#this song i have a very strong attachment to for. personal and writing reasons skklsdgfds

[mastermindmp3]

1, 2, 3, 4—

The Prophecy opens with the softest whisper, a male voice (likely Aaron Dessner) counts the song in. It's very faint ( I didn't hear it on my first listen through, actually. ) Deciding to record / keep the count in is an interesting writing tactic. Count ins can lend songs a sense of being like, a chant, but it can also lend a sense of vulnerability and rawness, an 'unedited' feel.

Here, it kind of has the same edge of like, an acoustic, live performance, and definitely calls to mind this idea of the singer songwriter, sitting with her instrument and her band mate, and processing her feelings out loud. And god, does the Prophecy deliver.

The Prophecy is a plea, it is hands and knees begging for another chance. There's this sense of defeat in Swift's narrator, as she acknowledges that a "lesser woman would've lost hope," and that "a greater woman wouldn't beg," even as she turns to pray for a different fate. There's something so painful in the speaker painting herself not as great, and not as weak, but as someone too strong to let go and not proud enough to know when to walk away.

It paints this picture so vividly of someone who has had her heart broken so much that the aches all bleed together. She says that she "thought I caught lightning in a bottle, but it's gone again." Gone again. If she were a greater woman, a woman more proud and less willing to suffer at the hands of her lovers, she would have walked away. Instead, she "howls like a wolf at the moon."

I love how.... claws and teeth that description is. Swift, in the bridge, paints her narrator as so desperate she is reverting to all her base instincts, sounding "like an infant" and being so drained that she feels "like the very last drops of an ink pen." Burnt out, hurt, left without even the words that Swift's narrator once donned as armor. All she has left is begging.

The Narrator does discuss the singular loss that has brought her to her knees - describing "poisoned blood from the wound of the pricked hand." A lover whose self destruction has soaked into her, has infected her mind. It brings forward, again, that idea of wanting to help someone through their darkest patches, but being unable to, because they don't want to get better. ( Its sister lyric, if I had to assign one, is You sacrificed us to the gods of your bluest days. from So Long, London. )

But I don't think that singular loss is what pains her so. The song makes it clear, it is the culmination of years that has brought her here - and by her own hand. I got cursed like Eve got bitten. (Note: My main source of bible knowledge was a Gender Women's Studies class I took in college called Women in Biblical Literature, so my understanding of the story might be... off.) Eve made the choice to bite the apple of knowledge, manipulated by the Snake, and in doing so, is blamed for all of mankind's ills. It's a fitting metaphor for Swift (and in turn, the narrator she portrays,) a woman blamed for something a man also did.

Swift's narrator in The Prophecy has suffered bruises and pains and still has it, somewhere in her heart, to beg for another shot at love. It's painful; how much she wants to be loved, and how little she gets in return. Left feeling as useful as a paperweight - something meant to hold down an important document, but ultimately, put aside once its usefulness is gone.