One interpretation:

Intro music: a slow, dirge-like organ that makes the song start off more like an elegy than a ballad. Brings to mind some beautiful, elegant old waltz that has been lost to time and melancholia.

Love is Blindness
I don't want to see
Won't you wrap the night
Around me
Take my heart
Love is Blindness

Pretty straightforward, lyrically... sets up the metaphors which will be used in the rest of the song; all of the other verses of the song will play off the idea of love as being equivalent with blindness.

There's a very simple percussion track going on in the background that is, perhaps, there both to sound like the inner workings of a clock (see stanza 3) and to give the song its slow, sad pace.

In a parked car
In a crowded street
You see your love
Made complete
Thread is ripping
The knot is slipping
Love is Blindness


A one-night stand. The line about seeing "love / made complete" is clearly ironic, since love is here being represented in terms of "parked cars", "crowded streets", and ripping or slipping fabric. More than a little bit shiver-inducing.

It is quite possibly also the case that this stanza is about somebody shooting up heroin, since one has to tie a band around their arm to coerce up the veins.

Love is clockworks
And cold steel
Fingers too numb to feel
Squeeze the handle
Blow out the candle
Love is Blindness

This description is particularly puzzling. I think that it's a continuation of the irony expressed in the previous stanza: Love as devoid of sensation and passion (the candle, perhaps?), as an emotionless, mechanical act.

The alternate interpretation of love as metaphor for heroin use also holds through this stanza; one is supposed to make a tight fist ("fingers too numb too feel / squeze the handle") while he or she shoots up.

Still another interpretation of this stanza is that it's about a man or woman committing suicide.

Love is Blindness
I don't want to see
Won't you wrap the night
Around me
Oh my love
Love is Blindness

The repetition of the first stanza/chorus for me is now transformed by the irony and circumstance of the previous two. "I don't want to see" in particular nor has an emotional power that was absent the first time through.

A little death
Without mourning
No call
And no warning
Baby, a dangerous idea
That almost makes sense

This bridge is my favorite part, lyrically of the song, and it weaves all three interpretations together very, very well.

A "little death" (euphamistic for an orgasm) without morning could be the climax of the love act, and the next four lines could be an exploration of the dangers of physical love.

It could also be a description of the high that one gets off of heroin use. "No call / and no warning" conjures up an overdose or, instead, an ironic aside.

More literally, this stanza could be, again, about suicide, and it could describe both the suddenness of a friend who kills him/herself and the irrational sense of desiring that end.

Love is drowning
In a deep well
Full of secrets
And no one to tell
Take the money
Honey
Blindness

Again, this stanza supports multiple readings:

Love is comparable to drowning in a deep well because it requres a surrender of the self at the same time that it reinforces the limits of how intimate one can be with another human being.

Heroin addiction and the high from use both are comparable to the act of drowning. "Secrets" and "money", because the purchase and use of the drug must be discrete.

The psychological state that would push somebody towards suicide is like drowning: a profound loneliness and inability to connect meaningfully with friends around you.

What I find particularly satisfying about this stanza is that it's impossible, for me at least, to support just one reading through. Each time I read it one way, hints of the others keep popping up.

Love is Blindness
I don't want to see
Won't you wrap the night
Around me
Oh my love
Blindness

The final lines of the song both repeat its motifs and merge together the song's imagery of love and death and darkness.

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That all said, The Edge's final guitar solo at 3:16 still gives me goosebumps.