The Archer
- The Archer / Question...? (Eras Tour, Amsterdam)
- The Archer / You're On Your Own, Kid (Eras Tour, London (Aug))
One of Taylor's most sustained explorations of anxiety, the speaker tears herself apart in real time, cataloguing her own contradictions and self-sabotaging patterns. The Archer as figure captures both the aggressor and the target simultaneously: the anxious mind as both attacker and victim.
The intrusive thought as self-destruct mechanism, the speaker cannot stop the voice that catalogues her flaws and fears in the night. 'Who could ever leave me darling / But who could stay?' is the thought-loop made lyric: the mind cycling through self-condemnation it cannot interrupt.
“I wake in the night, I pace like a ghost”
Nocturnal and restless, the speaker moves through their own life like a ghost, neither fully present nor fully gone. The self-as-ghost image speaks to dissociation and the anxiety of not belonging anywhere, inhabiting one's own existence from a distance.
“The room is on fire, invisible smoke”
“The room is on fire, invisible smoke”
“I jump from the train, I ride off alone”
the wish to stay still
“I never grew up, it's getting so old”
“'Cause I haven't moved in years” — the lakes
Community readers set the lakes' wish for stillness against The Archer's anxious admission of arrested growth. Where The Archer frets that she never grew up and it is getting old, the lakes reframes the very same stuckness as something chosen, wisteria growing over feet that have not moved in years.
never grew up
“I never grew up” — Peter
The Archer's I never grew up is set beside Peter for the same admission, the speaker caught in a childhood she cannot leave behind.
foes, friends, and the song that ends
“All the king's horses, all the king's men / Couldn't put me together again / 'Cause all of my enemies started out friends”
“And all of the foes, and all of the friends / Have seen it before, they'll see it again / Life is a song, it ends when it ends” — Opalite
A community reader pairs Opalite's catalogue of foes-and-friends who have "seen it before" with The Archer's all-the-king's-men refrain, where enemies "started out friends" - the same nursery-rhyme fatalism, but Opalite answers The Archer's desperate plea to hold on with acceptance: life is a song that simply ends when it ends.