Here’s the gist of the poem and its themes. The poem How Doth the Little Busy Bee by Isaac Watts celebrates the industrious nature of a bee as a model for human behavior. It enumerates the bee’s diligent habits—improving each moment, gathering honey from every flower, skillfully building and maintaining its cell, spreading wax, and storing the sweet food. The speaker then expresses a personal aspiration to imitate the bee, aiming to be busy in all constructive endeavors: study, labor, and wholesome play. The moral is reinforced with a warning: idle hands invite mischief, so to avoid temptation, one should keep busy in productive pursuits throughout the day, especially in the early years, so that each day yields a good account at last. If you’d like, I can:

• Provide a line-by-line paraphrase in simpler language.
• Explain the historical context and its place in children’s literature.
• Compare this poem to Lewis Carroll’s parody in Alice in Wonderland.