011. Passer-by, These are words...
Yves Bonnefoy
Passer-by, these are words. But instead of reading
I want you to listen: to this frail
Voice like that of letters eaten by grass.
I want you to listen: to this frail
Voice like that of letters eaten by grass.
Lend an ear, hear first of all the happy bee
Foraging in our almost rubbed-out names.
It flits between two sprays of leaves,
Carrying the sound of branches that are real
To those that filigree the still unseen.
Foraging in our almost rubbed-out names.
It flits between two sprays of leaves,
Carrying the sound of branches that are real
To those that filigree the still unseen.
Then know an even fainter sound, and let it be
The endless murmuring of all our shades.
Their whisper rises from beneath the stones
To fuse into a single heat with that blind
Light you are as yet, who can still gaze.
The endless murmuring of all our shades.
Their whisper rises from beneath the stones
To fuse into a single heat with that blind
Light you are as yet, who can still gaze.
May your listening be good! Silence
Is a threshold where a twig breaks in your hand,
Imperceptibly, as you attempt to disengage
A name upon a stone:
Is a threshold where a twig breaks in your hand,
Imperceptibly, as you attempt to disengage
A name upon a stone:
And so our absent names untangle your alarms.
And for you who move away, pensively,
Here becomes there without ceasing to be.
And for you who move away, pensively,
Here becomes there without ceasing to be.
I think that the controlling idea of "Passer-by, These are words..." by Yves Bonnefoy is that Bonnefoy wants the reader to know just because you know the names and dates on a tombstone, that you don't actually know anything about that person or their life. Bonnefoy uses personification - the attribution of human characteristics to inanimate objects - in order to make a person think more about something so small and of little importance. In the poem, you can tell Bonnefoy is trying to make you think about the names and dates on a tombstone because it says "A name upon a stone:...And for you who move away, pensively". The poem makes it seem as if Bonnefoy wants people to take a deeper look at the stones and think harder about what they are looking at. You can see that Bonnefoy uses personification in her poem because for example, its says "Foraging in our almost rubbed-out names". The word "our" in that phase shows that Bonnefoy is talking from a point of view of a group of tombstones. Tombstones can not talk, therefore she used personification to give an object the ability to do something they are not normally able to do.
