guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 June 2012 17.30 BST

Carol Rumens's poem of the week
Poem of the week: Telling the Bees by John Greenleaf Whittier

A poem with a narrative structure redolent of the short story is a tale of two Roberts, looking back to Burns and forward to Frost

A bumble bee
Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence … John Greenleaf Whittier's Telling the Bees is a touching tale, told in a flexible, mixed metre.

It was apparently an encounter with the work of Robert Burns that showed the struggling young Quaker poet, John Greenleaf Whittier, how material close to hand could be shaped into narrative verse, using a vernacular idiom. Too delicate in health to carry on the family farm at Haverhill, Whittier (who, happily, survived till he was 85) would draw on memories of the New England homestead in his most successful later poetry. His religious and anti-slavery poems (he was a passionate abolitionist) are generally more conventional in technique, though one of his hymns – Oh Lord and Father of Mankind, sung to the tune of Repton – remains a favourite of Anglican congregations. He was associated with the popular "fireside poets"; his best-known long poem, Snow-Bound, sold around 20,000 copies.

This week's choice, Telling the Bees, first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1858. A note by Whittier explained that, while the story is invented, the custom referred to, imported from the old country, was common in rural New England. The poem's form suggests, perhaps, the traditional ballad, but its narrative structure is one associated with a more modern genre, the short story. It begins in the present, with the speaker's return to a familiar place in the company of an unseen stranger. He recounts how, exactly a year earlier, he called at Fernside farm after a month's absence, excited by the prospect of seeing Mary again, the girl he loved.

By the third stanza, Mary's death has already been foreshadowed, the speaker referring to "her poor flowers, weed-o'errun, / Pansy and daffodil, rose and pink". Daffodils would be finished by June, of course, so we should imagine dead heads rather than dancing trumpets. The later-blooming flowers are, the speaker fondly imagines, the same as before, like everything in the scene. The flower names, rose and pink especially, seem to evoke the girl, her looks and character, while the weeds tell us she's no longer the careful gardener.

We read on in the shadow of the inevitable, knowing what happens, but interested in how it will be recounted. There are no plot twists. Whittier holds our attention simply by describing the scene: the dog, the old man and the chore-girl among the hives. In fact, it's she who tells us, in the little song she uses for telling the bees: "Mistress Mary is dead and gone!"

It's a slight, sentimental, touching tale, told in a flexible, mixed metre and fluent rhyme. The foreshortened second line in each stanza adds lightness to the casually tripping rhythm – a rhythm perhaps meant, like the blushing flowers, to evoke Mary herself. A closer look reveals how carefully Whittier organises the syntax over his rhythmic framework: the caesuras are nicely judged.

The idiom varies. Everyday colloquialisms like "right over the hill" and "just the same" rub along with dated poetic inversions ("gate red-barred", "poplars tall"). The effect is faintly jarring, yet the inversions form such good plain images we might forgive them, and even feel they help us slow down and look. The most elaborate metaphor is in stanza five, where the setting sun becomes a dishevelled angel who "Tangles his wings of fire in the trees". All the scenes, even this one, have a painterly quality, and an alertness to colour and contrast that makes it hard to believe Whittier was, as reported, colour blind.

There are many appealing vignettes. Whittier admired Charles Dickens, and I'm reminded of Gyp, Dora's dog in David Copperfield, in that little masterstroke of premonition: "the dog whined low". This isn't to deny the sharp observations from life, and the way tiny details accumulate and assert significance as the story unfolds: "the chore-girl small", the "shred of black" ("shred" signalling economy and hardly enough fabric to spare for each hive), the way the bees are "stealing out and in". The very term "chore-girl" sticks in the memory. Unfamiliar to English readers, it's more vividly suggestive of a solid, humble, useful working-life than "maid" or "servant-girl".

Whittier remains a minor writer, but his homeliest and most original work helped bring about the long-lived triumph of American vernacular verse. Responsive to Burns, he sowed the seeds that would bloom so magnificently in the poetry of a later Robert: Frost.
Telling the Bees

There is the place; right over the hill
Runs the path I took;
You can see the gap in the old wall still,
And the stepping-stones in the shallow brook.

There is the house, with the gate red-barred,
And the poplars tall;
And the barn's brown length, and the cattle-yard,
And the white horns tossing above the wall.

There are the beehives ranged in the sun;
And down by the brink
Of the brook are her poor flowers, weed-o'errun,
Pansy and daffodil, rose and pink.

A year has gone, as the tortoise goes,
Heavy and slow;
And the same rose blows, and the same sun glows,
And the same brook sings of a year ago.

There 's the same sweet clover-smell in the breeze;
And the June sun warm
Tangles his wings of fire in the trees,
Setting, as then, over Fernside farm.

I mind me how with a lover's care
From my Sunday coat
I brushed off the burrs, and smoothed my hair,
And cooled at the brookside my brow and throat.

Since we parted, a month had passed,—
To love, a year;
Down through the beeches I looked at last
On the little red gate and the well-sweep near.

I can see it all now,—the slantwise rain
Of light through the leaves,
The sundown's blaze on her window-pane,
The bloom of her roses under the eaves.

Just the same as a month before,—
The house and the trees,
The barn's brown gable, the vine by the door,—
Nothing changed but the hives of bees.

Before them, under the garden wall,
Forward and back,
Went drearily singing the chore-girl small,
Draping each hive with a shred of black.

Trembling, I listened: the summer sun
Had the chill of snow;
For I knew she was telling the bees of one
Gone on the journey we all must go!

Then I said to myself, "My Mary weeps
For the dead to-day:
Haply her blind old grandsire sleeps
The fret and the pain of his age away."

But her dog whined low; on the doorway sill
With his cane to his chin,
The old man sat; and the chore-girl still
Sung to the bees stealing out and in.

And the song she was singing ever since
In my ear sounds on:—
"Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence!
Mistress Mary is dead and gone!"

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