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The Miracle of the Bees and the Foxgloves

By Anne Stevenson b. 1933 Anne Stevenson

Because hairs on their speckled daybeds baffle the little bees,

foxgloves come out to advertise for rich bumbling hummers,

who crawl into their tunnels-of-delight with drunken ease

(see Darwin’s chapters on his foxglove summers)

plunging over heckles caked with sex-appealing stuff

to sip from every hooker its intoxicating liquor

and stop it propagating in a corner with itself.

And this is how the foxflower keeps its sex life in order.

Two anthers—adolescent, in a hurry to dehisce—

let fly too soon, so pollen lies in drifts around the floor.

Along swims bumbler bee and makes an undercoat of this,

reverses, exits, lets it fall by accident next door.

So ripeness climbs the bells of Digitalis, flower by flower,

undistracted by a Mind, or a Design, or by desire.

NOTES: In eight pages of The Effects of Cross- and Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom (London, 1876: 81–88), Charles Darwin describes an experiment he began in June 1869 among the fox- gloves of North Wales, this just one of his thousands of experiments demonstrating the superiority of cross-fertilization and throwing light on the origin of sexuality.

Source: Poetry (July/August 2010).

Biography

Born in Cambridge, England, Anne Stevenson moved between the United States and the United Kingdom numerous times during the first half of her life. While she considers herself an American, Stevenson qualifies her status: “I belong to an America which no longer really exists.” Since 1962 she has lived mainly in the U.K., including Cambridge, Scotland, Oxford, and, most recently, North Wales and Durham.

Intersections and borders . . .

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