Mary Oliver And Taylor Swift Comparison

2601 Words6 Pages

When you ponder life as a whole, other people are sure to quickly come to mind. Whether it’s conscious or not, human interaction is a very substantial part of living as a person. However, while there are vast benefits to this, it sometimes means you lose your own true thoughts. You forget who you were as a person before others opinions became mixed in. In reality, you never knew yourself completely separated from this; it’s always been swirling in. Over the course of history, philosophers, artists and poets have dug into the thoughts a human brain may have without the infiltration of others. Singer and songwriter Taylor Swift and poet Mary Oliver are two of them who have used their art as an avenue to express different aspects of deep introspective …show more content…

Before digging deeper into this idea, it’s important to get a better understanding of who these two artists are. While these two writers cover similar themes in their works, their backgrounds are certainly different. Taylor Swift is a worldwide sensation. It’s near impossible to go a day without overhearing a conversation about her and her Swifties, seeing her recent Era’s Tour on the news, or hearing one of her songs on the radio. It wasn’t always that way for her. She grew up as a somewhat normal teenager with mom Andrea, dad Scott, and younger brother Austin, who are all still part of her central support system today. While her grandmother Marjorie was an opera singer (who Taylor drew much inspiration from and even wrote a song about), fame wasn’t in her immediate family and she wasn’t always the clear talent everyone sees now. Taylor grew up in Tennessee, and attended Hendersonville High School …show more content…

The imagery and simile of “lucid dreams like electricity,” clue us in that this type of reflection and acceptance can’t just occur in a typical mind space with others contributing, it truly has to be your own thoughts, like what can happen in a dream. This same concept is exemplified in a poem by Oliver, also analyzed before, “The Uses of Sorrow.” This poem starts off with the lines, “In my sleep I dreamed this poem. )” It then goes on to explain how over time a truly painful experience brought on by someone she once loved was able to be recognized as a gift by her over time after reflecting on how it actually made her life better. It’s quite interesting that, like Swift, she mentioned dreaming as part of this process of moving on from hard parts of your life. It truly shows how those moments of being completely by yourself with your thoughts is when healing is able to

Open Document