This is a song about materialism, apathy and greed in society. It was written during the mid-1960s, during the fusion of folk music and rock music. It was a time when young pe
…ople were becoming skeptical about what their elders had taught them, as well as a time when the civil rights movement, women's rights movements, and anti-war movement were emerging. Many young people were exploring Asian religions like Buddhism or Hinduism, and some were speaking out against what they saw as a society that did not care about the poor or the less fortunate. In this song, the singer is speaking to the darkness, using the poetic device of personification -- "Hello darkness, my old friend/ I've come to talk with you again..." He has dreams and visions and he wants to speak about them ("In restless dreams, I walked alone/narrow streets of cobblestone"). Note that "darkness" can represent night-time, but it can also represent ignorance or prejudice or a lack of knowledge. The singer is seeing what is around him, and he does not like what he sees. He wants to see beauty and perhaps even hope, but he is confronted by the ugliness of neon signs with their advertising messages that "split the night and touch the sounds of silence." As the song progresses, the singer reveals himself to be a prophet (folk-singers often take the persona of the truth-teller, speaking truth to power, and this song was originally done in the acoustic, folk-music style). In his dream, he sees "people talking without speaking/ people hearing without listening" but none of them will "dare" to "disturb the sounds of silence." In other words, he sees people content to live in their ignorance, caught up in themselves, unwilling to listen to others or to speak out against what is wrong in society. He tries to warn them-- "Fools said I, you do not know/silence like a cancer grows..." He offers to teach them a better way, he asks them to take a stand, but they are unwilling to listen and they ignore him. In the final verse, he uses Biblical imagery-- the Golden Calf story from the Book of Exodus-- and notes that the people "bowed and prayed/to the neon god they made"-- in other words, they embraced materialism and greed, they bought into the advertising messages and the commercialism, and they refused to hear the prophet's message, asking them to change their ways. In the end, we have a pun about "the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls" (prophets/profits... back to the imagery of society's greed). This image too is biblical, from the Book of Daniel. An alternative interpretation is that, because the sign from the neon light actually says: "the words of the prophets are on subway walls and tenement halls" is that this is blasphemy. The people have engaged in idol worship by bowing to the neon sign and then the neon sign tells them to look for the prophets in the wrong place. The prophets of the Bible were usually not extremely poor men, but well respected and deeply feared by the king and the people. In many cases the prophets are seen to be more powerful than even the kings. For a king in the Bible to fail to heed the warning of one of God's prophets typically results in that king's death and suffering for the people of Israel. Turning away and worshiping idols is breaking the first and second of the Ten Commandments thus giving the song a deep undertone of rebuke to apostasy. And as the song concludes, the singer can only sing to us (or tell us his dream), in hopes that one day, the sounds of silence (the sounds of apathy and indifference) will be broken. But at this point, the neon sign serves as a warning, and the silence is not yet ready to be broken, and the society continues on, as materialistic as it ever was, despite his efforts to make people see the truth. It's a very thought-provoking song (influenced, I believe, by Bob Dylan) and one that I was pleasantly surprised to see become a hit. (MORE) 
