Few poems about a failed relationship are as quietly accusing as this one. The speaker stands silent while another person, the "you" of the poem, loudly laments that people guard their inner lives. What the speaker sees, and the listener does not, is the irony at the heart of the situation: the complaining lover has been given exactly the intimacy they claim to be searching for, and has failed to recognize it.
The first stanza sets up a contrast between noise and silence. The speaker "hear[s]" the other person "hurl / Your grief abroad," a verb that makes complaint sound like a thrown object, aggressive and wasteful. Against this stands the image that gives the stanza its beauty: men defend "the coverts of their souls like plants that furl / Their petals from the night." A covert is a thicket where animals hide, and pairing it with a flower closing at dusk makes privacy seem natural rather than sinister. Hiding is not a flaw in human beings; it is how delicate things survive. The "you" reads this protectiveness as an obstacle, and so sets out to "take by storm" what a flower would only give up to warmth. The military phrasing is telling. "Schemes," "storm," "prize": the language of siege shows how the lover treats other people's hearts as territory to be captured, using "metaphor and theory" as weapons. There is a quiet joke here, too, since the poem itself is built from metaphor, but its metaphors are used to notice, not to conquer.
The stanza closes with a turn toward softness: "the warm, / Quick hearts that hide behind their cautious eyes." Here the rhythm loosens and the adjectives, "warm" and "quick," bring a pulse into the line. The real prize is not an abstraction but something alive, and it hides behind a "casual glance," which suggests that ordinary offhandedness may be a disguise rather than indifference.
The second stanza is where the poem pivots into judgment. "If ever there was madness it is this" takes its title phrase and aims it squarely at the other person: the madness lies in being "so deaf and blind" yet expecting to learn secrets. The accusation is sharpened by the sensory reversal that follows. The secrets "shouted in my kiss," a loud verb for the most intimate and wordless of acts. The speaker has been communicating all along, but in a language the lover, busy theorizing, could not hear. Yet that same lover "could kiss me fleetingly and turn / Away," and the enjambment enacts the turning-away, since the sentence itself swings across the line break.
Formally, the poem is tidy in a way that suits its argument. It follows a pattern of alternating rhymes (defend/spend, furl/storm is slightly off, but "furl" does link to "hurl"), and the final two lines break off as a rhyming couplet, "true" and "two." This shape resembles a sonnet that has been cut short, with the argument concentrated into its last pair of lines. The meter is a fairly regular iambic pentameter, which gives the voice a composed, measured quality. That control matters: the speaker is wounded, but expresses it with restraint, in contrast to the "hurled" grief of the person being addressed.
The closing couplet delivers the poem's central idea: "what things are true / Of twice ten thousand must be taught by two." General truths about human beings cannot be extracted through theory; they are learned only between two particular people, slowly and by attention. The numbers are carefully chosen, a vast crowd set against a pair, as if to say that knowledge of "men" in general is worthless without knowledge of one person in particular.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it turns the usual love complaint inside out. Instead of lamenting that the beloved is closed, the speaker suggests the closed one may be the seeker. The poem's quiet power comes from its refusal to shout, which is exactly the quality its lover lacks.