“The Tortured Poets Department” is for the tortured former English majors.
After Taylor Swift announced a bonus track entitled “The Albatross” accompanying her highly anticipated 11th studio album, the theorizing was, well, swift.
An albatross is a seabird with a deep history as a literary metaphor, with roots in Samuel Taylor (Taylor, get it?) Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The lengthy poem was originally published in 1798’s “Lyrical Ballads,” often said to mark the beginning of the Romantic movement in British literature.
In everyday vernacular, an albatross might be described as something hanging around one’s neck, like a curse or burden.
Merriam-Webster’s dictionary helped clear up some initial confusion by sharing its entry for “albatross” on X Feb. 23, the same day Swift shared the name of the song.
“albatross | noun/ a: something that causes persistent deep concern or anxiety/ b: something that greatly hinders accomplishment : ENCUMBRANCE,” the post read.
Swift is no stranger to elaborate references to literature and storytelling. In fact, her 2020 albums “Folklore” and “Evermore” were stories within albums, creating her own mythology through the track lists.
But “Tortured Poets Department” is different. Instead, the references will likely contain Swift’s deeply personal truths. Before her Melbourne concert, Swift called the album a “lifeline” and something she “needed to make.”
“The things I was going through, the things I was writing about, it kind of reminded me why songwriting is something that like actually gets me through my life. I’ve never had an album where I needed songwriting more than I needed it on ‘Tortured Poets,'” she said.
That confession — plus song titles like “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart” — leaves fans theorizing that the album will detail her most recent breakup, her split with English actor Joe Alwyn after six years together.
And she might be using literature to do just that. After all, as she said in the initial album announcement, “All’s fair in love and poetry…”
Here’s a deep dive on some potential literary references behind Swift’s upcoming 11th album. (Don’t worry — we’ll be back with updates after listening to the tracks on April 19.)
‘The Albatross’
It’s impossible to study Romantic literature without considering Coleridge and William Wordsworth’s joint venture, “Lyrical Ballads,” a collection of poems.
One of the book’s centerpieces is “Rime of Ancient Mariner,” written by Coleridge. In this poem, a sailor attends a wedding and recounts a previous voyage he went on to a guest.
During this trip, the ship sailed into a storm, all the way up to the Antarctic, before a seabird, an albatross, lands on deck and leads the boat out of danger. The albatross is praised, fed and nurtured, but the mariner shoots the albatross with a crossbow, like an archer (wink).
The ship initially finds safer weather and conditions after the albatross’ death, but the crew is soon chased by wrathful spirits. As punishment, the crew makes the mariner wear the corpse of the albatross around his neck.
The ship then encounters the embodiments of “Death” and “Life-in-Death.” In a dice game, death wins the lives of the crew while the mariner is subjected to “Life-In-Death,” and he’s forced to watch the rest of his crew die and experience lasting punishment.
He eventually learns to appreciate the value of all living things but pays eternal penance by wandering the Earth to tell his ominous cautionary tale.
The core metaphor of the poem is the albatross is a burden, an insurmountable sense of guilt that hinders success and is impossible to shake.
So Swift’s song “The Albatross” could be about something that haunts Swift, or someone that a destroyed Swift is haunting.
It wouldn’t be the first time Swift dabbled in allusions to literature’s Romantic period. “The Lakes,” a bonus track from “Folklore,” references a setting “where poets went to die.”
She specifically cites the peaks of Windermere, a lake that William Wordsworth, the co-author of “Lyrical Ballads,” wrote about in his autobiographical poem, “The Prelude.”
She also subtly makes direct reference to Wordsworth, with the verse: “I’ve come too far to watch some namedropping sleaze/ Tell me what are my words worth.”
Perhaps instead of Wordsworth, known for elevating the beauty of everyday through poetry told in a common vernacular, Swift may now be taking up the tradition of Coleridge, often described as somewhat of a misunderstood genius, focusing on the supernatural and pushing the limits of his own imagination.
‘The Bolter’
Swift’s second bonus track, “The Bolter,” is far less specific compared to “The Albatross.” An alternate version of the album cover tied to the song features the sentence, “You don’t get to tell me about sad.”
A “bolter” is defined by Merriam-Webster as “one that bolts,” more specifically, “a horse given to running away” or “a person who ends his or her affiliation with a political party.”
With many expecting “Tortured Poets” to be about the end of a romance, “The Bolter” could refer to someone who bolts from a relationship.
But some Swifties have pointed to a 2008 biography of Lady Idina Sackville, an English aristocrat from the 1900s known for her numerous romantic liaisons that scandalized society.
Her great-granddaughter Frances Osborne compiled letters, diaries and legends to tell Sackville’s story, including her five marriages and life as part of the hedonistic Happy Valley set, a group of primarily white British people who resided in Kenya. And what did she call the book? “The Bolter.”
If songwriting about historical figures sounds strange for a pop singer like Swift, one only has to turn to her 2020 hit “The Last Great American Dynasty.” The third song from “Folklore” chronicles the life of Rebekah Harkness, an eccentric American socialite who owned a Rhode Island seafront house that Taylor Swift bought in 2013.
‘The Black Dog’
Swift’s “fourth and final” “Tortured Poets Department” bonus track is “The Black Dog,” a loaded title that predictably stirred plenty of theories, ranging from it as a metaphor for depression to a reference to a beloved “Harry Potter” character.
The special album cover associated with the track states, “Old habits die screaming.”
Death is one of the most immediate associations of the symbol of the black dog. Often described as a demonic hellhound, the black dog, or Black Shuck as it’s known in some English folkloric traditions, often has glowing eyes and is a supernatural, villainous animal.
The black dog is arguably most famous as a figure in “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” a Sherlock Holmes crime novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle first published in 1902. In the story, a hound haunts an estate and the heirs to the Baskerville family keep mysteriously dying.
In the end, the antagonist, a member of the family seeking to inherit the fortune, had trained a black dog to kill certain targets and covers it in phosphorus to give it a spectral appearance. The story is a cautionary tale in giving in to superstition.
The symbolism of the black dog has carried into contemporary fiction. In J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series, the black dog is known as the Grim, an omen of death. Harry Potter sees the Grim in his tea leaves during divination class in the third book of the children’s series, but again, there proves a rational explanation. The black dog turns out to be the character Sirius Black in his animal form.
But another key to understanding an allusion to “the black dog” lies outside of fiction. Writers like Samuel Johnson and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill described melancholia and depression as a “black dog” clouding their mental state.
‘But Daddy I Love Him’
OK, so this song title isn’t technically from a book or poem. But it could be a reference to a line from the animated Disney classic, “The Little Mermaid.”
In January 2019, at a New Years Eve party with a “childhood heroes” theme, Swift wore a red wig and green tail to dress up as Ariel from the 1989 film. So her appreciation of “The Little Mermaid” has been publicly declared, serving as further evidence that the track title might be a reference to one of Ariel’s quotes.
In a scene towards the beginning of the movie, Ariel’s father discovers she saved Prince Eric after a shipwreck, risking her life by going to the ocean surface to save his. As King Triton tries to reprimand her, she shouts, “Daddy, I love him,” before he destroys her collection of mortal treasures.
The rest of the film tells the story of a mermaid giving up her voice to be with the man she loves, which some fans have connected to her private relationship with her ex, Alwyn.
Fittingly, “The Little Mermaid” film was inspired by Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale of the same name. First published in 1837, the original “Little Mermaid” tale focuses on a mermaid who saves a human, falls in love and makes a deal with a sea witch in exchange for legs. But the similarities stop there.
In order to get legs, the little mermaid takes a potion that is compared to the physical sensation of being stabbed. Without her tail, walking is compared to “treading upon sharp knives.”
Once ashore, she struggles to receive the prince’s attention, and he mistakes the mermaid who saved him for another princess, whom he marries.
In her heartbreak, the mermaid’s sisters strike another deal with the sea witch, bringing a dagger to shore. If the mermaid kills the prince, she’ll be able to return to the sea and her suffering will end.
She can’t bring herself to do it, and she fails in both bargains with the sea witch, dying of a broken heart and dissolving into sea foam. But some interpret the story as having a happy ending, as the little mermaid turns into a spirit, giving her the eternal soul she also craved.
‘Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?’
While not a direct reference to a book, person or film, the question in the song title “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” bears a striking similarity to two famous literature references.
First, there’s “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” a 1933 song written for an animated cartoon of the “Three Little Pigs” tale. In the cartoon, the three pigs famously each build a house. Two aim to finish the structure as fast and as easily as possible, building homes out of straw and sticks, while the third eschews fun for quality. The first two pigs sing “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” in mockery, unaware that shortly the wolf will arrive and blow their houses down.
Then, there’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” a 1962 play about a complicated marriage, later adapted into a 1966 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton whose relationship is disintegrating.
Taylor (ahem) and Burton appeared in more than 10 films together and inspired a line in “…Ready For It?” from Swift’s “Reputation,” an album that has long been considered to be about her relationship with Alwyn.
“He can be my jailer, Burton to this Taylor,” Swift sings on the 2017 track. (Of note, this line has sparked additional fan theories surrounding “The Tortured Poets Department” song, “Fresh Out the Slammer.”)
During the play, a frustrated married couple, George and Martha, sing the tune of “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” swapping in author Virginia Woolf, known for writing modern stream-of-consciousness novels like “Mrs. Dalloway” and “A Room of One’s Own.”
The 1962 play focuses on George and Martha’s fantasies and illusions of their life that play out during a night spent with another young couple. As Virginia Woolf was associated with interrogating reality and inner truth, the title essentially asks, “Who is afraid to live without delusion?” At the end, Martha admits that she is afraid of Virginia Woolf.
