Taylor Swift opens ‘the lakes’, a bonus track from her 2020 album folklore, with the line ‘is it romantic’, and then goes on to pun about William Wordsworth and allude to the British Romantic poets, who were known for being inspired by the Lake District. However, it’s not actually Swift’s most Romantic song — not… Continue reading The peak before the prison house: Swift, Wordsworth, and the Romantic child
Tag: children
What about Wendy? Adaptation, interrogation, and turning on the light
When Swift’s speaker sings in ‘cardigan’ that the object of the song ‘tried to change the ending, Peter losing Wendy’, she encourages us to go back and take a closer look at a story that may have been a staple of our childhoods. The line is deeply ambiguous, and has always puzzled me. It’s unclear whether he tried to change the (happy) ending, making it so that Peter instead lost Wendy; whether he tried and failed to change the (unhappy) ending of Peter losing Wendy; whether he tried to change the (unhappy) ending, but Peter lost Wendy anyway. Is Peter losing Wendy the result of his actions, or the fate he tried to change? [Click above image to read on.]
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