The lyrics are almost identical to a poem written by Charles Baudelaire around 1869. The poem is called "The Eyes Of The Poor." It starts with the line, "So you would like to know why I hate you today?" and goes on to explain the story just as the song does.
Vocalist Robert Smith reflected on the songwriting process and the influence of a book of Baudelaire poems in a 1987 interview with Promotional 12": "I read through them all and one just really struck me, because I'd actually written a song like that... about how you think that you really know someone, and you really love someone, and suddenly discover that they can react to something you find very important, and they react in a totally different way, and you can't believe that it's the same person. I had a set of words that had that sort of idea in it." He added: "Once I'd read it I thought it's really a good idea actually having it so that you take it down to one incident. I tried doing it into a very general sense of not understanding someone, but then I thought I should actually take one particular incident and write a song - that was about the most difficult song to write because I wanted to get it just right, so that it sounded like a song rather than just a literary exercise."
This features on the band's seventh studio album, which was their first to enter the Top 40 on the US albums chart. Its big hit was the single "Just Like Heaven."
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