A blanket usually means comfort, but the one in the opening line of "Going Blind" is made of "velvet blackness," and the person tucking it around the speaker is, in the same breath, "tuck[ing] me away." Care and disposal are hard to tell apart here. The poem follows the speaker as they are "hand[ed] over" from a "you" to a "she," who offers the same velvet blackness in a new form, something to breathe in. By the end, the blindness of the title has little to do with eyesight. It is a chosen refusal to look at oneself, and the poem's central insight is that this refusal does not remove the pain. It only reshapes it into something presentable.
The turning point is the fourth line, where the speaker answers the old saying "out of sight, out of mind" with a troubling question: what if the thing I am trying not to see is my own mind? The line is grammatically broken. It seems to be missing a verb ("is" would fix it), which may be a slip or may be deliberate, but either way the sentence stumbles as the thought does. The question is also never answered. "You don't answer," the speaker says, and the next line moves straight on to "she," as if the first figure's silence were what pushed the speaker toward the second.
What follows is a journey up the body. The velvet blackness leaves the shoulders and enters the lungs, burns the nostrils, twines through the hair, and finally rises until it is "infused in my brain." The "spicy scent of tobacco" and the "dizzying whirl of impurity" suggest smoking, though the poem never names it as anything more than a scent. The sensory detail is worth noticing. The poem is about going blind, yet nearly everything in it is felt or smelled, never seen. Velvet is touch, spice and burning are smell, and sight is the one sense the poem lets go dark. Lines six to ten also lean on a chain of -ing words (burning, twining, rising, becoming, molding), so the process seems to unfold without anyone stopping it.
The verbs are another thread. Nearly all of them are about wrapping or binding: "wrap," "tucking," "coat," "twining," "fuse," "molding," "twisted." Smoke is treated like fabric or clay, soft enough to wind around a person and firm enough to set. This is why the ending lands so hard. The blindness does not cure the speaker's depression. It "mold[s]" it "into nothing more than a persona twisted around the truth of me." A persona is a mask, so the escape works as disguise rather than relief. The word "twisted" also echoes "twining with my hair," so the smoke that curled through the speaker's hair becomes the same twist that wraps around their true self. Whatever is hidden is hidden from the speaker too.
The form fits this mood. There is no rhyme and no steady meter, and most lines run on without punctuation, like a breath drawn in and held. The long, loose lines give the poem a slow, drifting quality. Small repetitions hold it together: "hand me over" in line three comes back as "beckons me over" in line five, a quiet sign that the speaker is simply being passed along. "At last, at last" is the emotional peak, and the doubling sounds like a sigh of relief, though it is not clear the relief is deserved.
Then comes the final line, short and end-stopped: "Blindness is unfriendly but still she is beautiful." The soft b sounds make it almost sing, and "she" now refers to blindness itself, so the figure who beckoned has been the blindness all along. Calling it "unfriendly" is an understatement, and the poem lets that mildness stand next to a cost it has just described in detail.
That honesty is what makes the poem worth reading. It does not lecture and it does not glamorize. It shows why escape appeals, since it feels soft, warm and finally quiet, and it also shows what the escape costs, which is the truth of the self. The poem leaves the speaker caught between the two, and the last line stays unresolved.