<aside> 💡 Analysis - Twenty is a number that Taylor has used often in her discography and she has made three references to the specific phrase “twenty years” as well as three references to the number “twenty” in regards to “sleep.” Taylor could have also made a reference to The Second Coming - William Yeats (click to see an in-depth intertextual analysis) in her lyrics for Anti-Hero, referring to herself as a “monster” that is “slowly lurching towards your favourite city”. Yeats suggests in this poem that the Second Coming is not actually going to be of Jesus Christ, but is going to be a monster that is roused from it’s “twenty centuries of stony sleep […] its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” Yeats draws on the theme of rebirth here, and sleep representing a dormancy period where the creature is inactive, similar to Taylor’s general themes on Rebirth/Born again/Birth/Born/Baptism/Resurrection/Back To life/Resuscitate/New Me/Old Me/Reinvention as well as her specific lyric from Daylight: “I’ve been sleeping so long in a twenty year dark night but now I see daylight.” Dawn, the beginning of each day, is a symbol of new beginnings and the idea that a new day with new opportunities is here. Coincidentally, twenty years before Taylor was born in 1989, it was the year 1969 and the Stonewall Riots was the movement that has been considered the turning point in the LGBTQ+ rights movement. Taylor’s multiple references to twenty years, as well as her use of the “sleeping” metaphor to signify inaction, may be alluding to the idea that she carries within herself a “calling” to contribute significantly to the LGBTQ+ rights movement - and that this calling was “asleep” within her/or her soul before she was born. That this purpose of hers was born into the world when she was, waiting to “open its eyes and see the daylight” with her contribution to the movement.
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<aside> 👸 Relevance to Taylor’s Life:
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<aside> 🌈 Queer History:
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<aside> ➕ See also: Sleeping/Asleep
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