Most poems about blindness lament what is missing. William Dickey's "Where Blind Men Walk" does something bolder: it imagines the blind as explorers of a richer, stranger world than the one sighted people think they share. The four stanzas each begin or turn on the same phrase, "Where blind men walk," as if the words were a threshold, and what lies beyond it keeps surprising us.
The first stanza gives the world to the nose. Buildings "tell / Their definition to the smell," and the verb matters: stones are not merely smelled, they speak, delivering their own account of themselves. The old stones "exude / An odor of their latitude," a wonderfully odd phrase, since latitude is an abstraction from maps, yet here it becomes something you can breathe. Even a living room exists "by its unique perfume." For a sighted person a room is furniture and walls; for the walker in this poem it is a scent signature, as individual as a face.
In the second stanza, sound and touch take over. Pavements "proclaim / That surfaces are not the same," and then they "burst into articulate spines / Sharp as the Lunar Appenines." The comparison is startling in scale: a street underfoot becomes a mountain range on the moon. The feet are "receptive," listening, and what they hear is "musique concrète," a term for music assembled from recorded everyday noises. It is an apt choice, since the blind walker composes meaning out of ordinary sounds, and the French phrase lends the street a faintly avant-garde dignity.
The third stanza darkens. "Blank spaces" become "perilous vertigo," and the safest image in the poem, a field of grass with its "green levels," turns out to "harbor the infinite crevasse." Here the poem shifts from sensory richness to metaphysical dread. A sighted person trusts a field because the eye reports it flat; the blind walker has no such guarantee, and the poem suggests that the guarantee was always something of a convenience. The stanza ends by stretching this uncertainty outward: no "effort of horizon" prevents the "final gulf beyond the stars." The horizon, that comforting line where the world appears to stop, offers no protection against the void.
The final stanza turns on a simile that reframes everything. The blind are "alert, like radios tuning in / Languages wholly alien," and they live "in simultaneous command / Of this, and an uncharted, land." They inhabit two countries at once, the shared everyday one and a private one with no map. The last two lines deliver the poem's central claim: the blind walk "through a prioris of our talk, / Eluding them." "A prioris" is philosophical vocabulary for assumptions held before experience, and the idea seems to be that sighted people's ordinary conversation is built on unexamined givens about space, surface and distance, which the blind walkers slip past. The word "Eluding" even grants them a quiet victory.
The poem's form supports this confidence. Each stanza is a sextet of rhymed couplets, with lines of eight syllables and a brisk, steady beat. The rhymes are neat, almost epigrammatic: "tell" and "smell," "grass" and "crevasse," "tuning in" and "alien." This tidy music creates a pleasing tension. The content tilts toward vertigo and the unknown, while the form keeps its balance, much like the walkers themselves, who move calmly across a landscape that could swallow them.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal of pity. It never describes a blind person's feelings or circumstances; it describes a different quality of attention. In doing so it quietly accuses the sighted of a kind of poverty, since we skate across surfaces and never notice the smell of stone or the hidden chasm under the lawn. The poem's final turn, "the blind men walk," reads less like a statement of fact than a salute.