Throughout her composition “The Lakes,” Taylor Swift consistently invokes the language, spirit, and ideals of poetry—specifically aligning her imagery with the sensibilities of Romanticism, the influential eighteenth-century artistic and philosophical movement that exalted emotional authenticity above the rigid constraints of logic and rational discourse. For the Romantics, feeling was not merely a supplement to reason; it was a higher form of understanding, one that allowed the soul to perceive beauty and truth through instinct and empathy rather than through intellectual calculation alone.
The poets of this era—figures such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley—championed an unguarded engagement with the world. Their verse was characterized by an openness of heart and a willingness to be vulnerable before nature and personal emotion. They sought neither to judge nor to moralize, preferring instead to observe and to feel. Romantic writers embraced solitude, not as isolation in the negative sense, but as a sacred and restorative state—what Wordsworth might call “the bliss of solitude”—a psychological condition in which one could hear the resonances of one’s own mind and find illumination through contemplation. For them, to write was not a public performance but an inward expedition: an act of tracing the contours of consciousness, finding in imaginative freedom the interdependence of joy, sorrow, and creativity.
In this context, Swift’s work on the album *Folklore* can be interpreted as a contemporary revival of that Romantic ethos. She reclaims introspective songwriting as a form of self-discovery, constructing modern elegies that question fame, mortality, and artistic worth in a tone that echoes the literary preoccupations of the late 1700s. Within “The Lakes,” she announces this affiliation almost overtly, opening the piece with the provocative line in which she wonders if it is romantic that her own elegies become self-eulogies—a meditation on artistic self-reflection and the poetic process of transmuting pain into art. Later, in the song’s second verse, she asserts her independence and creative integrity, refusing to allow insincere critics or opportunistic observers to dictate the value of her work. This verbal play, centered on the phrase “my words’ worth,” naturally summons a connection to William Wordsworth, one of the principal architects of the Romantic movement and its most enduring spokesperson.
Wordsworth’s literary philosophy, famously expressed in the preface to *Lyrical Ballads*, defines poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions, distilled and recalled in tranquility. This definition encapsulates the Romantic idea that true art arises from the harmony between passion and reflection. When Wordsworth was in his late twenties, he moved to Grasmere, a small and breathtaking village nestled in England’s Lake District, where the serene landscape became both his sanctuary and his muse. Within the modest walls of Dove Cottage—his home, now preserved as a museum—he composed many of his most celebrated works, drawing perpetual inspiration from the surrounding lakes, craggy hills, and shifting light. Yet these years were shadowed by personal tragedy: the death of his brother in a shipwreck, an event that compelled him to write a series of elegies grappling with grief and memory. These poems, such as “I only look’d for pain and grief,” “Distressful gift! this Book receives,” and “To the Daisy,” display an early instance of poetic self-commemoration—what literary scholar Sir Jonathan Bate later described as Wordsworth’s innovation of writing elegies that, on some level, eulogized the self as both mourner and subject of mourning.
Swift’s lyrics parallel this tradition in striking ways. In “The Lakes,” she too weaves the beauty of nature with meditations on loss, purpose, and self-recognition. In the emotional bridge, her plea for “auroras and sad prose” evokes both the visual grandeur of the Northern Lights and the melancholic prose of Romantic reflection, as she imagines herself weeping among the serene waters and rugged peaks of Windermere. This imagery resonates profoundly with Wordsworth’s own description, written in a 1791 letter, of an “Aurora Borealis” that could brighten a metaphorical Lapland night of sadness. He returned to the same motif in his poem addressed to a young lady who faced reproach for her solitary wanderings—a poem that celebrates the gentle wisdom acquired in contemplation and the beauty of a mind growing older in harmony with nature’s cycles.
That poem’s central figure, a woman finding renewal through introspection and isolation, mirrors the image of Swift during the creative period surrounding *Folklore*. Having entered her thirties amid the stillness of quarantine, Swift approached that moment in life with characteristic apprehension, aware of the entertainment industry’s tendency to marginalize women as they age. In her documentary *Miss Americana*, she voiced her anxiety about approaching the symbolic threshold of thirty, calling the music world an “elephant graveyard” crowded with women past their supposed prime and declaring her determination to work intensely while society still granted her its conditional approval. The fear she named is both personal and cultural: the Romantic dread of transience and the modern woman’s confrontation with societal double standards.
Yet, Wordsworth’s vision offers an alternative and uplifting counterpoint to such melancholy. In his poem, he recasts aging not as decline but as an evolution toward clarity—a transformation both serene and luminous. He describes his muse as an enduring source of inspiration, “a light to young and old,” suggesting that with experience comes a deeper and more abiding radiance. Indeed, Wordsworth himself produced much of his most profound and enduring poetry after he had crossed the milestone of thirty. In one of his consoling closing lines, he promises that the inner life—the realm of thought and feeling—will not wither with age: “Thy thoughts and feelings shall not die, / Nor leave thee, when grey hairs are nigh.”
In this sense, both Swift and Wordsworth present art as a means of enduring transformation: a dialogue between solitude and expression, time and imagination. “The Lakes” becomes less a mere homage than a living continuation of Romantic ideals—an affirmation that, across centuries, poets remain bound by the same impulse to translate emotion into meaning and to find, amid change, a form of eternal selfhood.
Sourse: https://www.businessinsider.com/taylor-swift-lyrics-literary-references-easter-eggs-details-2023-5
