Prayer
The act of kneeling in prayer - representing childhood religious devotion, innocence, and submission to God. In Taylor's writing the image marks the speaker's pre-fall state of faith.
Childhood innocence and religious devotion: the state of faith the speaker occupied before the corrupting relationship.
Appears in 7 songs
“I would've stayed on my knees”
Kneeling as prayer, the speaker would have continued in her childhood religious devotion and innocence had the relationship not occurred. Uncle Jerry also raises the possibility of sexual connotation.
“Sacred prayer and we'd swear To remember it all too well”
Sacred prayer as the speaker's characterisation of the relationship's deepest register, love as something even more sacred than matrimony. Uncle Jerry reads the oath/secret/sacred prayer cluster as defining what the speaker believed the relationship to be: 'Not only a matrimony being a sacred moment, but even more sacred than that, the perfect love that two people can share should be a sacred thing.'
“Please, don't be in love with someone else / Please, don't have somebody waiting on you”
The prayer is the culmination of the speaker's post-encounter fixation, a simple, raw plea to the universe that this stranger is available. Uncle Jerry identifies it as the prayer that comes after staying up past 2 a.m. and dancing around her room, and calls it 'her mantra.' He notes that while it is simple, it is deeply impactful, and that 'the best prayers are the simple ones.'
“But I looked to the sky and said "Please”
The speaker looks skyward and utters a single plaintive prayer, 'please', directing her appeal to God, the stars, or whatever prophetic force might be listening. The prayer is stripped to its most basic form, a single word of supplication.
“You ain't gotta pray for me”
Prayer operates ironically throughout the song, the religious community prays for the narrator as a form of judgment and control rather than genuine compassion. The 'you ain't gotta pray for me' is a rejection of the community's performative religious concern.
“Bet they never spared a prayer for my soul”
The absence of prayer represents the antagonists' complete indifference to the speaker's wellbeing, their Christianity is performance without substance, and they never genuinely cared about her soul.
“These desperate prayers of a cursed man”
The desperate prayers mark the speaker's plea from a state of brokenness, not the childhood prayer of innocence but an adult prayer from someone who knows they are cursed.