The Second Coming was written at the end of World War 1, otherwise known as “The Great War”. Taylor wrote a song called ‣
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Gyre = spiral. “I just need this love spiral” I Know Places - See the vultures circling, dark clouds
In March of 2018, Taylor tries falconry in Big Sur. She was with someone on a hike but the people who interacted with her didn’t say who:
Second Coming - refers to Jesus Christ coming to earth again to save humanity Religion/Religious Imagery/God/Sin/Hell/Worship/Sacred
“I’ll stare directly at the sun” and other Sun/sunshine/daylight imagery. Although her sun imagery is usually positive and this is very negative.
I Know Places - See the vultures circling, dark clouds
Twenty is a number that Taylor has used often in her discography, and her lyric from Daylight below could suggest that she is referring to the Stonewall Riots 20 years before her birth - that she feels she carries within herself an opportunity to make a large contribution to the LGBTQ+ rights movement, and that potentially this soul’s calling has been “sleeping” between 1969 and 1989 - waiting to “open its eyes and see the daylight” with her contribution to the movement. Sleeping/Asleep Daylight - Been sleeping so long in a twenty year dark night but now I see daylight Epiphany: Only twenty minutes to sleep but you dream of some epiphany
The Great War: Sucker punching walls, cursed you as I sleep talked (sounds like a beast that is trapped)
Anti-Hero: And I'm a monster on the hill Too big to hang out, slowly lurching toward your favorite city Pierced through the heart, but never killed
“Born” here represents rebirth, a common theme in Taylor’s art. The poem’s title and references to “The Second Coming” also represent rebirth - the Bible tells of a “Second coming” of Christ, but this poem says that instead a violent beast will come to humanity: Rebirth/Born again/Birth/Born/Baptism/Resurrection/Back To life/Resuscitate/New Me/Old Me/Reinvention
https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/william-butler-yeats/the-second-coming#:~:text=Yet for all its metaphorical,that killed millions of people.
https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/william-butler-yeats/the-second-coming
https://www.studysmarter.co.uk/explanations/english-literature/american-poetry/the-second-coming/