The Tortured Poets Department: Reimagining Myth and Memory
In her 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift reimagines myths and 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 symbols to craft an emotional narrative that resonates with her audience.
How Cassandra Connects to Social Judgement
In Cassandra, Taylor Swift weaves together mythic, literary, and philosophical motifs into her signature autobiographical storytelling, positioning herself as a tragic figure whose narrative has escaped her control. Nowhere in the album is this more evident than in the song “Cassandra.” By comparing herself to the doomed Greek prophetess Cassandra, who is cursed to see the future but never believed, Swift explores her own struggle for truth in a world that is indifferent to her and reflects on the burden of being the one to prove her narrative.
Cassandra as a figure embodies the dilemma of the cost of truth in a society that refuses to listen. In Swift’s song, this theme is made literal. “When the first stone’s thrown, there’s screaming / In the streets there’s a raging riot / When it’s “burn the bitch’, they’re shrieking / When the truth comes out, it’s quiet.” (“Cassandra”, 0:22 - 0:41). The narrator’s warnings, like Cassandra’s prophecies, are ignored. The experience of being doubted, and as a result, othered from her community becomes part of her very identity.
As the book Taylor Swift & Philosophy notes, “Taylor may be telling a story of a time when she, or the narrator whose point of view she adopts, feels attacked and vilified for her warnings.” (pg. 234). This links to Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of bad faith, where external judgements and roles forced onto you by others threaten to solidify into one’s own perception of themselves, even when it conflicts with your personal truth.
The Emotional Haunting of The Black Dog
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, “...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 it 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.
Conclusion
By drawing on figures like Cassandra and symbols like The Black Dog, Swift manipulates these motifs to explain the weight of emotional trauma through being disbelieved, and connects that to the cyclical nature of guilt and fate. The album's layered symbolism and philosophical depth invites listeners to reflect on their own positions within stories that may not feel entirely their own. In this way, Tortured Poets becomes more than a collection of songs, it becomes its own modern myth cycle where commonly known archetypes are reimagined for a contemporary audience. Through this, Swift positions herself as not just an everyday singer-songwriter, but as a modern mythmaker.