Darkness
Darkness as both setting and state: the literal night-time in which so much of Taylor's writing takes place, and the figurative state of not knowing where you stand. The dark holds the speaker's most candid voice - the things said to a lover, a former self, or an absent other when the daytime rules are off - and at the same time marks the limit of what she can see, decide, or admit. The image takes in night, midnights, sleeplessness and the unlit room, which all share that mix.
Darkness means intimacy and uncertainty together: night as the place where the speaker is most honest with herself or whoever she is addressing, and dark as the condition in which she cannot quite tell what is happening or what she is reacting to.
Appears in 29 songs
“Midnights become my afternoons”
Darkness and midnight as states that have overtaken the speaker's entire life, the night is no longer contained to nighttime but has spread into every hour, whether as depression, schedule inversion, or nightmare intrusion.
“So I wander through these nights”
Night is the setting for the speaker's most honest self-disclosure, wandering through darkness is when the mask comes off and the speaker reveals who she really is behind the guiding-light persona.
“Perched in the dark Telling all the rich folks anything they wanna hear”
Darkness represents both the literal nighttime setting and the speaker's figurative uncertainty about how to respond to genuine emotional connection after a life of deception.
“Long were the nights when My days once revolved around you”
Uncle Jerry links night with the speaker's subconscious self-revelation, her grief and insomnia, while day belongs to her conscious waking reality. The juxtaposition of the two in the very first line establishes the tone of anxiousness and grief that runs through the poem.
“I looked up at the sky and it was maroon”
The second chorus deepens the colour turn, the sky darkening further from scarlet into maroon. Both hosts note the intensifying, the light draining as the memory sours.
“So scarlet, it was maroon”
The progressive darkening through the song, from morning to silence, from scarlet to maroon, enacts the relationship's descent into darkness. The colour spectrum itself moves from light red to near-black, and the album (Midnights) reinforces this dark register.
“Sleepless in the onyx night”
The dark period of the speaker's past, sleepless suffering, loneliness, and emotional turmoil, rendered through the mineralogical register as a funerary, mournful state that precedes the opalite transformation
“Hands in the hair of somebody in darkness named Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus”
The dark is the limit of what the speaker can see and of what the song will tell. The figure stays unnamed and unlit, and the scene never settles into memory or invention.
The entire poem operates in a dark, Gothic register. Uncle Jerry catalogues the diction: 'Pierce holes hit die screaming heartbroken kills hate shaken hazing cruel smoke fire exercise' and concludes: 'If you put about all those words together and it's this dark place. It's this castle of a Toronto. It's this Frankensteinian Gothic tradition that she's drawing on for this poem.'
“We're dancin' 'round the kitchen in the refrigerator light”
Darkness/nighttime as the setting for the most intimate scene, the kitchen dance happens in the middle of the night, lit only by the refrigerator. Uncle Jerry reads the darkness as both romantic and foreboding.
“It's a goddamn blaze in the dark”
Darkness serves as the condition in which the illicit love must be kept hidden. Uncle Jerry reads 'blaze in the dark' as potentially 'a light in the darkness or black fire.' In the sapphic reading, the darkness represents the need for secrecy: 'it is that love affair that for this time and place, we have to keep dark, especially since one of them is married.'
“But what you did was just as dark”
Darkness here names what the beloved has done: the harm is figured as a moral and spiritual darkness that matches the eclipsed sun earlier in the poem. Uncle Jerry reads it as an echo of the earlier cosmic imagery and connects it to Byron.
“You booked the night train for a reason”
Night signals the ominous, sombre tone of the narrative, loss and grief before the story has even been told.
“Pacing the rocks, staring out at the midnight sea”
The midnight setting marks the darkened end of Rebekah's arc, isolated, alone, haunted. The darkness of midnight contrasts with the sunny arrival, placing Rebekah in a state of solitude and possibly grief after her husband's death and the town's rejection.
“Drunk under a streetlight, I”
The streetlight creates an intimate pocket of illumination within surrounding darkness, the couple in a private circle of light while the world around them is dark, representing the intimacy and privacy of the relationship.
“In the cracks of light I dreamed of you”
The cracks of light represent recovery breaking through the grey depression, the first signs of hope emerging from the speaker's sustained darkness.
“I've been sleepin' so long in a twenty-year dark night”
The twenty-year dark night gives the darkness a measured duration. Sleeping through it makes the dark a state the speaker was unconscious inside rather than a night she sat out, which is why the song can only put a length on it once it has ended.
“I wake in the night, I pace like a ghost”
Waking and pacing at night place the speaker's self-interrogation in sleepless darkness, where the song's hardest admissions emerge.
“I want your midnights”
Midnight holds a triple register: the peak celebration of New Year's Eve, the partner's depressive low points, and intimate private moments. The speaker wants all three, the joy, the difficulty, and the privacy.
“And every day is like a battle But every night with us is like a dream”
The hosts connect the night with nightlife, the club where the crowd gets to be self-expressive. Against a day described as a battle, night becomes the part of the day where that self-expression is possible.
“The lingering question kept me up 2 a.m., who do you love? I wonder 'til I'm wide awake”
The darkness/night setting structures the second half of the song, the speaker is alone at 2 a.m., unable to sleep, pacing in the dark. Uncle Jerry identifies the nighttime setting as the place where the speaker's most candid thoughts emerge, the prayer, the pacing, the obsessive wondering all happen in the dark hours after the party.
“It's you and me forever dancing in the dark”
Dancing in the dark places the couple alongside the kitchen dance in All Too Well and the streetlit scene in cardigan. Here the dark is not a threat but the condition of being unobserved together.
“He was sunshine, I was midnight rain”
The speaker takes midnight as her own weather and hands him the sun. Choosing the darker half of the pairing is how she states the incompatibility, and she does not offer it as the lesser side.
“Did I paint your bluest skies the darkest grey? A universe away”
The speaker asks whether she painted somebody else's blue sky its darkest grey, which puts the darkening in her own hands rather than in the weather.
“Those days turned into nights Slept next to her, but I dreamt of you all summer long”
The day-to-night transition marks the shift from innocence to transgression. Uncle Jerry reads daytime as a symbol of openness and things that come to light, while nighttime represents when 'naughty things happen.' The progression from days to nights tracks James's innocent act turning into something illicit.
“I hit the ground running each night”
Night changes the meaning of the idiom 'hit the ground running.' Instead of energetic forward motion, it becomes running from something in the dark. Uncle Jerry reads 'night' as 'a symbol of darkness' and suggests the speaker is staying up all night trying to distract herself or avoid self-reflection.
“You should think about the consequence of you touching my hand in a darkened room”
The darkened room conceals the touch, giving the warning about its consequences a private, unwitnessed setting.
“Skies grew darker, currents swept you out again”
The sky darkens at the moment the love is taken back out, so the weather times the loss. The darkening does the telling before the current is named.
“And the sky turned black like a perfect storm”
The sky turning black brings on the storm the song has been waiting for, so the darkening marks the turn from drought to downpour rather than a state the speaker settles into.
“darling, I'm a nightmare dressed like a daydream”
The nightmare/daydream opposition, the speaker is darkness disguised as light, danger dressed as beauty. Uncle Jerry names this his favourite line in the work.