Passerby,These are words by Yves Bonnefoy

Analysis of Passerby, These are Words

Writeen by: Yves Bonnefoy

POEM

Passerby, these are words. But instead of reading 

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 unseen gold.

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.

Listen simply, if you will. Silence is a threshold

Where, unfelt, a twig breaks in your hand

As you try 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.

Summary:

Hello! Poem lovers. This poem though tricky has made me learn a bit and therefore i would like to share my interpretation of the poem.

The setting of the poem is not clearly mentioned but what i can interpret is that the setting is of a graveyard.  The speaker of the poem is a dead man who was burried under the earth long long ago...

Now don't worry the speaker is not a ghost instead he's a learned spirit who wants the visitor of the graveyard to not just read his initials of the epitaph but to listen to the speaker's frail voice.

 Before we venture further into the summary of the poem,  let's understand a few important words in the poem:

1. Frail: weak

2. Foraging: search; obtain food through search. 

3. Flits: move swiftly or lightly

4. Filigree: ornamental work of gold wire

5. Imperceptibly: in a way that is so slight ,gradual, or subtleas not to be perceived. 

The speaker calls the visitor of the graveyard as Passerby and he yearns them to not read what is written on his stone but to listen his frail voice. 

The visitor who was initially reading the speaker's illegible initials engraved on the stone is asked by the speaker to listen to his frail voice which just like the letters of his engraved stone is tarnished with grasses. 

In line 3, the the speaker justifies that he died years ago because the letters engraved on his stone are now eaten by grass and just like that his voice has turned weak , uninterpreted like the letters eaten by grass. 

In stanza 2, he wants the visitor to lend an ear and in a methodical way first wants to listen to the happy bee.

For the speaker the bee flies through foraging through all the rubbed out names in the graveyard.  In other words the bee flies through the entire graveyard where all burried people or dead or people whose name is rubbed from the world are kept. The bee  moves lightly between leaves and carries sound of branches, in other words, the nature and  the reality to those who are into materialism and see only filigree and can't see  the real gold.

In stanza 3, the speaker shifts the visitor's mind from the bee to a much fainter sound, and wants it to let be in the visitor. 

He calls all the burried people's boxes as shades and explains that faint sound is of the  endless murmuring of all the shades. 

The murmur or whisper or talking comes from the ground or beneath the stones. This fainter sound which is coming from within the ground rises to fuse into a single form of energy. This energy is called heat in the poem. All this energy or heat submits to the blind which means submits to the un known or the unseen or the outer space or to God etc. He mentions the living visitor as light. 

Light you are as yet, who can still gaze means that the visitor can still see the world and gaze at things around.

May your listening be good! 

Means that the speaker wishes that the visitor listens well and later mentions the term Silence which prevails inside the heart of the visitor who's standing inside the graveyard.  

The twig breaks that means that the chain of melancholic thoughts or silence breaks and he pensively  attempts to disengage or moves away from the silence or physicaly tries to moves away from the graveyard. 

The speaker again calls the dead as absent names  who have untangled the visitor's warnings or alarms about death and with this the visitor moves away and realises that with without ceasing time the visitor shall too be from here, the life to there, into the burials. 

The poem is about the inevitable nature of death and talks about the strange race of silence and death.