Silence is usually treated as an absence, but in three lines and a scrap of dialogue it becomes something you can put on, like a costume. The speaker sees someone she loves, and he is plainly trying to reach her: his eyes "serenade." She decides not to answer. The poem's central idea is that ignoring someone is not the same as feeling nothing. To ignore a person you first have to notice them, and the effort of pretending shows how much she has noticed. The title, "Ignoring," is a present participle, an act still going on, and the poem catches her in the middle of it.
The key metaphor arrives in the opening line: "Silence is my masquerade." A masquerade is a party where everyone wears a mask and everyone knows a face is underneath. That makes it a risky choice of image for someone trying to hide. The second line gives the game away at once: "I saw you my love, but I pretend." The words "my love" slip out before the sentence turns on its one comma and the word "but." The mask is announced and removed in the same breath. The speaker's grammar is also casual. "Pretend like I didn't hear" is how people talk, not how formal poems talk, so the voice feels like a real person admitting something she would rather not.
The second and third lines mix up the senses in a way that deepens the contradiction. She says "I saw you," yet what she claims not to have heard is her admirer's "eyes serenade." A serenade is a song sung to a lover, an old and slightly theatrical gesture. Eyes make no sound, so the only way to hear them is to be paying very close attention. The silence she hides behind is answering another silence, his wordless look, and her claim of not hearing proves she heard it perfectly. "Masquerade" and "serenade" are also showy, ornate words, and they rhyme, so the poem's grandest vocabulary sits at its edges while the plain, uncomfortable confession sits between them.
That middle line is where the construction gets interesting. The line lengths grow: seven syllables, then nine, then ten. The opening is a tight, almost motto-like declaration, and the lines that follow loosen as the admission spills out. The rhyme scheme leaves "pretend" stranded in the middle, the one end word that doesn't chime with its neighbours. It is tempting to read that as the poem's quiet joke on its speaker, since the pretence is the only thing that doesn't fit. There is no closing full stop, so the lyric part of the poem trails off rather than ends.
Then the form changes. "He: hey / She:" drops the lyric voice and switches to a bare script, the layout of a transcript or perhaps a text conversation, though the poem never says which. His line is a lowercase "hey," about as small as a greeting can be. Set beside "masquerade," "serenade" and "my love," it shows a gap between what the speaker feels and what anyone could hear her say. Her side is a colon followed by nothing. The poem stops describing silence and performs it, leaving white space where a reply should be. The reader is placed in the position of the boy waiting for an answer that doesn't come, and that last empty "She:" lands harder than any further line would.
The poem is slight, but it does something precise: it splits a moment into what is felt and what is shown. The first three lines are private, rhymed and a little romantic, and the last two are public and flat. Anyone who has seen a message arrive and left it unanswered, while thinking about nothing else, will recognise that split. The poem's strength is its restraint. It never explains why she hides, whether from shyness, fear or pride, and the reader is left to wonder what the speaker herself may not want to say.