Phenomenal Woman

In the second stanza, Angelou’s speaker tells us that men “swarm around me / A hive of honey bees” (Lines 19-20). This symbolically equates her to a queen bee. In hives, bees are divided into several groups that perform functions based on their biology; here, the image is of male drone bees performing obeisance to the female queen bee that directs and is the center of each hive. This image not only shows the male devotion the speaker receives, but also uses the key physiological differences of a queen bee to subtly connect to the poem’s description of the speaker. A queen bee is typically larger than the drones of the hive, which relates to the speaker not being “a fashion model’s size” (Line 2). There may also be an autobiographical connection: Angelou herself was approximately six feet tall, well above average height for women of her time. The queen bee is also usually a more golden or darker hue than the rest of the hive’s inhabitants, which implicitly connects to the speaker’s skin tone and racial identity. Finally, the queen bee’s mandibles are used to groom other bees, and not for stinging, which echoes the lines about not needing to “shout or jump around” (Line 48) or “talk real loud” (Line 49) to make her point.