Nobody in this poem is shouting, and yet the noise is almost unbearable. The speaker stands inside a crowd and hears only "the talk, / the talk", a stammer that already hints at how little the talking is saying. The title promises a study of collective madness. What the poem delivers is quieter and more personal: one listener, surrounded by voices, who finds that the only people she or he can understand are the ones who say nothing. The central idea is that real recognition between people has little to do with volume. In a crowd, loneliness and silence can be the nearest thing to a shared language.
The opening works by sound as much as by sense. "Forever" in the second line is answered two lines later by "fever", a near-rhyme that is nearly a pun, since "fever" sits inside "forever" like a smaller word caught in a larger one. The noise is called "the symptom of a fever", so the crowd's chatter becomes something sick, feverish and without a clear source. That fits the title: the "madness" is not violent or dramatic, just a restless, endless babble. The poem is otherwise free verse with no regular rhyme scheme, which suits a speaker who cannot find a pattern in what she or he hears. The line breaks and indents add to this. Words are pushed across the page, and "bewildered" sits alone on its own stepped line, so the layout copies the hesitation and the gaps in the talk.
The middle of the poem shifts from sound to the act of listening. "I pick out one voice after another" sounds almost like sorting through a drawer for something specific, and the word "disappointed" shows the speaker was hoping to find something. Each voice turns out to be "a foreign language / I cannot speak". It is telling that the speaker says "speak" rather than "understand". The failure is partly one of voice: the speaker cannot join in. Compare the next stanza, where the "silent ones" are the ones "I can understand". Two details deserve attention. "Shrouded" is a heavy word, associated with burial and covered faces, and it gives these silent figures something ghostly. Then the list of what their silence might hold dwindles from "loneliness" to "pensive thoughts" to "maybe just nothing at all". That last phrase is honest and slightly deflating. The speaker admits that the sympathy might be a projection, since an empty face could just be empty.
The poem turns on its one question: "Are they, like me, / bewildered / as to how the past / can blend / from Spring into Winter / so swiftly?" Here the crowd's noise is set against time. The image of seasons skips summer and autumn altogether, so a whole middle stretch of life seems to have vanished. The direction matters too. The seasons run from spring to winter, towards decline, and not the other way round. The verb "blend" is gentle and almost seamless, which suggests the change was never marked by any single moment. Judging by the imagery, the bewilderment comes from age or loss, from looking back and finding the distance between then and now impossibly short. The speaker does not state this outright, and the poem is stronger for leaving it as a question.
The ending returns to the opening: "As the noise, the / noise goes on forever…" The repeated stammer, the word "forever", and the trailing ellipsis make the poem circular, so it ends where it began and nothing has been resolved. Set side by side, the two time-scales make a sharp contrast. The noise goes on "forever", while the past passes "so swiftly". Life rushes by, yet the chatter around the speaker never stops, and most of it is meaningless.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It takes a phrase that suggests mass hysteria and turns it inward, so that the crowd's madness is really its emptiness, and the real subject is how it feels to be out of step with everyone around you. It also offers a small, modest consolation. The speaker cannot be sure the silent ones feel the same way, but the guess that they might is enough to make the crowd a little less lonely.