Angela & Uncle Jerry analyse the 1, the opening track of folklore, as a what-if poem exploring counterfactual thinking, the emotional power of unlived lives, and the mature, bittersweet tone Taylor brings to a memory of a lost relationship.
Key Insights
Uncle Jerry identifies contrafactuality as the poem's most important literary device, arguing that the speaker imagines alternative realities without any empirical way to know they would have been better. Angela & Uncle Jerry note that the poem never uses the word 'memory' despite being entirely built on remembrance, and that Taylor introduces the what-if question through the contrafactual line about the greatest films never made before ever saying 'what if' directly. The conversational, colloquial diction is read as a deliberate craft choice that gives the speaker authentic voice and makes the poem feel like interior thought rather than formal writing. The line 'Roaring twenties, tossing pennies in the pool' is singled out as the most poetically dense line in the song, carrying allusion, imagery, symbolism, alliteration, internal rhyme, trochaic hexameter, and caesura simultaneously. Uncle Jerry argues the poem's climax is deliberately modest, with 'it would have been fun' capturing a mature perspective that refuses to confuse nostalgia with a desire for reunion.
Literary Analysis
Angela & Uncle Jerry frame the 1 as a what-if poem, a type of poem built around hypothetical questions, citing Shel Silverstein's What Ifs and Paula Goldsmith's What if the Old Lighthouse Could Speak as examples of the form. Uncle Jerry introduces contrafactuality as the central literary concept, the imagining of alternative realities that run counter to known facts, and connects it to the dream vision tradition in classical literature, citing Dante's journey through the Inferno as a parallel. The song is read as a reverie in which the speaker remembers the past and then projects those memories forward into a counterfactual future. Hemingway's iceberg theory is applied to the narrative compression throughout, particularly in lines like 'I thought I saw you at the bus stop, I didn't though,' where enormous backstory is folded into a few words. Uncle Jerry identifies the conditional 'if' as the poem's structural obsession, appearing roughly eight times, and argues the emotional architecture rests on this single word. The shift from 'pennies in the pool' to 'rosé flowing with your chosen family' is read as a movement from youthful wishful thinking to imagined adult belonging. Angela reads 'Roaring Twenties' as simultaneously a Gatsby allusion, a reference to the decade before the Depression, and a reference to Taylor being in her own twenties. Uncle Jerry notes the poem's use of sight rhyme (no/know/grow/now), trochaic hexameter in the 'Roaring twenties' line, and extensive parallelism between the two verses. The bridge's 'I, I, I' repetition is compared to Hamlet's 'words, words, words' as a challenge of how to deliver the same word multiple times with different inflections.
Concepts Explored
Literary Devices
References
Literary Quotes Referenced
Paula Goldsmith
What if the Old Lighthouse Could Speak: 'the old lighthouse wants to say about the cold clouds of gray when it rained all night / Day with the keeper wanting to pray
when then the sun would come out to play
making the blue sky a pretty highway. This old lighthouse saw many ships. Some sailed by and some smashed like a souffle.' Shel Silverstein
What Ifs: 'last night
while I lay thinking here
some what-ifs crawled inside my ear and pranced and partied all night long and sang their same old what-if song. What if I'm dumb at school? What if they've closed a swimming pool? What if I get beat up? What if there's a poison in my cup? What if I start to cry? What if I get sick and die? What if I flunk that test? What if green hair grows on my chest?...' Shakespeare
Sonnet 116: 'I admit no impediment to love. Love is not love that alters when it's alteration finds
nor bends with a remover to remove. No
it is a ever fixed mark.'
People & Figures Mentioned
Connections Across the Work
Shared themes appear across the archive
Recommended Reading
- The Windhover; What Ifs; What if the Old Lighthouse Could Speak?; Hamlet; The Great Gatsby; Sonnet 116
In the Archive
In the archive:
the 1View song →7 themes traced
7 motifs traced
40 literary devices explored
1 literary reference noted