Thou Blind Man’s Mark Poem Analysis

In the poem “Thou Blind Man’s Mark” Sir Philip Sidney conveys how desire affects one’s mind and drives the mind. In the poem, the author continually expresses how desire changes people’s perceptions and controls their minds.

The poem starts out with Sidney expressing distraught feelings towards desire, and its effect on the mind. Like how he describes desire as the “Blind man’s mark” and how desire affects everyone and especially making them unaware of what will happen if they were to follow that desire. He also calls those who are captivated by desire as “fool’s self-chosen snare” and how those who are affected by desire are choosing to fall into their own traps and if they were not fools desire would not capture them. 

The author, Sir Philip Sidney, continues to express how the mind is destroyed by desire and describes how the mind is destroyed and turned into a monster. The line “With price of mangled mind, thy worthless ware” describes how falling into the captivations of desire mangles or distorts the awareness of the mind and said with “mangled” and “worthless ware.” Sidney also says that desire is the one evil that bands all of them together with the line “Band of all evils, cradle of causeless care” basically saying that desire is what causes evil in humans, and therefore it is the evil of all evils.

Near the end of the poem, Sidney communicates that he himself has fallen into the grasps of desire and is destroying himself, and is trying to rid himself of .. Line 11 “In vain thou kindlest all thy smoky fire,” Sidney is showing how he will no longer be capitvated by the grasp of desire and he will not fall to nothingness and let desire control him, but yet he is letting desire control him, as in the final line of the poem, he says “Desiring naught but how to kill desire,” indicating that he is fighting fire with fire, or in this case desire with desire, by having the desire to rid desire he is essentially unable to be affected by desire.

In the poem, Sir Philip Sidney expresses the effects of desire, its effects on the human mind, then goes on to show how he has the desire to rid himself of desire.