Lavender Haze
Details
- Stated inspiration
- From the Midnights prologue: "A lavender haze crush that feels like the crash of a wave."
Dickinson's amethyst as the lavender afterglow
“I feel the lavender haze creeping up on me”
“I've never been anywhere cold as you” — Cold as You
Dickinson's closing image in the jewel poem Uncle Jerry read - "an Amethyst remembrance" - sends community readers to Midnights, where the amethyst's violet keeps returning. They hear it in the lavender haze that creeps over the narrator as a colour of being lovestruck and watched, and in the jewel register that surfaces again in Bejeweled. The purple gem of Dickinson's remembered loss becomes, in Taylor's later writing, the colour of a love worth guarding from scrutiny.
the midnights wanted versus the midnights got
“Staring at the ceiling with us / Oh, you don't ever say too much / And you don't really read into my melancholia”
“I want your midnights” — New Year's Day
Community readers follow the "midnights" the speaker asks for at the close of Reputation through to the album that later took the name. Five years on, the Midnights opener describes a partner staring at the ceiling who does not say much or read into her melancholia. The midnights she wanted are not the midnights she got, the wish and its disappointment book-ending the two eras.
society pressuring a woman toward marriage
“All they keep askin' me Is if I'm gonna be your bride”
“"She would've made such a lovely bride What a shame she's fucked in the head," they said” — champagne problems
Community readers pair the two choruses of social surveillance. champagne problems closes its bridge with the town's verdict on a woman who declined to be a bride; Lavender Haze names the same pressure directly, the world reducing her to a single question about marriage. The judgement that hangs over the evermore song as gossip becomes, in the Midnights song, the explicit demand she refuses.
melancholy named and set aside
“And you don't really read into my melancholia”
“I might've drowned in the melancholy” — The Fate of Ophelia
Community readers connect the near-drowning "in the melancholy" to Lavender Haze's "you don't really read into my melancholia": the same clinical-tinged word for a sorrow that could pull her under. The pairing tracks a shift: in the earlier song the melancholia is something a partner refuses to over-read, and here it is the fate she is pulled clear of.