romantic musical dulcimer composition, as he savors the fading memory of a long lost love, becoming in the process enchanted by what seems to his quixotic ears, the enticing appealing sound of a musical brass hornet instrument. In this state of mind he dreamily recalls a pleasant faded memory of his sweetheart ‘Dulcinea’ mate, by muttering in the poem’s third stanza a thought similar to the inmemorable poetic lines uttered by Lorenzo, courting Jessica, Act II, Scene I, in William Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice” which reads in part: “How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Here will we sit and let the sounds of music Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night Become the touches of sweet harmony….” Readers of this poem are invited to observe that the poem’s one-stanza 5-5-5-5-5 quintain is placed strategically between the two stanzas of tanka that begin and close the poem, as a means of cementing the overall tempo range of the poem as a whole, while at the same time delivering the poem’s multilevel semantic messages with a humorous harmonious lyrical beat. The hair-filled waxed ear chamber of the protagonist is suggestive of someone way past youth, no longer a spritely vigorous lad, but remaining adventurous, full of curiosity, and still energized by the offerings of nature abuzz with the vibrancy of life. more »