In the Taylor Swift canon, an album's closing track is often a moment of catharsis and closure. (See: lover“Daylight” or 1989“Clean.”) For the superstar's eleventh studio album, Department of Tortured Poetsthat role belongs to “The Manuscript,” a smooth piano ballad that seems to trigger another past relationship, but read between the lines, and serves as the thesis of his entire career.
Swift calls the dual albums of Department of Tortured Poets an anthology, a term that in the literary world means a “collection of poems or other writings” – and the 31-song juggernaut is certainly quite a set. As fans and critics have breathlessly pointed out, the project is a trove of references to historical figures, fictional characters, and the likes of Matty Healy, Joe Alwyn, Kim Kardashian (and possibly Olivia Rodrigo), from The 1975. But since from the beginning of TTPDDuring Swift's promotional cycle, it seemed like “The Manuscript” was a big part of the album; when he announced the record at the 2024 Grammys, he announced the song as well, as if presenting a key that would unlock what awaited. And what does Swift wants us to take away with “The Manuscript?”
On the surface, the double album closer and single bonus on the records appears to be another reflection of her relationship with John Mayer, with whom she briefly dated in 2009, when she was 19 and he was 32. .
In her second verse, she sings that during her “age,” she wished she “was thirty,” and that after her breakup, she went back to dating “guys her age.” Later lines like, “She thought about how she said, 'cause she was so wise beyond her years / It had all been over the top / She wasn't sure,” seem to reflect the same plaintive tune she now has about the relationship of ” Would' ve Could've Should've,” their other, and much more scathing, Mayer-centric song.
But “The Manuscript” is ultimately not really about Mayer. In the bridge, the song becomes a meta-analysis of how Swift has processed the events of her life and incorporated them into her music. “The teacher said write what you know / Looking back might be the only way forward,” he sings, as if regurgitating creative advice a mentor might have given him early in his career: that he should use it pain to feed his art.
The following lines complete this moment of omniscient hindsight: Swift observes the actors “hitting their marks” (a metaphor for their tours) as “tears fell in sync with the score,” a likely allusion to the emotional response from her fans towards her. songs “And at last,” he sings, “she knew what the agony had been for.”
With the seemingly incessant buzz the record has set off, critics have come calling Department of Tortured Poets one of Swift's messiest and most conflicted albums of her career, and it is. But what's been lost in the sauce is Swift's rationale Because she's doing all this in the first place, and “The Manuscript” is a gentle reminder.
And underneath that, the song may also contain an important lesson in recognizing Swift's distinct and distant authorship behind it all: that her music, while littered with familiar markers, is still cleverly crafted by to the consumption of others. As she herself states in the final letter: “From time to time I re-read the manuscript, but the story is no longer mine.”
Taylor Swift's Tortured Poets Department is now available.
