Review of French poet Yves Bonnefoy’s poem 'Passerby, These are words'

 

https://poets.org/poem/passerby-these-are-words

Review of French poet Yves Bonnefoy’s poem

'Passerby, These are words'

I request readers to read the poem first from the above link and then only my review. Thanks.

 

Only after the second reading of the poem the reader understands the backdrop is a cemetery. The passerby doesn’t find anything audible or any sound that draws his attention from the cemetery. But there are sounds that emanate from the cemetery the poet wants him to listen:

 

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 unseen gold.

 

There are tombs in a cemetery which are never visited by anyone. The names on these tombs are fading. A bee is trying to find a hideout in the cracks that have developed on the names on the stone. The poetic depiction is a bee here is carrying the sound of branches of a tree that will be audible only to those who love nature. The poet points out subtly that people over generations have forgotten not only the departed souls, but the wonderful gentle happenings in nature too, and the mild sound of a bee or any other fly or the plants in a forest. We also understand the cemetery has been abandoned so long that plants have grown around tombs thickly.

Poems are often visualizations that carry a meaning. The abstract and mysterious and magical visualizations give the reader the intended meaning. In the remaining stanzas one of the passersby is trying to read a name or remove a name on a stone, and in that effort twigs get broken. The ending line is very meaningful and powerful:

Here becomes there without ceasing to be.

Nothing ceases to be. Something becomes something else. Someone is always somewhere, but we call one place here and another place there contextually. So it’s all contextual. The passerby is alive and active, and is of human species. But there are other creatures, beings and species not him, nor his species. These differences in species or beings are just like here and there. Same is the unfulfilled wishes of those below a stone inside a tomb, and those who are outside.

There are hundreds of poems with profound meaning and depth. This poem is one and we wonder how each of these poems written in various eras in various continents and countries and languages depict whole new visualization so creative and imaginary. Here we see both philosophical and environmental messages woven together so beautifully and poetically.