"He can hear the stars." The poem's first sentence asks us to accept something impossible. As far as ordinary experience goes, stars are silent, and the poem doesn't apologise for that. It states the claim flatly, in the present tense, as a plain fact about a person. Then it spends its remaining nine lines guarding that fact rather than explaining it.
The guarding begins with the father. "His father did not ask / the sound they make." The line break leaves "ask" alone at the end of line two, so the missing question hangs in the air. We never learn how old "he" is, though the word "father" makes it easy to picture a child. We also can't tell whether the father's silence is neglect or tact. The next lines lean toward tact: the sound is "too solemn a sound, / too private to describe." "Solemn" is a word we normally attach to ceremonies and vows, and it makes listening to the sky sound almost like a ritual. "Private" suggests the sound belongs to one listener and cannot be passed across a table like a salt shaker. Not asking becomes a form of respect.
Then the poem turns on us: "Have you heard it?" The title, "All You Can Hear," now takes on a second meaning. It can describe the boy's hearing, but it also addresses the reader directly as "you." The question is also oddly chosen. The poem doesn't ask whether we have seen the stars, which would be easy to answer. It asks whether we have heard them, and that puts us in the boy's place. The poem also keeps its own rule. Having called the sound too private to describe, it never describes it. Instead of telling us what to hear, it tells us where to stand.
That is the work of the final four lines. "After the soft snowing stops" is a careful phrase. "Snowing" is an ongoing action, quieter and more continuous than the noun "snow," and the verb "stops" brings the hush the poem has been moving toward. Snowfall is known for muffling a landscape, so the stillness is a believable condition for hearing something faint. Throughout the poem, s sounds drift along like a whispered "shh": stars, sound, solemn, soft, snowing, stops, striding. The word "sound" itself appears twice in consecutive lines, as if the poem keeps circling the thing it won't name.
Then comes Orion, "striding / through a gap in the clouds / with his dogs at his heels." The personification adds movement and company to a frozen scene. It also fits the sky: Orion is a winter constellation in northern skies, and the nearby constellations are traditionally pictured as his hunting dogs. "Striding" and "heels" are the nearest the poem comes to sound words, since they suggest footfalls. One could suggest that the boy hears something like the steady tread of the heavens, though the poem never says so. The only description we are given is visual, so the sound is carried entirely by implication.
The form supports this restraint. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, only short, plain lines that sound like speech. The opening lines are brief statements of four or five syllables, and the closing lines stretch a little longer as the image opens up. The grammar does something stranger. The last sentence is a fragment, a string of conditions ("After... and Orion comes...") that never reaches a main clause. The poem ends on a question mark, not an answer, and we are left holding the circumstances without the sound.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it acts out its own idea. Some experiences, it suggests, are real but cannot be handed over in words, and the kindest response may be to leave them unquestioned. By refusing to describe the sound, the poem protects the boy's wonder and also lets ours begin. For students, it is a useful reminder that what a poem leaves out can matter as much as what it puts in.