The Confusing Poetry of Taylor Swift
At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name.
It ate the food it ne'er had eat,
And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder-fit;
The helmsman steered us through!
And a good south wind sprung up behind;
The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariner's hollo!
In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
It perched for vespers nine;
Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
Glimmered the white Moon-shine.'
'God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—
Why look'st thou so?'—With my cross-bow
I shot the albatross.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ~ 1834 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Like most teenagers, I didn’t care about poetry. It was just an obstacle in my English classes, one that I often tripped over. I see that look of angry confusion in the faces of my students now. Poetry hasn’t got a great reputation with the kids these days.
I wonder now if that is shifting.
I had not planned on writing about this album. I listened to it when it dropped, and felt odd about it. Mostly, I cringed at the titled - THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT. It didn’t feel like a appropriate title for the next decree to past down to us mere mortals by the current queen of pop music. What’s she got to be tortured by? Since when was she a poet? But, I like Taylor Swift most in the depths of her acoustic despair, so I gave it a go.
It was fine. Good. Weird.
I liked Fortnight a lot at first, but I struggled to understand why. But the rest of the album didn’t really sit well with me. I don’t know how I feel about the renewing of Kardashian revenge themes. I don’t know how I feel about the constant online discourses attempting to sort each song into boxes labelled Joe, Matty, or Travis. I don’t know how I feel about Jack Antonoff’s continued wub-wubbing, a feature of her music that I have only tolerated for a long time now.
I don’t like to say it, but this album is something of a mess. And I’m not alone in thinking that. That’s how I felt last on the 20th April, 2024.
So I’m glad I waited a week to write this post.
Wise men once said
"One bad seed kills the garden"
"One less temptress
One less dagger to sharpen"
Locked me up in towers
But I'd visit in your dreams
And they tried to warn you about me
Cross your thoughtless heart
Only liquor anoints you
She's the albatross
She is here to destroy you
Devils that you know
Raise worse hell than a stranger
She's the death you chose
You're in terrible danger
And when that sky rains fire on you
And you're persona non grata
I'll tell you how I've been there too
And that none of it matters
The Albatross ~ 2024 by Taylor Swift
By the time I met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, I was a little more open to poetry. I was 18 years old, in my Extension English class in high school, meeting him in the battlefield of our Romanticism unit. I’m not sure if The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is my favourite of his, but it’s grand plot and haunting images certainly put it in the echelons of the classics. The part that captured me, however, was the death of the titular seabird.
Why did the Mariner shoot the Albatross?
We discussed it in class. Maybe the Mariner was a sick man, with a psychotic streak that was only unleashed in the barren harshness of the Artic circle. Maybe the Mariner really believed the bird was a bad omen, despite the protests of his fellow sailors, and shot it down in a calculated act of sacrifice. Maybe the Mariner was spiteful, angry at the bird and what it represented. Whatever that was.
But maybe he didn’t do it for any reason at all. It was just a meaningless, violent act.
This is what my high school teacher imposed upon us. The reality is that the Mariner had no real reason to want the bird dead. The text doesn’t strongly suggest that the bird was a bad omen - in fact, the text suggests the exact opposite. The text doesn’t show us that the Mariner was glad for the bird’s demise, or that he had any good reasons to kill it. The Mariner, along with his crew, bemoan his actions immediately suffer greatly as a consequence.
In Swift’s song, The Albatross, she takes on the persona of a sea bird thought to bring bad tidings, instead proven to be a force for hope and change. In a sense, it is a song about reputation - one that proceeds and underestimates the good in a person. It is also a song that seems to examine the impulses and vices of so-called wise men, in their liquor-soaked delusions of grandeur.
When compared to Coleridge’s work, a new layer unravels. Two sides of one malicious act, capture together.
The Mariner killed an albatross for no reason, an act that brought down the horrific wrath of the universe.
The Albatross knows that men act without reason. The Albatross will swoop in at the rescue, with no promise of gratitude or mercy.
If it were any other song on any other album, this comparative analysis would likely be shallow and a little bit silly. For example, there’s probably not a whole lot to be gained from comparing Shakespeare’s 1597 tragedy of love-sick teens to Swift’s 2008 song. But here, at the Tortured Poets Department, we are invited to read in as deeply as we can. This is not a happy coincidence. Taylor Swift is, after all, a poet.
And here I found, once freed from notions of easter eggs and ex-boyfriends, what I feel to be the shining gem of this album, at the very end (of the middle) of the record.
"The crown is stained but you're the real queen
Flesh and blood amongst war machines
You're the new god we're worshipping
Promise to be ... dazzling"
Beauty is a beast that roars
Down on all fours
Demanding "more"
Only when your girlish glow
Flickers just so
Do they let you know
It's hell on earth to be heavenly
Them's the breaks
They don't come gently
"You look like Taylor Swift
In this light
We're loving it.
You've got edge
she never did
The future's bright
... Dazzling."
Clara Bow ~ 2024 by Taylor Swift
I want so badly not only to make art, but for that art to be loved by someone. I don’t want attention. I want someone to care. I want to be serious. I want to be found. I want to be chosen from all the options and elevated above the rabble. I don’t want to be in a spotlight. I just want to be seen. And I don’t want to admit that desire, because that would make me a narcassist. I don’t want to be Taylor Swift, or Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I want to be dazzling.
This album feels like it was made for writers. It feels like it was made by an artist reflecting on her art - as a manifestation of her ego and her life, and as a bloodletting practice to purify the soul. Artists may be tortured, but to make art from one’s suffering is to declare that suffering worth paying attention to.
So is this album a mess? Yes. But so am I. And I can’t hate something that reached into parts of me that I didn’t know were there.
I want to leave you with one more except. I told you that by the time I was reading Coleridge, I had softened on poetry. This last poem is the reason for it. I found it in a book in my mum’s office when I was 17. I read it, and burst into tears.
No poem had ever done that to me. No poem as done that since. I hope that everyone finds art that does that to them, at least once in a lifetime.
the time i dropped your almost body down
down to meet the waters under the city
and run one with the sewage to the sea
what did i know about waters rushing back
what did i know about drowning
or being drowned
you would have been born into winter
in the year of the disconnected gas
and no car?????? we would have made the thin
walk over genesee hill into the canada wind
to watch you slip like ice into strangers’ hands
you would have fallen naked as snow into winter
if you were here i could tell you these
and some other things
if i am ever less than a mountain
for your definite brothers and sisters
let the rivers pour over my head
let the sea take me for a spiller
of seas??????? let black men call me stranger
always??????? for your never named sake
the lost baby poem ~ 1971 by Lucille Clifton
Images ? Suzy Hazelwood via Pexels