How beautiful you are

In this post I would like to comment on a song by a band I absolutely love: The Cure. The song is called How beautiful you are, and was released in the 1987 album Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me. It was actually inspired by a poem written around 1869 by the French poet Charles Baudelaire, ‘The eyes of the poor’. The lyrics are actually very similar to the lines of the poem. The poem is narrated by a man who is sitting at a café with the woman he loves, when he notices a poor man dressed in rags, who is carrying two children. All three of them are looking from the street at the couple, admiring the world they live in. This sight makes the narrator feel ashamed of himself . But when he looks at his woman to share these feelings with her, he realises she doesn’t feel the same way he does. She wants to ask for someone to send those people away, as she cannot stand the way they are staring.


Besides showing how insensitive people can be, I believe what  this poem illustrates is  the absurdity of the concept of  `soul mates’ . We should not delude ourselves into thinking that because we are in love with someone, we have some special connection that makes us think in the same way and understand each other completely. It is the realisation of the fact that you will never truly know a person, no matter how close you are, as the final line of the song clearly states: 'That no-one ever knows or loves another'.


'The eyes of the poor'

'How beautiful you are' lyrics

'How beautiful you are' song on youtube