The Swiftie and The Scholar

Buckle up, folks. This is a long one! Invisible String is up next in our folklore canon, and Uncle Jerry showed up PREPARED. He and Angela chat through folktales about the red thread, handfasting ceremonies, and more before diving into the poem. They then get into a long and philosophical conversation about fate and predestination and Forrest Gump.

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Works Cited:
All in green went my love riding – e.e. Cummings
Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman
Red thread of fate
Handfasting
Pope Innocent III and Handfasting
2 Kings 14:21 – 16 as the age of ascension
Epizeuxis
*The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
Enjambment
Metanarrative
Synecdoche
Goddesses of Fate
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
Caesura
Forrest Gump – Winston Groom
Forrest Gump (1994)
Design – Robert Frost
Hap – Thomas Hardy
Proverbs 16:33
The Swiftie and The Scholar Grading Matrix

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We have the opening track of folklore for you today! Uncle Jerry and Angela discuss the relatable way Taylor Swift writes about the ruminations about the different lives we never got to live during this discussion of The 1. 

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Works Cited:
The Windhover – Gerard Manley Hopkins
Ellipsis
Caesura
Ernest Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory
Contrafactuality
Sight rhyme or eye rhyme
*The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Trochaic Hexameter
The Swiftie and The Scholar Grading Matrix

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In this episode, we are covering Hoax, the closing track from 2020’s folklore. Uncle Jerry starts out a bit iffy on his feelings about the poem, but talking through it with Angela helps him find extra meaning.

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Works Cited:
Anaphora
Ellipsis
Oxymoron
Polysemy
Parallelism
Paradox
Fatalism
Faithless Love – Linda Ronstadt
i sing of Olaf glad and big – e.e. cummings
To a Mouse – Robert Burns
*Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
To a Louse – Robert Burns
Jonah 3 – Jonah Goes to Nineveh
Synecdoche
Metanarrative
The Lord’s Prayer
The Swiftie and The Scholar Grading Matrix

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Continuing along our folklore journey, this episode covers exile, the collaboration between Taylor Swift and Bon Iver. Uncle Jerry teaches us about different types of exile and how they appear across literature and folk tales. We then dig into the poem and Uncle Jerry admits to Angela that he almost cheated and listened to the song because he was so ready to hear how they spoke over each other. 

Also, ICYMI, we will be finishing the entire folklore album. Stay tuned over the next few weeks as we tackle the remaining tracks and then do a comprehensive overview.

Song discussion starts at 19:12

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Works Cited:
Just Give Me a Reason – Pink ft. Nate Ruess
The Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri 
Gilgamesh, Nature, and Civilization
Paradise Lost – John Milton
The Odyssey – Homer
Exile of Ovid
Poems From Exile: Ex Ponto, Book I – Ovid
*Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
*Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
*Ulysses – James Joyce
*Dubliners – James Joyce
*A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
Polyphony in Contemporary Literature
Dramatic irony
Assonance
Alliteration
Iambic tetrameter
Iambic trimeter
Ballad meter or common measure
Synecdoche
Phaedrus
Epistrophe
The Swiftie and The Scholar Grading Matrix

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We are tackling one of the most underrated tracks from Taylor Swift’s folklore album, epiphany. The poem compares past war tragedies to 2020’s pandemic, and Uncle Jerry uses the poem to teach us about Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory. 

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Works Cited:
Wilfred Owen
Siegfried Sassoon
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner – Randall Jarrell
The Angels at Hamburg – Randall Jarrell
Vignette poems
Rhapsody on a Windy Night – T. S. Eliot
Trochees
Iambs
The Song of Hiawatha – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Ernest Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory
*Death in the Afternoon – Ernest Hemingway 
Caesura
Parallelism
Synecdoche
*The Things They Carried: The Classic Work of American Literature on War, Memory, and Storytelling –Tim O'Brien 
*Man's Search for Meaning – Viktor E. Frankl 
Sonnet 19: When I consider how my light is spent – John Milton
The Swiftie and The Scholar Grading Matrix

Follow Us:
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Uncle Jerry’s Instagram
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