Ignorance is where Ram Krishna Singh begins, and he admits it plainly: "I don't know how / the bones grow in the womb." It is a surprising way to open a poem, because we usually expect poets to know things. Here the speaker stands in front of something ordinary and astonishing, the making of a human body, and confesses that it lies beyond him. The poem's central idea is that the body carries a kind of knowledge, a music and a love, that language cannot capture. The last line says it outright: "some truths not spoken."
The shape of the poem supports this. It has three stanzas of three, six and three lines, so the long middle section is held between two short ones, a little like a body sheltered in a womb. There is no rhyme and almost no punctuation apart from one dash. The lines are short, mostly four to six syllables, and they read like quick breaths or pulses. Without full stops, the syntax in the middle stanza loosens and becomes ambiguous. "Elements clack / in the small house shudder" can be read in more than one way. It might mean the elements clack and shudder inside a small house, or that the house itself is shuddering. Even grammar seems unsure of what it is describing.
That ambiguity makes the imagery richer. The "small house" can be a womb, the body, or a real dwelling shaken by weather. I'd argue the poem wants all of these at once, since the later phrase "against heat wind rain" turns the body into shelter, something small and fragile set against large natural forces. "Elements" works the same way, suggesting both the chemistry that builds bone and the weather outside. Inside and outside become one system, and the "balance of nature" is something the body has to hold, not just something we observe from a distance.
Sound does a lot of the work. "Clack" is a hard, dry, percussive word, and it is easy to hear bones knocking together in it. "Shudder" has a similar roughness. Against these, the "harp and strings" bring in something delicate and musical, so the skeleton is imagined as an instrument as well as a frame. The speaker may be thinking of ribs as strings, though the poem only hints at it. The "h" sounds in "harp," "heartbeats" and "heat" quietly link music, pulse and warmth, as if they were one thing with different names.
The verb "pronounce" is worth noticing. Heartbeats "pronounce the balance of nature," as if the pulse were speech, a steady announcement that the body is holding its own. Yet the poem ends by insisting that truths remain "not spoken." The tension is deliberate. The body does speak, but not in words, and we can hear it only by listening differently. That is why the final stanza switches to a command: "look for body's love." The dash after it creates a pause, and then the answer arrives as sound: "the mystery song echoes." Even here the speaker says "look" and then describes something heard. The senses blur, and the knowledge on offer is felt rather than explained.
The word "still" in the first stanza deserves a closer look too. "Still in darkness" could mean the bones grow while motionless, or that they grow even now, or that darkness persists. The poem never chooses between these. Darkness appears at the very start and the final song "echoes," which suggests a sound travelling in an enclosed, dark space, perhaps the same one the poem began in. If so, the ending quietly returns to the beginning, and the mystery of the womb is the mystery of the whole poem.
What makes the poem significant is its modesty. It does not solve the mystery of how we are made or pretend that science, or poetry, has the last word. Instead it makes ignorance feel respectful, even tender. For a student reader, the lesson is that a poem can succeed by pointing at what words cannot hold. In a few dozen words, Singh turns bones, heartbeats and weather into a single quiet song, then leaves us to listen to it ourselves.