The poem never says who has died, or even where the speaker is standing, but the details are enough for a careful guess. Someone has been covered with a blanket, toys have been set beside them, and a surface feels like stone. Judging by these clues, the speaker is at a grave, quite possibly a child's. The central idea is that love keeps speaking after the person it addresses has gone beyond reach. What comes back is not a voice but silence, and the poem leaves us to decide whether that silence is a comfort or a kind of indifference.
The opening is strange and precise: "Today I touched the face of your soul. / It felt like stone." A soul has no face, and the phrase shows what the speaker longs for, which is to touch the person. The only surface available is a gravestone, so the stone has to stand in for the soul. The line break does a lot of work here. The tender gesture fills the first line, then the second arrives as a short, blunt sentence, like a hand pulling back. "Today" also hints that this is one visit among many.
In the middle of the poem the speaker's mind drifts into worry. The verbs "covered" and "placed" are in the past tense, small acts of care that sound like tucking someone in for the night. Burial is remembered in the language of bedtime. Then the grammar jumps to the present: does the blanket "still" warm you, do the toys "still" amuse you? The speaker cannot stop looking after the person, and imagines the dead as cold or bored because that is easier than imagining nothing. These worries are written as fragments beginning with "Whether," with no question marks. The questions never quite get asked, as though they are too painful to say with full confidence.
The word "still" returns in "I still love you, I say," and it carries two meanings. It means "continuing," because the love has not ended. It also means "motionless," which is the condition of everything else in the poem. The plain tag "I say" makes the declaration sound like a habit, something said on every visit. That prepares for the next line: "But your answer is always the same."
We expect that answer to be words, perhaps a remembered phrase or an imagined voice. Instead the poem describes a place: "Beside the orange tree / A small patch of quiet abides / Unperturbed by comings and goings." The language changes too. The speech so far has been simple and halting, and now the diction becomes calmer and more formal. "Abides" is an old, steady word that suggests endurance, and "unperturbed" gives the quiet a kind of dignity, as if it were a person who cannot be rattled. The phrase "comings and goings" can be read two ways. It might mean the ordinary traffic of the living world, or the speaker's own repeated visits. Either way, the quiet takes no notice.
That is the poem's central ambiguity. The unperturbed quiet might mean the dead are at peace, beyond disturbance. It might equally mean that the world does not stop for one person's loss. The poem allows both and does not choose. The orange tree adds to the uncertainty. In a scene of stone it is the only living thing, and its colour and fruit suggest warmth, so it echoes the blanket the speaker hopes is still doing its work. The answer comes from beside the tree, a faint sign of life at the edge of the grave.
Formally the poem is free verse with no rhyme, which keeps it close to speech. Its short lines and stanza breaks leave white space on the page that works like pauses in a halting conversation. Only at the end does the sound settle, with the long, level rhythm of the last line, which slows the poem down to match the stillness it describes.
The poem matters because of this restraint. It does not wail, argue with God or promise reunion. The speaker keeps talking, the answer stays the same, and the poem ends on the tree and its patch of quiet, not on the speaker's grief. That is a truthful picture of mourning: the habit of speaking to someone who cannot reply, and the effort of learning to read silence as the only answer there is.