Inclusio
Inclusio is 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 7 songs
“So if I sell my apartment”
Uncle Jerry identifies circular structure in the song: the apartment appears in the first verse ('stumbled into my apartment') and returns in the third verse ('if I sell my apartment'). He calls this 'circular structure' and compares it to Moby Dick's coffin imagery, which brackets the novel from first chapter to last. The return to the apartment closes the song's structural loop.
The return to the apartment brackets the song's movement through memory and imagined futures. Uncle Jerry reads the same shape in Moby Dick, where a coffin opens the book and a coffin closes it, so the frame is a technique rather than a coincidence.
“I knew it, I knew you”
Community readers notice the song is built as a closed circle: it opens on "I knew you" and ends on "I knew it", so that played on repeat the last line runs straight into the first to spell the title. The circular framing reinforces the song's own subject, a reunion that returns the speaker to where she began, with the ending folding back into the beginning rather than resolving away from it.
“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.
“When I showed you around Centennial Park”
Uncle Jerry identifies circular structure: the song returns to Centennial Park, where it began. The opening verse placed the speaker reading alone in the park as a teenager; now she is showing her partner around the same location. The geographic return creates an envelope that brackets the entire song.
The circular return to Centennial Park enacts the invisible string's work. The speaker has travelled the world (Nashville, London, LA, the Lakes) and come back to where she started, but now with the person she was always fated to meet. The return proves the string was real.
“My only one”
Uncle Jerry identifies the circular structure of the poem: the outro returns to 'My only one,' the same words that opened the poem. He notes this is something a lot of writers do and calls it both repetition and tragic, asking 'how in the world can this beloved person remain my only one?' after everything that has happened. He later describes the poem's progression as beginning with love and ending with that same love, creating a circular argument: you are my everything, you destroy me, I know you deceive me, you know exactly how vulnerable I was, and you're still my everything.
The circular structure enacts the speaker's entrapment: she ends where she began, unable to escape the attachment despite knowing it is a hoax. The return to 'my only one' after all the destruction makes the devotion feel like a prison rather than a choice.
Uncle Jerry notes that the parenthetical line 'And maybe I don't quite know what to say' returns in the final chorus, calling it a structural callback that creates circularity. The song ends where it began, with the speaker still uncertain, still trying, still unable to fully articulate what she means. The 'at least I'm trying' post-chorus also repeats from earlier, reinforcing the circular structure.
The circular return enacts the song's argument about trying as an ongoing process rather than a conclusion. The speaker has not arrived anywhere new by the end; she is still in the same emotional place, still making the same understated claim. The circularity is the point: trying has no endpoint.