6 December 2017

Taylor Swift’s poem for Vogue: a close-reading

This poem feels like it was written specifically to be quoted by the blonde lead in a Nicholas Sparks movie, which is also the most Taylor Swift thing I can think of.

By Anna Leszkiewicz

Taylor Swift doesn’t do interviews any more. But she would quite like to be in a glossy fashion magazine if it’s cool enough. This presents us with a conundrum. How do you get into a big, high-status publication without having to be questioned in any way, shape, or form? The answer – write a poem and be done with it!

Yep, Vogue have allowed Taylor Swift to grace their cover in exchange for 31 lines of what some may call poetry! Or, in Vogue’s own words, they have bagged “the world-class lyricist’s stunning words on the timely subject of reinvention and moving on”. It’s called “The Trick to Holding On”, and you can read the poem in full at Vogue, or below, as we give it a full analysis.

We have four stanzas, all of eight lines except the second, which has seven. There’s no formal rhyme scheme to speak of, but we get a few random rhyming lines here and there, which is nice. The poem opens with quite a forceful metre that quickly dissolves into totally free verse. It’s message is: to hold on to your life, your sanity, and your sense of self, you have to let go of people who upset you, that drift apart from you, and that let you down. It’s a little defensive, nostalgic, faux-wise and trite, which is to say, it’s exactly as you’d imagine it to be.

Let go of the ones who hurt you
Let go of the ones you outgrow
Let go of the words they hurl your way
as you’re walking out the door

Wow. We begin with some textbook anaphora, and in the imperative mood, no less. It’s a pretty sombre tone. It might remind you of some of the great funeral poems: Christina Rossetti’s “Remember”, “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep” by Mary Elizabeth Frye, WH Auden’s “Funeral Blues” (“Stop all the clocks…”) and “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas – if those poems were about getting mad at a pop star for stealing dancers or Kim Kardashian leaking recordings of private phone calls.

It might also remind you of the e. e. cummings poem “let it go – the”, if it were written in full sentences, with hearts dotting the “i”s. (That poem encourages the reader to “let go” of “the truthful liars, “the false fair friends” and “the oath cracked” – so, basically the most Taylor Swift phrases you’ve ever heard.) The difference, of course, is that this poem is more of an inspirational cross-stitch bookmark than a poem.

Anyway, classic Swiftian concerns from the start: haters, betrayal, doors (Taylor Swift loves doors, man), and a mysterious, tyrannous “they”, always out to get her.

The only thing cut and dry
In this hedge-maze life
Is the fact that their words will cut
but your tears will dry

Here Swift takes the common or garden expression “cut and dry” – final, decided, settled, definite – and is like, well, you know the only thing in life that’s CUT AND DRY??? The fact that words CUT but tears DRY. THE EXPERIENCE OF PAIN IS INHERENT IN THE HUMAN CONDITION – BUT SO TOO, IS HEALING. Oh, AND ALSO: LIFE IS A MAZE (or “hedge-maze”, because I’m a classy bitch), NOT A STRAIGHTFORWARD PATH!!! Words to live by.

They don’t tell you this when you are young
You can’t hold on to everything
Can’t show up for everyone
You pick your poison
Or your cure
Phone numbers you know by heart
And the ones you don’t answer any more

We’re back to that “they” – which has now seemingly shifted from all the bad people who are trying to ruin your life, to adults who should be giving better advice. (Either way, they suck.)

We get our first little hint of a rhyme here, in cure/more – linking not answering the phone to toxic people with healing, and reversely framing the compulsion to remember a full phone number as a kind of poison.

Any sense of regularly or metre fully collapses here – instead we get these overlong lines opening and closing the stanza, getting shorter towards the middle, isolating “Or your cure” as the big – dun dun dunnn – dramatic moment of the verse. Guys, you can CHOOSE your cure! Choose healing! Let go!

This verse is one line shorter than all the others. I tried to find a reason for this (Seven numbers in a phone number? Uh…. It’s the most powerful magical number?!) but I really don’t think there is one.

Hold on to the faint recognition in
the eye of a stranger
As it catches you in its lustrous net
How quickly we become intertwined
How wonderful it is to forget
All the times your intuition failed you
But it hasn’t killed you yet
Hold on to childlike whims and moonlight swims and your blazing self-respect

Possibly the weirdest section of the whole thing. I’m not sure if this is an actual stranger, or a long lost acquaintance who’s become a stranger, or whether the recognition is real or imagined. I also don’t know what a “lustrous net” is or would look like, or how an eye can have one. I don’t know how self-respect can blaze. I’m very confused, basically. Also, Taylor Swift has read Joan Didion, and she don’t care who knows it!!!!

There are lots of words here that it feels like Swift has chosen because they are “poetic”: “lustrous”, “intertwined”, “blazing”. Images, too: “the eye of a stranger” “childlike whims”, “moonlight swims”. The result is a tangle of mixed metaphors that feels like it was written specifically to be quoted by the blonde lead in a Nicholas Sparks movie, which is also the most Taylor Swift thing I can think of.

Meanwhile, we have the most rhyming of all here (net/forget/yet, whims/swims), and some of the most regular metre, as if Swift is really getting into it – or slipping back into the rhythm of song writing. The four lines that begin “How quickly…” would make sense as a little verse on their own, with a cute nursery rhyme scheme and metre (if it wasn’t for that irritating “it” in the fourth line) but then it dissolves again.

And if you drive the roads of this town
Ones you’ve gone down so many times before
Flashback to all the times
Life nearly ran you off the road
But tonight your hand is steady

If there’s one thing I know, it’s that Taylor Swift fucking loves a flashback. “Love Story” begins with a flashback to a “balcony in summer air”, “Forever & Always” is about the “flashback to when he said forever and always”. There are flashbacks in “If This Was a Movie”, “Red” and, most recently, “Dress”. Other shit she loves: driving metaphors (“Red”, “Treacherous”, “Style”, “Getaway Car”). This might be both meaningless and cliché-ridden – but it sure is her.