He asks them to hear his words and to hold his hand. The narrator calls them fool, because silence has an abnormal unhealthy growth, like cancer. It is an image painted in the 1960s but it anticipates what is happening in our present society: people next to each other seem to say things (on the phone or the social media) to everybody except the ones immediately surrounding them. Unfortunately, many of us don’t really pay attention to the content of what we hear or say. The complete impersonality of a crowd is portrayed : not only are we lonely when we are alone, but we are also alone even when we are surrounded by other people. Our meaningless existence applies to everyone else, we fail to communicate, to enter into relationships with others. Some of them are even writing songs that will never be sung. Now the sharp light allows him to see a lot people are talking without speaking and hearing without listening. People writing songs that voices never share something arrived to distract him (he is still alone) from his lonely feelings. This refers to the deceitful nature of life that may prevent us from realising the emptiness or alienation of our lives. Suddenly the “ neon light” hit his eyes, i.e. It is dark, cold and wet, and he “ Turned my collar to the cold and d amp” to highlight that we everybody seems obliged to accept bad conditions. This might mean that the more enlightened we are, the lonelier we become. Now the poet describes his restless dream, in which he seems alone, walking in a dark world of nothingness. When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light Maybe we are aware we are familiar with the darkness, but he has had a “ vision softly creeping”, a sort of inspiring dream that has triggered a sort of self-awareness, of enlightenment The singer seems to realise what we are in essence – lonely people, living in the darkness, in the void. The vision still remains there in the sound of silence. The narrator says that he has come to talk to it because a certain vision has planted its seeds in his brain while he was sleeping. The poem begins with an address to darkness. The poem ‘The Sound of Silence’ consists of five irregular stanzas in which the poet describes the conflict between spiritual and material values in our modern world.Īnd the vision that was planted in my brain

The oxymoron (=combination of words having opposite or very different meanings) in the title gives a good idea of incommunicability among people

Disturbed sounds of silence midi