In her 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift reimagines Greek myths and cultural symbols to explore personal trauma, emotional healing, and the effect that fate and free will have on each other. By exploring these motifs, Swift has created her most vulnerable work by miles, using her songwriting as a form of semiotic power as she manipulates these well-known artifacts to craft an emotional narrative that resonates with her audience.

For example, in the song “The Black Dog”, Swift draws on the symbol of a black dog, often associated with depression of the omen of death. She uses the metaphor to explore both personal and existential despair. The line in the opening verse, “And so I watch as you walk / Into some bar called The Black Dog / And pierce new holes in my heart” (“The Black Dog”, 0:19 - 0:29), connects the symbol of the black dog to a place of emotional numbness. The bar, named “The Black Dog”, not only represents a physical space where the narrator’s ex-partner seeks escape, but also symbolizes a retreat into a place of deep sadness. As noted in Taylor Swift & Philosophy, the bar could be “...an allusion to the depression that both she and her ex-partner are experiencing in the aftermath of their breakup, or the depression that they experience throughout their relationship.” (Mills, pg. 33). By using this as a metaphor, Swift has created a song with layered meanings that go beyond her personal experience, allowing listeners to connect with the themes of isolation and hopelessness described in the lyrics.

 

Throughout the song, Swift uses turns of phrase such as “You said I needed a brave man / Then proceeded to play him” (“The Black Dog”, 1:31 - 1:37) and “'Cause tail between your legs, you're leaving” (“The Black Dog”, 3:31 - 3:38), to serve as an underhanded jab at the narrator’s ex, following the theme of comparing him to a coward (also seen in the song “loml”). Through this comparison, Swift paints the narrator’s ex-partner as someone who ultimately proves himself to be weak and unable to face the consequences of his actions. This inversion of the black dog myth -- a myth that describes a hellhound-like dog appearing at a crossroads or as a harbinger of death and destruction -- transforms the metaphor from a warning or omen of physical death into a manifestation of the internal emotional struggle that accompanies personal loss. Rather than it being an outside force of fate, or just a location to set the scene, the “black dog” in this song becomes a way to describe the narrator’s emotional death, triggered by the actions of someone else.