Few love poems open by proposing to blind the beloved, and fewer end by announcing hatred. D. H. Lawrence's speaker asks a woman to shut her eyes because he believes her way of looking has gone wrong. She sees the world as something to be worked out, and she is trying to work him out too. The poem's central idea is that love cannot be solved like a problem, and that someone who insists on understanding everything will end up possessing nothing.
The first stanza builds that charge out of school subjects. She has been taught to see "a mean arithmetic on the face of things," "a cunning algebra in the faces of men," and finally "God like geometry / Completing his circles, and working cleverly." The scale climbs from objects to people to the divine, and each step is reduced to a sum. The adjectives do the damage. "Mean" suggests both stingy and merely average, while "cunning" and "cleverly" make calculation sound sly rather than wise. Even God becomes a tidy draughtsman. A pointed paradox sits underneath this: the speaker wants to take away her sight so that she might see better.
In the second stanza the tenderness is real but shaky. "I'll kiss you over the eyes till I kiss you blind" is physical and gentle, yet the doubt in "If I can--if any one could" admits that nobody can do this for another person. The word "make" in the opening line also gives the game away. He wants to force her out of her habits, which is its own kind of control. The kaleidoscope is the best image in the poem. Her "clever eyes" have "discovered so many bits," and a kaleidoscope is a toy made entirely of bits. Shake it and it gives new patterns, but it never resolves into one answer. He is telling her that he cannot be assembled in her mind, however hard she shakes.
Then the mood snaps: "Now stop carping at me.--But God, how I hate you!" The sudden swerve from kissing to loathing is the poem's most daring move, and it makes the speaker more believable. His questions turn to money and risk: "Do you fear I shall swindle you?" He accuses her of treating intimacy as a deal in which she must not lose anything. Her list of qualities, "so sad, so intrinsic, so spiritual, yet so cautious," stretches out sarcastically, and the final "yet" lands the blow. Her spirituality is a form of caution, and what she wants is to have him "all in your will and your consciousness."
The sound shapes this build-up. The first stanza is short and its indented lines work like small pauses. The second is a long, almost unbroken stretch where the argument piles up and the lines grow more crowded. The rhyme is loose and uneven, as in free verse, but it clusters in telling places. "Blind," "find" and "mind" chime like a refrain of frustrated wishes. The lines ending on "you," in "hate you," "swindle you," "abate you" and "cautious, you," beat like a finger jabbing at her. Then the poem stops dead on the three-word line "I hate you." It is indented and bare, and it has no softening answer.
The poem matters partly because it refuses to tidy emotion. Love and hatred appear in the same breath, and the speaker does not come out as a hero. He is demanding, a little cruel, and aware that his own wish might be impossible. The title is ironic as well. "Spiritual" should suggest something gentle and giving, but here it describes a mind that wants to know and control everything. A suspicion of cold intellect runs through much of Lawrence's writing, and this poem shows it in miniature. Here it is not an abstract argument. It is a quarrel in which one lover wants to be felt and the other wants to understand him, and neither can get what they want from the other.