The nature of time
In a number of Taylor Swift's songs, time itself is the subject under examination: not the passing of it as a fact of life, but the question of how it behaves. These songs ask whether time moves at all, how quickly, in which direction, and whether it runs at the same rate for everybody. Peter holds the clearest version, where time does not pass for the boy who never came back but does pass for the woman who waited and presses hardest on the villain who lives in fear of it. Elsewhere time telescopes, so that then and now and before and after arrive out of order and refuse to sort themselves. The theme sits beside The nature of truth and The nature of permanence, and the distinction from Permanence is worth holding. Permanence asks a yes or no question about endurance: does love survive, does anything last. This theme asks a question about behaviour: how time moves, and what it does to the speaker who is inside it. Two other themes sit close by. Memory concerns what the past does to the present rather than what time is. What Might Have Been imagines an alternative timeline instead of examining the one the speaker is standing in. A song does not qualify simply by being told out of order; rearranged chronology belongs with Non-chronological narrative. Nor does it qualify by being saturated with remembering, which belongs with Memory. This theme needs the song to treat time as a question rather than as a tool.
Appears in 7 songs
Time is what the song is anxious about rather than the frame its events sit inside. The speaker wakes in the middle of the night able to feel time moving, which makes its passage a physical sensation instead of an abstraction, and elsewhere asks whether the relationship is only biding time until her attention is lost. What the song keeps circling is what a person becomes once time has moved past her, and whether anything is left once novelty has been spent. That places it on the same axis as Peter, where time is read as pressing hardest on whoever is left waiting.
Uncle Jerry starts from a technical puzzle, the way the poem keeps changing tense, and works through whether it is a young writer losing hold of her grammar or a claim being made about the nature of time. He settles on the second, and the song's tenses become evidence for an argument about how time works rather than a lapse to be forgiven. From there he looks across the rest of the catalogue for the same preoccupation and reports that there are a ton of them, which is the moment this line of enquiry opens.
“As the decade would play us for fools”
Uncle Jerry gives extended attention to the personification of time in this song, treating it as part of a broader pattern in Taylor's work. The decade is given agency, 'playing us for fools,' and Uncle Jerry connects this to Shakespeare's sonnets on time's destructive power (Sonnets 12, 60, 73, 116), arguing that time in this song 'changes not a person or circumstances per se' but operates as its own force. He traces how the song uses time as both a destructive agent and a corridor that memory can travel back through ('that passage in time'), though the speaker can never undo what time has done. Angela connects this to All Too Well (the speaker being too young) and Peter (time passing for the woman but not for Peter). Uncle Jerry notes that time 'creates conduits to and from memory' and 'reciprocates love' across distances between reality and possibility.
Uncle Jerry finds the song's ambiguity running all the way down to its clock. Time does not pass for Peter, who never came back and is still the boy who promised to; it does pass for the woman who waited; and it presses hardest on Captain Hook, who lives in fear of the animal carrying the ticking clock. Time is not one condition in this song but something that applies to some characters and not others, which is what makes it a question rather than a setting. Uncle Jerry sets the reading against the cedar closet the speaker cannot stay inside, a magical world where there is no time, and against ageing, which he calls inexorable and impossible to stop. The goddess of timing, arriving a line later, he offers as fate and as life simply going on.
The song runs a set of alternative lives past the same two people and reports the same result each time, returning to the claim that even in a different life they still would have been timeless. Time is the variable under test rather than the setting the song happens in, which is what separates it from a straightforward song about lasting love. The antique-shop frame puts the question in the speaker's hands, since she is turning over precious things that time forgot, objects that outlasted whoever owned them. By the close the pair are placed in that same category, so the song ends by claiming the property it spent its length testing.
Uncle Jerry describes the poem as telescoping time, moving between then and now and before and after without settling the order. What makes this an argument about time rather than a matter of arrangement is where it takes him: partway through the reading he stops and doubts whether the poem can be a dramatic monologue at all, because that form turns on a single dramatic moment and this one will not stay in one. Snow gives way to spring breaking loose, a husband is alive and then dead, and the speaker addresses a lover in another time and place. Time passing is not the backdrop here, it is what destabilises the reading.
Uncle Jerry puts the nature of time at issue in the song directly. Love fades in time, which makes time an agent working on the relationship rather than a container holding it, and the city moves at a rapid pace alongside. He reads time and pacing as part of the song's poetic idea rather than its setting, so the speed at which things happen becomes one of the terms on which the love is assessed.