John Milton’s Beehive, from Polemic to Epic

While the bee simile in book 1 of Paradise Lost has garnered much critical attention, the significant image of the hive in Milton’s corpus remains largely overlooked. Deriving from an ancient literary tradition, the bee metaphor was enlisted in seventeenth-century England as a divine symbol of monarchical and ecclesiastical power structures. From his polemic to his epic, Milton, by contrast, consistently uses apian imagery to register harsh critiques of earthly monarchy, feminine influence, and Catholic superstition. Beginning with an unexamined bee passage in Eikonoklastes, this article traces Milton’s revisionist reading of the apiological kingdom, which culminates in his representation of insect and related serpentine imagery in Paradise Lost. I argue that the Miltonic hive serves as a symbol of a natural corruption of the divine hierarchy, an inevitable failure to replicate on earth or in hell the benevolent design of heaven.