“Take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die” writes Taylor Swift in her 2020 release ‘the lakes’, a line that, six years on, feels almost deliberately prophetic given the current conversations surrounding her career.
With the release of Showgirl: The Encore, Swift’s supposed lyrical prowess has come under fire. Critics are divided on the lack of depth the record displayed, a number suggesting a decline in songwriting quality or exhausted creativity. Can swift, as articulated by TIME Magazine still be considered “the modern age’s most notorious poet?”
Certainly no song in her discography so readily invites this comparison as ‘the lakes’. Abundant with rich, sensuous imagery and poetic allusions, at its core, Swift’s ‘the lakes’, encapsulates a deep-seated desire for anonymity and centralises notions of escapism and nostalgia in their purest, most romanticised form. The first verse’s lyrical metaphors of “cynical clones” and “hunters with cell phones,” alluding to paparazzi surveillance, affirm this theme, gaining particular significance given Swift’s high-profile and dissected lifestyle.
An instance of verbal art, Swift’s use of language, just as the Romantic poets that influence her, evidences a degree of design. Exemplified in the opening rhetorical line “is it romantic how all my elegies eulogise me?” Not only does she liken, rather wryly, and with a satirical edge, her modern breakup songs to elegies, traditionally solemn poems of mourning, but she also writes a raw and poignant direct address to a lover, or later coined “muse,” as is often the
Romantic preoccupation.
This self-mythologising permeates the entire poetic narrative of ‘the lakes’, and much of Swift’s catalogue, a trait that grants her writing a resonant quality for a variety of diverse audiences.
Alongside manipulating language, Swift, unsurprisingly, also pays close attention to the aural performance of her words, utilising, with pronounced effect, repetition, patterning, and internal echoes to create an appealing synchronicity. Most effective is the line, “those Windermere peaks look like the perfect place to cry,” where the alliterative plosives generate a rhythmic subdued turbulence, echoing both the physical Cumbrian landscape, the literal mountains, hills, and fells Swift denotes and the internal interior landscape she is mapping.
Capable of genuine poetic resonance, ‘the lakes’ serves as a clear reminder that, at its best, Swift’s songwriting, can demonstrate expert literary craftsmanship. Yet TIME’s description of her as “the modern age’s most notorious poet,” whether justified or not, prompts a deeper, more provocative investigation. Where will the shifting art of songwriting sit in the literary canon? And, as she enters the next chapter of her career, will Swift’s place within it remain compellingly unresolved?
Image via Flossie Haskins @studioflorencemary for The Student
