Swift references poetry throughout “The Lakes,” specifically Romanticism, which was an 18th-century movement that valued emotional expression over logic and reason.
Romantic poets were empathetic rather than judgmental; instinctive rather than self-conscious. They believed in embracing “the bliss of solitude,” writing as a way of understanding one’s own mind, and cultivating the correlation between joy and imagination.
Indeed, one could argue that “Folklore” is a modern revival of Romanticism, and Swift herself seems to make that argument in “The Lakes.”
“Is it romantic how all my elegies eulogize me?” Swift sings to open the song.
In the second verse, she adds: “I’ve come too far to watch some namedropping sleaze / Tell me what are my words worth.”
In addition to praising the value of her own work, Swift draws a semantic connection to William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic movement.
In the preface to his collection “Lyrical Ballads,” Wordsworth wrote, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”
At age 29, Wordsworth relocated to the village of Grasmere in the county of Cumbria, located in the heart of England’s Lake District. He was inspired by the natural landscape and wrote many of his best-known poems in the following years at Dove Cottage, which has now been enshrined as a museum.
During this time, Wordsworth’s brother died in a shipwreck. The loss inspired him to write three elegies: “I only look’d for pain and grief,” “Distressful gift! this Book receives,” and “To the Daisy.”
According to Professor Sir Jonathan Bate, an expert in English literature and Romanticism, Wordsworth was “the first poet to write elegies that eulogized himself.”
In the bridge of “The Lakes,” Swift begs for “auroras and sad prose” while she frets and cries amid the lakes and Windermere peaks.
Wordsworth made a similar reference in a 1791 letter: “Such an excursion would have served like an Aurora Borealis to gild your long Lapland night of melancholy.”
He also uses the imagery of a “Lapland night” in a poem titled “To a Young Lady, Who had been Reproached for Taking Long Walks in the Country.”
Wordsworth addresses a woman who can feel herself growing older, who is inspired by isolation to reflect on the “heart-stirring days” in her life.
Wordsworth’s muse closely resembles Swift during the “Folklore” era. The pensive album, born during quarantine, was the first she released after turning 30.
Swift had previously expressed her fear of aging as a female entertainer, describing the industry as an “elephant graveyard” full of older women: “As I’m reaching 30, I want to work really hard while society is still tolerating me being successful,” she said in her Netflix documentary “Miss Americana.”
However, Wordsworth’s poem offers an alternative vision of aging as “serene and bright,” painting his muse as “a light to young and old.” (Additionally, Wordsworth himself penned most of his best poems after turning 30).
“Thy thoughts and feelings shall not die, / Nor leave thee, when grey hairs are nigh,” he writes.
