Guilty as Sin?
- Guilty as Sin? / Untouchable (Eras Tour, Amsterdam)
- mirrorball / Guilty as Sin? (Eras Tour, Miami Gardens)
Intrusive thoughts as pre-emptive confession, the speaker is already guilty of thoughts she has not acted on: desire as involuntary intrusion that the mind commits before the body has done anything. One of Taylor's most explicit treatments of the experience of unwanted but consuming interior thoughts.
Explores infidelity of the mind, lustful, sinful thoughts about someone who is not her partner, framed in heavy religious imagery.
“You've haunted me so stunningly”
Hauntedness as aesthetic experience, being haunted stunningly reframes the gothic as something breathtaking rather than tormenting. The adverb transfigures horror into beauty, characteristic of TTPD's gothic romanticism. The haunting is welcomed, even admired.
“My bed sheets are ablaze, I screamed his name”
rolling the stone away from forbidden desire
“What if I roll the stone away? / They're gonna crucify me anyway”
“And the old widow goes to the stone every day” — ivy
Community readers group ivy with Guilty as Sin? as a later, more explicit treatment of the same forbidden longing, hearing the stone the widow only visits answered by the stone the later song dares to roll away. Where ivy keeps the affair in the realm of the imagined and the grave, the later song presses toward acting on it.