Sirens
Sirens work in Taylor Swift's songwriting as a figure of dual warning: at once the literal alarm of pursuit (police sirens) and the mythological creature whose song lures men to destruction. In Taylor's writing the siren image activates both the danger register (something is wrong, flee) and the monstrous femininity register (the woman as beautiful, irresistible, and deadly).
The siren works in two directions at once, warning and luring with the same sound: what should send the listener running is exactly what draws them in. In its mythological form it casts the speaker as a monstrous-feminine figure whose beauty is itself the danger; in its modern form, the police siren, it turns the scene into a crime already underway.
Appears in 2 songs
“There were sirens in the beat of your heart”
Sirens as a double meaning, literally the sound of police pursuit (fitting the getaway car conceit) and mythologically the creatures from the Odyssey who lure men to destruction. The second man hears the siren song of the speaker's beauty and follows her to his own ruin, failing to heed the warning.
“And when you can't sleep at night (you hear my stolen lullabies)”
The stolen lullabies as the siren's song, the speaker's music as the sound that lures the antagonist toward harm, with the siren's register sitting alongside the white-lady scream and the banshee cry as a third strand of dangerous-female-voice imagery in the song.