Before the first sting is named, the title gives only a pronoun: “Terrified of Them.” That withholding matters. The poem’s opening lines define the speaker’s world through panic and defense: “Terrified of them she was through long / Experience being swarmed with stings, / Running, her hands over eyes and mouth.” The enjambment after “long” stretches the word, making the experience feel like a duration rather than a single event. The insects are called “punishers,” a word that turns a natural swarm into a judgment, as though the stings were personal and moral. Fear here is not irrational; it is learned from pain. But it narrows the world to protection and flight.
The poem works in free verse, without a regular rhyme scheme, so its music comes from repetition and line breaks. The doubled “Running, / Running” mimics breathlessness, while the sibilance of “swarmed with stings” hisses with danger. At its center, the poem is about how fear can harden into revenge and how learning, combined with slowness, can soften that hardness.
The second stanza charts that revenge. The woman becomes “their nemesis,” setting nests afire and inverting a glass bowl “upside / Down over their holes to watch them starve.” The exclamation after “afire” sounds almost triumphant, and the line break at “upside / Down” visually enacts the turning of the bowl. In this section the poem’s rhythm grows crueler and more deliberate; there is no running now, only watching. The word “nemesis” borrows the language of myth, as if this backyard battle were a war of deserved vengeance. The cruelty is unsettling because it is so calculated. The poem does not excuse it; it simply records it as another stage.
The final stanza turns on time and reading. “Only in recent years, as her ways have slowed, / Finding in books their part in the scheme of / Things as helpers in garden and orchard, / Has she learned to move more gently.” The phrase “as her ways have slowed” links physical aging to a change of perception. Books alone do not transform her; slowness makes room for their knowledge to matter. The enjambment “scheme of / Things” suggests a larger order she had not seen while she was running or burning. The word “scheme” is especially rich: it can mean a plot, echoing the earlier language of punishment, but here it means an orderly design. The insects shift from “punishers” to “helpers,” from enemies in a plot against her to participants in a shared garden.
The final image is intimate and startling: “Even as they light on her cidery hands, / Milking fingers for juice, never stinging.” “Cidery” is earthy and sweet, hinting at apple harvest, pressed fruit, hands stained by useful work. The insects become almost like guests feeding from her skin, and “milking fingers” reverses the usual direction of harm. She is not seized; she is visited. The poem ends on “never stinging,” two words that answer the first stanza’s “stings” without completing a rhyme or tying everything neatly. That plain closing feels earned because the poem has shown the long, unlovely path from terror to gentleness. What makes the poem significant is its honesty about the middle stage—the revenge—and its refusal to pretend that the insects have become harmless. They can still sting; it is the woman who has changed. That distinction gives the ending its quiet power: the gentleness is not guaranteed, but it is being learned.