Sompsin's poem opens on a word that can't quite decide what it means. "Still and ever lasting" can describe something motionless, but "still" also means "continuing", so the quiet is asked to be both a pause and a permanent state. The speaker's thoughts "move slow / yet precise", and a few lines later breathing is "slow yet calm". That little word "yet" turns up twice in the opening, and it works like a raised eyebrow. Why would slowness need defending? Judging by the repetition, the speaker expects calm to be mistaken for sluggishness, or for something worse, and wants to insist that it is control.
The turn comes with a question nobody has asked: "where have I been?" The calm has been so complete that the speaker has lost track of themselves, as if silence were a place you could travel to and return from. The reply is a single word with its own full stop, "Silence.", which answers the question and dodges it at once. "On the hill again" adds a faint sense of routine, since "again" suggests a return. The poem never explains why the speaker is there, and it is stronger for not pretending to know.
Then comes the crash, and the poem's loudest trick: "I can't hear because / there is "crash!"" The quotation marks drop the sound into the text like debris, as though it belonged to someone else, and we can't tell whether it happens in the world or inside the speaker's head. What follows is a stampede in miniature: "My thoughts race, / heart pounds, breaths / rapid as time's fly." The grammar breaks down along with the calm. The balanced phrases of the opening give way to a list of symptoms with no connecting words, and the line break after "breaths" pushes you across the gap to "rapid" at speed. "Time's fly" twists the familiar "time flies". Whether the twist is deliberate or not, the effect is of a sentence tripping over its own feet.
The formula "I can't hear because" appears three times, and its explanation keeps being revised. First the cause is simple noise. Next it is "noise within / the silence", a racing mind in a quiet place. Finally the phrase flips: "silence within / the noise." This last version is the strangest and may be the truest, since it suggests the numbness of being so overwhelmed that the din around you stops registering. The mirror-image wording enacts the poem's idea in its structure. Noise and silence are not on opposite sides of a wall; each has the other inside it.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre here. The poem is free verse, held together by repetition rather than matching sounds. Even so, the sounds are chosen. The opening is full of soft s-sounds and long vowels ("Still", "slow", "silence"), which slow the reading voice to a hush. "Silence" is itself a hissing word, a slightly noisy name for quiet. Against this, "crash" and the stand-alone "Noise" are blunt, single-beat interruptions, and the short lines make the page look jittery. The final line, "Silence and Noise", capitalises both words and joins them with "and", granting them equal status.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it performs its idea instead of just stating it. The title promises "Silence", yet the closing line hands half the stage to noise, as though the title were a starting assumption the poem has quietly dismantled. Anyone who has sat in a hushed exam hall with a pounding heart, or tuned out in a loud corridor, will recognise the situation. The poem's insight is that what we hear depends less on the volume of the world than on the state of the listener.