Silence is a awkward subject for a poet, because the moment you describe it, you have filled it with words. "Quiet" turns that problem into its method. The opening line, "House is quiet," drops the article, as if the speaker is too hushed to spare a word. The poem then spends most of its length listing what is not happening.
That list is the most inventive part. "Not a whisper, / Not a voice, / Not an utter, / Not a trickle, / Not a scatter, / Not a clatter": the same "Not a" opens each line, but the nouns grow more physical as they go. Whisper and voice are human, a trickle suggests water somewhere in the walls, and scatter and clatter are the noise of small objects knocked loose. Those last two also rhyme, the only real chime in a poem that otherwise avoids rhyme. The poem denies every sound while letting its own sounds pile up in the reader's ear, so silence is built out of the very noises it rules out. Then the "wind" and the "cat" widen the circle, from the house's insides to the night outside and back to its quietest resident.
The language is also slightly bent. "Not an utter" turns a verb into a noun. Later, "the yawning / Of rustling" and "The humble, / Of honest dreams" turn verbs and adjectives into things you can hold. These phrases are not quite standard English, and that suits the subject. They have the loose logic of drowsiness, when words slide out of their usual jobs. They also make the reader pause, which suits a poem about stillness.
The turn comes at "Just a hush, / But not heard." Up to here, the poem has mostly listed absences. Now it admits that something is present, only not to the ear: "The creeping, / Of shadows," "The whisper, / Of falling asleep." The word "whisper" is the key. Early on it was denied ("Not a whisper"), and it returns as a metaphor for drifting off. The literal sound is gone, but a quieter, figurative one has taken its place. The poem suggests that a quiet house is less empty than crowded with small, slow things that daytime noise would cover over. Judging by the phrase "honest dreams," the speaker thinks of night as a time when nothing is being performed for anyone.
Rhythm does much of the work here. There is no regular meter, only short lines, mostly end-stopped, with commas that fall in unexpected places. The lines "The creeping, / Of shadows" and "The humble, / Of honest dreams" break just before "of," so each phrase seems to hesitate before finishing, like a head nodding forward. Even "Very, very still" slows itself by doubling the adjective. The consonants help too. "Still," "silent," "sounds," "whisper," "hush," "shadows" and "asleep" scatter s and sh sounds through the poem, close to the "shh" a parent makes at a bedroom door.
The ending loops back to the first line, "House is quiet," then tightens the claim: "Not a sound, / Is heard." The last two lines are the strangest: "Only nothing but silence, / Is invisible." The phrase "Only nothing but" piles reductions on top of each other until the sentence itself shrinks, and the verb is stranded alone on the final line as if the poem were fading out. Calling silence "invisible" also switches senses. After a poem spent listening, we are told that silence cannot even be seen. This is a small paradox rather than a neat conclusion, and it leaves the quiet unresolved. A few phrases, such as the vague "Never more," are loosely worded, but they add to the dreamlike blur.
The poem is worth studying because it achieves a lot with plain materials: one stanza, everyday words, and a handful of repeated patterns. It shows that a poem need not rhyme or be complicated to make a reader feel something. Repetition, negation, line breaks and sound can all imitate the thing described. The poem also leaves a lasting idea: in a quiet house, the absence of noise is where the small, unnoticed life of the night begins.