Episode 57
The Despair and Persistence of This is Me Trying | The Swiftie and The Scholar
this is me tryingAngela & Uncle Jerry analyse this is me trying from folklore, examining its heavy rhymed couplet structure, its system of metaphors involving cars, cages, wounds, and film, and its central paradox of a speaker who claims not to know what to say while writing a highly crafted poem.
Key Insights
The song's consistent rhymed couplet scheme is rare in Taylor's catalogue and serves to bind paired lines together, reinforcing the speaker's attempt to hold things in place. The car metaphor from the opening verse develops into a conceit spanning wheels, roads, lookouts, and the suggestion of suicidal ideation at the cliff's edge. The word 'stranger' in verse two is read as potentially referring to the significant other who has become unfamiliar after the relationship came full circle, not necessarily a literal stranger. The repeated understated chorus gains force through doubling rather than elevation, further depressing the tone rather than lifting it. Angela connects the song to the pandemic experience, which Uncle Jerry acknowledges as a new interpretive lens that helps justify the song's place on folklore.
Literary Analysis
Uncle Jerry identifies the song's opening as an in medias res beginning, comparing it to Homer's Odyssey and the film Starship Troopers. He traces a heroic couplet tradition through the rhyme scheme, noting it approaches but does not exactly match iambic pentameter. The caesura in 'I had the shiniest wheels, now they're rusting' is read as structurally essential, forcing a pause between the antithetical states. Joan Didion's 'Why I Write' is referenced in the Works Cited. The line 'you're a flashback in a film reel on the one screen in my town' is identified as the poem's most significant line, with its prepositional phrases creating rhythmic momentum and its small-town imagery implying no escape from memory. Uncle Jerry invokes Percy Bysshe Shelley's idea that one word can make a poem, applying it to this single line. The Long Pond Studio discussion provides Taylor's stated inspiration about addiction, mental health struggles, and the gap between effort and perceived failure. Roland Barthes's concept of textual bliss is referenced as the physical reaction Uncle Jerry has to well-crafted lines.
Concepts Explored
Literary Quotes Referenced
Thomas Wolfe's 'you can't go home again' is referenced as a counterpoint to the speaker's attempt to return. Percy Bysshe Shelley is paraphrased on the idea that one word (or line) makes the poem.
People & Figures Mentioned
Connections Across the Work
Shared themes appear across the archive
Recommended Reading
- Starship Troopers; Why I Write; The Pleasure of the Text; The Odyssey
In the Archive
In the archive:
this is me tryingView song →6 themes traced
11 motifs traced
36 literary devices explored