The poem “Mad Honey” by Tarik Dobbs is a work filled with metaphors and symbolism which I did not fully understand in my first read. I believed that the plot of the poem was stated within the first stanza of the poem when the speaker declares that the “violence” they experienced on the “battlefields” is what has allowed them to empathize with bees, insects notorious for their distinct black and yellow stripes, as well as their painful stings. This assumption made it very simple for me to oversimplify many lines of the poem that I have now seen after multiple reads that have a much deeper meaning.

Reassessing the first stanza, the italicized “get” instantly catches my attention. Had the word not been italicized, I likely would have still understood that the use of this word did not mean the speaker did not literally acquire bees until violence but that he did not understand bees until he understood violence, that making the most sense in context. Assuming that many other readers would have also come to this conclusion, why did Dobbs still choose to italicize the third word of the poem? It definitely draws the reader’s attention to the very first line of the poem, no other lines have any bolded, underlined, or italicized words in them, possibly denoting it as one of the most important lines. One question I found myself asking was if the speaker was relating the violence of a battlefield simply to a bee’s sting or to bees in general. Is this poem about comprehending one moment in a bee’s life or the lifestyle and innate nature of bees as a species? The second stanza leads me to believe the latter. The speaker, the former or current soldier, continues to create parallels between bees and soldiers like himself. Similar to the way bees visit from flower to flower, collecting pollen and creating honey as they travel, the presence of these soldiers “from colony to colony”, or rather from one opposing group of people to another, has been “bittered” by their “pollen”. But what is the speaker referring to as “our pollen”? What is both collected by the soldiers as they visit different colonies and bittered by war? My best guess is the pollen symbolizes appreciation for other nations. Going on vacation to a country is enjoyable because you are able to learn about the people, culture, and history of the place you are visiting. The ability to do this is ruined for soldiers because they are programmed to see this other place as their opponent, something that needs to be conquered and destroyed. Pollen usually fertilizes the flowers it touches, but the pollen the speaker is talking about is ruined by war and does the opposite, wreaking havoc on destinations these soldiers could have otherwise enjoyed. The “honey” of these soldiers has been tainted with gunpowder, or the sweet pleasure derived from traveling to a foreign country has been ruined by warfare.

The nearly identical phrasing of lines four and five implies that “The Lebanon” and “The Ukraine” are examples of colonies bittered by war. I know about the conflict between Russia against Ukraine, but I am not very up-to-date on global current events so I did not understand the speaker’s inclusion of Lebanon in this line. Upon further research, I learned about the explosion in the port of Beirut, august 2020. There was a large amount of ammonium nitrate stored at this location in the capital of Lebanon and it exploded, causing hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries. These nations are linked by their shared experience of falling victim to deadly explosives. At this point in the poem, I realized that the focus of the poem has shifted from the analogy to bees and focuses more heavily on war and battle-related symbolism. Even so, I initially found it very difficult to make direct military connections to the fourth and fifth stanzas. Why is he talking about his mom all of a sudden? why is she spitting blood and looking at her tongue in the mirror? A lot of the confusion I felt during my first read stemmed from the feeling that these stanzas were out of place, unrelated to the blatant military descriptions in earlier parts of the poem. One of my hypotheses was that this “mother” is not the woman who gave birth to the speaker but actually the speaker’s motherland, their native country. Continuing with this train of thought, I think it’s possible that a “gray burst” could be a bomb landing in the motherland, causing the “mother” to bite her tongue, literally causing the metallic, bloody spit, but figuratively making her “larynx invisible”, the organ which allows for speech, in conjunction with the tongue. The next part of this poem that caused me difficulty was the penultimate stanza. Initially, I thought the poisoned syrup could be a second reference to the “gun-powdered honey”, bringing the poem back to the bee metaphor but the word “dose” pushed me in another direction. I then began thinking about medicine, a cough syrup of some sort, and how soldiers may need this syrup if they were injured in the battle. After reading this line even closer, I realized that the line is phrased in such a way that the syrup itself is not poisonous but the dosage, the amount given to the soldiers, is what makes it poisonous. So what could this syrup be? Maybe it is just actual medicine or maybe it is symbolic of the excessive violence the soldiers were exposed to, I was very uncertain. I turned to the internet search for this poisonous syrup and learned about mad honey; this was my full circle moment. Mad honey is honey contaminated with grayanotoxin which has intoxicating/poisoning effects. This explains the “hallucinogenic tint” and the “gray burst”! I could not find any uses of mad honey that related to war in any way, so perhaps the mad honey is meant to be an analogy from nature related to poisons used in wartime to silence soldiers.

This alliteration-filled poem, with unique diction and a strong bee metaphor carried from beginning to end, caused me a great deal of confusion. Some lines I thought I understood after reading individually, I found confusing when placed in the context of the rest of the poem, and some lines I found the opposite to be true. What I do know to be true is that this poem is beautifully crafted and conveys the hardships of war wonderfully. Even though it required a great amount of effort for me to fully appreciate it, which I am not certain I have fully accomplished yet, I enjoyed reading this poem and learned a lot while doing so.