Is Taylor Swift Writing About the Dark Night of the Soul?

In 1577, a Spanish Carmelite friar named John of the Cross was imprisoned by his own religious order — locked in a small cell in Toledo, in conditions of considerable misery. During his captivity, and in the months after his escape, he wrote some of the greatest poetry in the Spanish language and some of the most precise spiritual cartography ever produced: the Dark Night of the Soul. He described a journey that many Christian mystics had reported — a period of profound spiritual desolation, a felt absence of God, a stripping away of consolations, that served not as evidence that faith was false but as the path through which the soul was being prepared for something it could not yet imagine.

In 2020, a pop star from Pennsylvania released two albums in the space of five months — Folklore and Evermore — that together constitute one of the most unexpected artistic pivots in recent music history. They were quieter, more interior, less certain than anything she had made before. The production stripped back to piano and acoustic guitar and whispered vocals in winter light. The themes were loss, isolation, the slow work of becoming someone you cannot yet name. They were followed, in 2022, by Midnights — an album that sounded like someone who had been through the dark and was still not sure what she had found on the other side.

I am not claiming Taylor Swift is secretly a Carmelite mystic. I am noting that the arc of her most serious artistic work traces the shape of what John of the Cross described with uncanny precision — and that this tells us something interesting about both the durability of his map and the seriousness of hers.

The Dark Night: What It Actually Is

The Dark Night of the Soul is routinely misunderstood as a synonym for depression, or a general sense of spiritual difficulty. John of the Cross was describing something more specific: a period in which the usual sources of spiritual consolation — prayer that once felt alive, a sense of God's presence, the emotional warmth of faith — go dry. The soul that has relied on these consolations finds itself without them, and cannot manufacture substitutes by trying harder.

The crucial point, which is easy to miss, is that in John's analysis this is not a sign of failure. It is a sign of progress. The consolations were real and good — but they were training wheels. The soul is being weaned from dependence on feeling in order to be capable of a deeper, more mature relationship with God that does not depend on feeling. The darkness is the darkness of being moved into a space that cannot be lit by ordinary means. Something larger is coming, and it requires a new kind of capacity.

The mystic in the Dark Night feels abandoned. She is not. She is being held in a darkness that is itself a form of intimacy.

Folklore, Evermore, and the Shape of Desolation

The albums Swift released in 2020 are, lyrically and sonically, studies in withdrawal. They are full of small enclosed spaces — cabins in the woods, attics, the interior of a car in a storm. The narrator is repeatedly a figure at a remove from the life she used to inhabit, watching it from a distance, trying to understand what happened. The emotional temperature is cool. The certainties of earlier albums are gone. What remains is a kind of honest uncertainty that does not pretend to resolutions it has not earned.

This is the tone of the Dark Night's first stage — what John called the night of the senses. The colorful world has gone grey. What once worked no longer does. The self is left with its own company in ways it finds uncomfortable. The movement is not toward despair but it does not feel like hope either. It feels like waiting in the dark for something that has not arrived yet.

Midnights is a more complex album and a harder one to read spiritually, partly because it is more self-aware and more guarded. But its central images — insomnia, the 3am moment, the conversations one has only with oneself in the dark — place it on the same territory. The narrator is still in the dark, but she is more clearly looking for something now. She is not simply enduring. She is searching.

What the Church Offers People in That Darkness

The widespread resonance of Swift's Folklore/Evermore era tells us something important: a lot of people recognized their own experience in those albums. A lot of people are in some form of the dark night, without the theological vocabulary to name it or the tradition to navigate by. They know the consolations have dried up. They are not sure what, if anything, is coming next.

The Church has a tradition designed precisely for this situation. Spiritual direction — one of the oldest forms of pastoral care — exists to help people navigate interior territory that cannot be navigated alone. The great mystics left maps: John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Ignatius of Loyola's discernment of spirits. These are not self-help tools. They are accounts from people who went into the dark and came back with something they could describe.

The invitation to someone resonating with Swift's desolation albums is not "become more religious." It is more specific: the experience you are having has been named and navigated before. You are not the first person in this darkness. There are people who can read the terrain with you. The tradition exists to be companionable in exactly this place.

What Secular Art Can and Cannot Do

Great secular art can name the experience. It can make the person in the dark feel less alone. It can even provide a kind of companionship — the sense that someone else has been here and made something beautiful from it. This is genuinely valuable. It is not nothing.

What it cannot provide is the map through, the account of what lies on the other side, the promise that the darkness has a direction. John of the Cross could make that promise because he had been through the dark and arrived somewhere. His poetry is beautiful because of what the suffering produced, not merely because of the suffering itself. The Church offers what the album cannot: not just the acknowledgment of the darkness, but the destination.

Something to sit with: Have you experienced a period when the consolations of faith — or of life more broadly — went dry? Did you know, in the middle of it, that the darkness had a direction?