Love poems usually describe a plunge, a lightning strike or a fire. "Didn't Expect A Thing" goes the other way. Its speaker stumbles into love while looking elsewhere, then keeps asking whether it really happened. The central idea sits in the title: attachment arrives uninvited, and by the time the speaker can name it, it has already rearranged everything.
The poem is three tercets, each built the same way: a plain statement, a question, a closing statement. "My eyes looked into yours. / Was I accidentally falling for you? / Little did I know that I was." The second and third stanzas repeat the pattern, so the question always sits in the middle, hemmed in by facts. That is a neat picture of the speaker's state of mind: doubt held between things already known.
The first stanza holds the cleverest moment. The question opens with "Was I" and the answer closes on "that I was," so one small word swings the sentence from doubt to confession. "Little did I know" is also the voice of someone looking back. The questions are not really live, because the speaker already knows the answer and is replaying the moment of not knowing. The adverb "accidentally" and the verb "falling" help too. Falling is something that happens to you, and nothing in the stanza suggests a choice.
The second stanza turns from eyes to dreams. "Your dreams ran into mine" borrows the language of an unplanned meeting, as if two travellers had collided on the same road. The poem never says whether "dreams" means ambitions or the things we see asleep, and both readings work. Then comes the question "Was it a coincidence?" and a strangely flat reply: "We were very similar." After the romantic build-up this could feel like a letdown, but it rings true, because people often explain attraction in unglamorous words. The reply also sidesteps the question. Similarity is quietly offered as the reason it was not chance, without the speaker claiming fate.
The poem tracks a widening of stakes, and its grammar shows this. Each stanza pairs possessives: "my eyes... yours," "your dreams... mine," "your time... mine." The two people keep trading ownership of things. The things themselves move inward and grow: eyes, which are surface and body, then dreams, which are inner life, then time, which is life itself. "Your time would change all of mine" uses the biggest word in the poem, "all," and it treats time as the real currency of closeness. The verbs escalate as well, from "falling for" to "need you so much," the only point where the speaker admits dependence.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The language is short, conversational and end-stopped, with each line a complete sentence. Line length does some quiet work, though. The openers of the first two stanzas ("My eyes looked into yours," "Your dreams ran into mine") are about six syllables, while every line of the last stanza runs to roughly ten. The lines lengthen as the feeling grows and the speaker has more to say. The poem also begins on "My" and ends on "you," so it travels from one person to the other. The last line, "I never planned for these moments with you," echoes the title and settles on the plural "moments." The speaker is already counting what has accumulated.
The poem's weakness is that it is abstract. We get no place, no object and no gesture, and "you" could be anyone. Nothing in the text tells us who is speaking or to whom, so the poem has to stand on its own. That vagueness also lets readers slip their own story into it, and it keeps the focus on the speaker's surprise, which is the real subject.
The poem matters as a lesson in how little a poem needs. Repetition of structure, a handful of plain words and one well-placed echo ("Was I" / "that I was") can carry a feeling that many of us recognise: realising that something important began before we knew to pay attention.