Apis mellifera (Rilke, Leśmian, Valéry, Miłosz)

This essay concerns Paul Valéry’s sonnet The Bee, a fragment of Rainer Maria Rilke’s letter to Witold Hulewicz, Boleslaw Lesmian’s poem The Bees, and a fragment of Czeslaw Milosz’s poem Orpheus and Eurydice. Investigating the semantics and symbolism of the bee, a trope common to each text, allows for a reading of a broader ontological project: the relationship between being and non-being. This essay centres on denying the division between being and non-being, proposing the concept of a greater whole instead.