Despite the continuous controversies surrounding Taylor Swift and her music, I think it’s safe to say that she’s a lyrical genius. In my opinion, her music is worth listening to because of her lyrics. It isn’t everyday that you get to hear music that makes you feel deeply enough that it transports you to a different time in your life, or a future you hope for yourself. That right there is the main reason I have grown to love her music.
Her album The Tortured Poets Department is my favorite album of hers because it contains the songs that I relate to the most. The songs on this album are so powerful and deep, that even the more upbeat ones like “Florida!!!” and “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” contain a deeper meaning hidden in between the lyrics. The song I’m going to decipher is “The Prophecy” though.
We’ll start with the first few lines:
Hand on the throttle
Thought I caught lighting in a bottle
Oh, but it’s gone again
Let’s assume that this is a song about love, as you probably could with most of her songs. In regards to a car, the word throttle is what controls the power of an engine, so the first line hints at speeding head first into loving someone or entering another relationship. The lighting refers to the spark you think you share with a person, and how you think that you have bottled it up for safe keeping, only for it to be snatched away from you. These first few verses hint to quickly falling for someone, but realizing it was under some kind of false pretense.
And it was written
I got cursed like Eve got bitten
Oh, was it punishment?
For background on these few lines, one of the first stories in the Bible is a woman named Eve biting into an apple and being cursed by God for eating such forbidden fruit. In a sense, you could say that God bit her back for disobeying him as a punishment. This analogy Swift makes relates to being on the bitter end of continuous relationships that never work out. The trend is so continuous that it starts to feel like a punishment and one might think, “Did I do something to deserve this?”
Pad around when I get home
I guess a lesser woman would’ve lost hope
A greater woman wouldn’t beg
But I looked to the sky and said
You start contemplating why failed relationships keep happening to you, why you’re never good enough for an honest relationship, and why this particular form of happiness can never last for you. Despite all of these things floating around in your mind, you don’t lose hope on finding love, even when you feel like you have every reason to do so. Yet, you’re not above begging a higher power to give you the kind of love you’ve been hoping to have and to keep. Swift does an amazing job of painting this picture with just a few words. It’s a feeling that I suppose many people have experienced, at least I know I have.
Please
I’ve been on my knees
Change the prophecy
Don’t want money
Just someone who wants my company
The beginning of the chorus is the continuous plea that is being made of simply just wanting to be loved and wanting to be put above everything else. You beg a higher power to change the prophecy of the damaged love life you’ve been given. You don’t care for money because like the famous saying goes, “money doesn’t buy happiness.” Instead, someone to share company and time with is like getting happiness, but for free.
Let it once be me
Who do I have to speak to
About if they can redo
The prophecy?
Here she begins to question if it’s a higher power she should be begging too after incessantly doing so. She’s begging to whichever higher power possesses the ability to change the dooming prophecy that’s been placed over her.
Cards on the table
Mine play out like fools in a fable, oh
It was sinking in
Here she starts to head down a different route and tries her luck with a tarot card reader, but it doesn’t give her any better outcomes. The cards clearly aren’t in favor of her love life getting any better, creating a sinking feeling as she feels like she’s exhausted all of her options at this point.
Slow is the quicksand
Poison blood from the wound of the pricked hand
Oh, still I dream of him
(Chorus repeats)
The feeling sinking into her was slower than sinking into quicksand because, despite the odds that still weren’t in her favor, she still dreams of love finding her. So the repeating of the chorus is her again trying her luck with begging to a higher power to provide this love for her. She’s begging once again for her love prophecy to change.
And I sound like an infant
Feeling like the very last drops of an ink pen
A greater woman stays cool
But I howl like a wolf at the moon
She’s now starting to realize how irksome she sounds in her begging, comparing herself to a baby who cries non-stop essentially about the same thing over and over again. Her cries and pleads are making her inconsolable, and they’re so loud they resemble a wolf howling to the moon.
And I look unstable
Gathered with a coven round a sorceress’ table
A greater woman has faith
But even statues crumble if they’re made to wait
She’s feeling the absence of love so deeply that it’s affecting how she behaves and causing her begs to appear so pitiful that other people might think she’s lost her cool or gone crazy. It’s making her so crazy, that she hints to needing help from some kind of witch or sorceress. It reminds me of those witch coven scenes in The Vampire Diaries when they would surround one of the characters and perform some kind of ritual. This is the point where she’s starting to lose faith because of how long she’s been waiting for her love life to blossom into something real, lasting, and permanent. Maybe a greater woman wouldn’t beg, maybe they just wouldn’t lose faith, but she doesn’t think she’s a greater woman because she continues to beg and lose faith all at once.
I’m so afraid I sealed my fate
No sign of soulmates
I’m just a paperweight
In shades of greige
Spending my last coin so someone will tell me
It’ll be okay
This may be the point in which she’s finally given in to the fact that her doomed love life is just fated and there is nothing she can do about it. There is no sign of love, a love interest, or a soulmate for her, but in one last desperate attempt, she pays someone, like perhaps a psychic, just to tell her that it will be okay. To ease her fears and worries about never finding love, and it works.
The song ends with a repeat of the chorus and first verse where she goes back to begging after getting that glimpse of hope from the last coin she spent for someone to tell her that everything will be okay. She finds love again (first verse), and it yet again leaves her quickly, so she repeats the process of looking to the sky and begging. It seems that the song ends with a hopeful tone though, despite this horrid process repeating itself once again.
I think this song does a perfect job of embodying the fear of never finding love and being in the constant cycle of dating and liking someone, only for it to not work out in the end with the relationship terminating quickly. As someone who relates to that sentiment, I can also relate to gripping onto the hope of never giving up on finding love, even if I want to sometimes, and even if I do feel like I’m going a little crazy. There’s someone for everyone, and just like Taylor (our newly engaged queen), we’ll all find our person eventually. Also, who knows? Maybe it’ll end up being a football tight end… things could definitely be a lot worse than that.