Being told to be bold and answering with ice is the whole quarrel of "ignored orders," and the title tells us how to read it. The speaker has been handed an instruction, "boldness is what i'm told," and has refused it, handing back "coldness" instead. Everything after that defends the refusal, in a small argument where courage loses its usual halo and stone becomes the thing worth admiring.
The opening shows how carefully the poem is put together. "boldness" and "coldness" differ by a single letter, and the sentences around them copy each other: "is what i'm told" against "is what i've returned." The speaker answers the order in the order's own grammar, which makes the reply sound calm rather than angry. Then the reasoning words arrive: "for the bold must be brave / yet the cold stay sane." Look at the verbs. The bold "must" be brave, as if bravery were a duty with no exit, while the cold simply "stay." The value the speaker cares about is sanity, which suggests boldness is something that can cost you your balance.
Midway, the poem changes scale. Lines five and six stretch out, and the repeated "for the coldness of stone" has the weight of someone laying bricks. The imagery works in two directions. To "harbor" is to shelter, but you also harbor a secret or a grudge, so the stone is both protection and hiding place. "stays forever a fortress" leans on its f-sounds (forever, fortress, then "fort") until the line feels solid. Then comes a roughness: "the fort defend from those which are bold." The missing s on "defend" may be a slip or a deliberate bluntness. The phrase "those which," rather than "those who," is odd too. Either way, it reads as though the bold have become a faceless force pressing on the wall, though that is an inference from the wording.
The violence arrives in line eight, the most crowded line in the poem: "and the bold only bleed onto cold stone walls." The long o sounds roll through it (bold, only, onto, cold, stone), and the b-alliteration of "bold" and "bleed" makes it thud. "bold" and "cold," held apart in the opening, now collide in one line, and the result is one-sided. The stone isn't marked. The blood simply runs down it.
The word "only" returns in the next line, "leaving only the victors and vain," where the poem is at its most ambiguous and its sharpest. The victors are whoever is left standing, but "vain" means both proud and, in the echo of "in vain," futile. These survivors "retell the bold's doomed name." The bold have shrunk from people to a name, and "doomed" arrives before the story is even finished.
That "retell" loops back to "told" in the first line. A poem that begins with the speaker being told to be bold ends with the bold being told about, by the very people who benefit from the story. Boldness becomes a tale handed down by survivors, and the speaker declines to be part of it. The sound pattern supports this. The long a of "brave," "sane," "vain" and "name" runs from the opening to the close, and the full rhyme of "sane" with "vain" sets one kind of sanity against one kind of vanity.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does without ornament. It has no capital letters and no punctuation, and its lines swell from five or six syllables to a dozen or more before tapering back to seven, as if the wall were built up and then the name faded. Yet the sound patterns are tight. It also resists a simple reading. Refusing an order takes nerve, so the speaker's coldness may be its own quiet kind of boldness, and a fortress is a place that is hard to leave. The poem never says what the secrets are. Judging by the imagery, the speaker has chosen safety and silence over glory, and the poem leaves us to decide what that costs.