I woke up at 5am to listen to the album, a second album dropped at 7am, a TV presenter turned up at 11am to film me close reading some song lyrics for ITV News while my cat screamed in the background, I appeared briefly on BBC Radio Newcastle, and long story short, the day I set aside to do some serious analysis of Taylor Swift’s lyrics has become a day spent assuring the public that Swift’s lyrics are worthy of such analysis.
The analysis will need to wait until next week’s newsletter. Here are some probably incoherent thoughts:
Anthology is, it seems, the album’s organizing principle (based on the double album being called The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology and Swift’s use of the word in her post on X marking its release). “Anthology” is from the Greek for a collection of flowers. It implies selection and arrangement - choice, in other words - leading us to think about what might have been omitted, what the selection criteria were, who decides.
I think “The Manuscript” sums up what Swift thinks the message of the album is: that writing down what happened in the past allows you to experience it fully, and then to distance yourself from it:
The only thing that's left is the manuscript
One last souvenir from my trip to your shores
Now and then I reread the manuscript
But the story isn't mine anymore
She also emphasizes in her post on X that “Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it.” This doubles as a request not to harass the people we might think her songs are about: “This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed.” This is both a statement about the purpose of art and a specific request of her fans as to how to interpret and act on her art. (Don’t dwell, and don’t avenge - leave emotion behind).
Is “The Manuscript” in question “All Too Well?” (which she also imagines as a book in the short film?) Why is it a manuscript and not a printed/published volume? Is the implication that she seeks publication at the end (“the story isn’t [only] mine anymore”) or completely separates herself from the characters in it (“the story isn’t mine [at all]”)? I don’t know but I want to spend more time with this song.
I really like “I Can Do it With a Broken Heart.” People keep asking me which of Swift’s lines are most poetic, or most like Paradise Lost or The Prelude or whatever, but this is just such a fully Swiftian line:
He said he'd love me for all time
But that time was quite short
Maybe I’m just sleep deprived but I laughed out loud when I listened to this one.
[An update: My partner, who is an expert in Tudor verse and is reading over my shoulder as I write this, notes that this is very similar from some lines from a poem sometimes attributed to Thomas Wyatt (CCXXXV in R. A. Rebholz’s edition of Wyatt):
Quondam was I. She said for ever.
That ‘ever’ lasted but a short while.
So much for purely Swiftian style.]
Anyway, I am going to go listen to some more Taylor Swift and feed my cat, who has been very bad today, probably because she knows it is a special occasion and anything goes.