Inclusio
A structural framing device in which the same line, image, or idea appears at both the beginning and the end of a work, creating a circular or envelope structure. The technique is named from biblical and classical rhetorical tradition, where an opening phrase is deliberately echoed or repeated at the close to bracket the intervening material. The structure is sometimes paired with the ouroboros figure (the snake or dragon eating its own tail) as imagistic shorthand for the same principle: beginning and ending coincide, forming a closed circle that has historically symbolised eternity. When the work's focusing image is itself circular or cyclical, inclusio reinforces it visually as well as structurally.
Creates a sense of circularity and enclosure: the work ends where it began, which can enact entrapment, resignation, or the persistence of a condition. When the repeated material is altered slightly at its return, the small change carries maximum weight against the otherwise identical framing.
Appears in 2 songs
“Hand on the throttle Thought I caught lightning in a bottle Oh, but it's gone again Pad around when I get home I guess a lesser woman would've lost hope A greater woman wouldn't beg But I looked to the sky and said ("Please")”
Uncle Jerry explicitly identifies and names 'inclusio' as a literary device, the repetition of the same lines from verse one in the outro. He says: 'When you have the same line or image or idea at the beginning of work and at the end of the work, it's called an inclusio.' He notes the inclusio is 'the same except she does change it with the word please,' making the return to the opening lines a structural framing device that brackets the entire song.
The inclusio creates a circular structure that enacts the speaker's entrapment in her fate, she ends where she began, still pleading, but now the final word 'please' concentrates all the song's accumulated desperation into a single utterance.
“Because I'm a mirrorball”
Angela & Uncle Jerry identify the song's cyclical structure as an inclusio, a literary device where the beginning and ending mirror each other. Uncle Jerry explicitly names it: 'this is also a literary device. You know, I've mentioned Inclusio before... beginning and ending is cyclical.' He notes the song begins with 'I want you to know I'm a mirrorball' and ends with 'Because I'm a mirrorball,' shifting from 'I want you to know' to 'Because', indicating the speaker has moved from wanting to declare her identity to stating the reason she does what she does. He also connects this to the Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, as a symbol of the eternal circle. Community supplement (mirrorball episode comments). Patreon commenter Eddy Tang reads an intentional ouroboros at tour-staging level alongside the lyric-level inclusio Uncle Jerry identifies. On the Eras Tour's Singapore Night 6, the last show before the TTPD era, Taylor paired mirrorball with epiphany in the piano slot and Tim McGraw with cowboy like me in the guitar slot, two folklore tracks bookended against two earlier-catalogue tracks. The two mashups, taken together, read as a deliberate circular figure that mirrors the song's lyric-level beginning-equals-ending, folklore wrapped around itself on the last night before the next era began.
The inclusio paints a word picture of the mirrorball itself, a continuously evolving circle. The cyclical structure also suggests that fame, like the mirrorball, can spin round endlessly, and that the speaker's identity as performer is both her beginning and her ending.