And the next song in our #MidnightsTS lyrical analysis is: Bigger Than The Whole Sky! We will discuss how this song touches on the many aspects and manifestations of grief, as well as explore the potential lyrical connections to Would've, Could've, Should've. A 🧵: 
1) A disclaimer to begin: this song is about grief, period. The genius of Taylor's songwriting is in the universality of her emotional expression, meaning that absolutely anyone can relate this song to their own personal experiences with grief. That is what makes it so beautiful.
2) Many have related this to a lost love, or else the unimaginable loss of an unborn child. This song can absolutely apply to any and all of these scenarios. The purpose of this analysis is not to speculate about what specific, deeply personal grief inspired this song for Taylor.
3) I will instead discuss how she carefully constructs her lyricism to create a song that can hold beautifully, painfully true to any kind of grief, whether it be for a loved one, a time in your life, or your past self (ie, through parallels with WCS). With that, we can begin!
4) "No words appear before me in the aftermath." We begin with a scene of devastation. She has lost something incredibly important to her--so much so, that her usual coping strategy of channeling her emotions into song completely fails her. For once in her life, she has no words.
5) "Salt streams out my eyes and into my ears." Not only has the magnitude of her grief left her speechless, but she has also been physically immobilized by it. Her tears do not fall down her face--they follow gravity down to her ears as she lies down, looking up at the ceiling.
6) This description also touches on the overwhelming sensory experience of grief. Her tears fill her eyes and her ears: she is blind and deaf to the outside world, completely consumed by the sights and sounds of her memories and the enormity of this loss.
7) This lyric also later ties in to the title, where she compares the importance of what she has lost to the all-encompassing sky. She is lying flat, crying while staring up at the "sky" that used to represent this incredibly valuable thing she has lost. A sky which is now empty.
8) "Every single thing I touch becomes sick with sadness." For one, this loss has rendered her so devastated that everything she encounters also becomes touched with her own grief. Just like her tears, her sadness imbues every experience she has and every person she sees.
9) Another explanation is that Taylor may be blaming herself in part for this loss. Perhaps she feels that she has lost someone BECAUSE everything that she touches becomes sick with sadness. She may be grieving her inability to maintain anything stable and healthy in her life.
10) "'Cause it's all over now, all out to sea." Her use of "out to sea" to describe her loss has several potential meanings. She could mean that what she has lost has been "put out to sea:" ie, that it has left her behind, never to return to the familiar harbor of her life.
11) Alternatively, the "it" that is "out to sea" could also refer to herself and her life. With this loss, she feels alone in a vast unknown: swept away from all that was familiar, isolated, shipwrecked, forced to fend for herself in the choppy waters of her new, empty life.
12) "Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, you were bigger than the whole sky." She emphasizes just how important this loss was to her. What she lost represented her whole life, her whole purpose, her "whole sky." She must say goodbye to something that had become an integral part of her.
13) This is where the many meanings of this song really begin to take form. She could be saying goodbye to a person who had become her everything: a dear friend, a family member, a partner. She could be saying goodbye to a dream or a hope that had animated her whole life.
14) "You were more than just a short time." Perhaps this was a short-lived relationship or dream, but perhaps it was simply short in comparison to what it could have been. Perhaps this was something Taylor wanted to last her entire life, and having to lose it at all is crushing.
15) "And I've got a lot to pine about, I've got a lot to live without." Not only is the scale of what she has just lost enormous, but Taylor also implies that it is adding to a long list of similarly awful losses. This is grief piled on to all the grief she has felt in her life.
16) As many of us who have had intimate experiences with grief know, losing something important has a way of triggering so many memories of past griefs and struggles. The cumulative weight of all that you have lost throughout your life can also feel "bigger than the whole sky."
17) "I'm never gonna meet, what could've been would've been, what should've been you." This centers on the loss of potential. If this was a relationship, she is grieving never knowing what they might have become. How close they may have grown, what they could have built together.
18) If this was a dream, a hope for her life, she is grieving that it never came to fruition. I very much see how this line in particular resonates with those who have experienced miscarriages, who will never be able to see who their child would have become had they lived.
19) This line has also raised much speculation due to the direct lyrical connection with the song "Would've, Could've, Should've." I think it is very possible that this was a purposeful lyrical choice.
20) The song WCS is, at heart, a song about "missing who you used to be" before a traumatic experience. Taylor writes in WCS that she wishes more than anything that she could take back "my girlhood," that she wishes she could have been "left wondering."
21) By making this connection, Taylor develops the additional interpretation that the great loss described in BTTWS is the loss of one's past self, perhaps the innocent, childlike self before an experienced trauma. This interpretation works on many levels throughout the song.
22) The person that she used to be was of course "bigger than the whole sky" because that person represented her whole self: her dreams, her personality, her outlook on life. Her old self was more than just a short time: she represented a potential for her entire future.
23) This song could be about how a trauma irrevocably changed her, leading to the loss of her innocence and her old view of the world. Those of us who have experienced trauma know: you are not the same on the other end. You never will know who you would have become without it.
24) Even if this song is about the loss of something external, this alternate meaning still applies. When we lose someone important to us, we are forever changed. We lose their influence, their support, the joint life we could have shared. We become different people without them.
25) Taylor may be grieving about what she could have, would have, or should have done to maintain an incredibly important relationship, but she is also grieving who she desperately feels she herself could, would, and should have become had this gigantic loss never happened.
26) "Did some bird flap its wings over in Asia?" In her grief, she is looking everywhere for an explanation for her loss. Here, she invokes the Butterfly Effect, a theory that tiny changes (ie, the flapping of a bird's wings) can lead to a cascade of consequences in the Universe.
27) This line really expresses how helpless she feels. She can't find a reason for why she has been left with such enormous grief, so she grasps at any explanation in an attempt to soothe herself: fate, chance, a grand universal plan of which she has no control or conception.
28) This line is in direct contrast to the next: "Did some force take you because I didn't pray?" This implies that Taylor feels in some way responsible for this loss. Perhaps she feels guilty that she didn't see the warning signs, or that she could have done more to fix it.
29) One one level, this perfectly, painfully describes the desperate back-and-forth of grief. So often, you oscillate between extremes, from feeling hopelessly crushed by inexorable fate to blaming yourself for everything that happened. This is real, raw, messy grief in action.
30) On another level, I think this is an incredibly interesting parallel to the religious imagery in WCS. There, she paints an abusive relationship as the cause of her loss of innocence, regretting that she did not "stay on her knees" (ie, in "prayer," away from temptation).
31) Taking BTTWS as a song about the loss of your old self, this line implies that Taylor feels she did not safeguard her innocence enough. A "force" changed her, taking away her younger self because she wasn't careful--because she "danced with the devil" rather than "pray."
32) Regardless of the exact cause of her grief, these lines show that Taylor feels both helpless and guilty about the loss. She doesn't know where her culpability begins and where inevitability ends, and she feels lost in her total inability to pinpoint how and why this happened.
33) "Every single thing to come has turned into ashes." Once again, we see how her entire future feels erased in this loss. She doesn't know how to move forward. She has to rebuild her entire sense of self, reconstruct her entire world around the devastation of her grief.
34) Once again, this touches on how so much of ourselves is tied in the people and things that we love. When we lose something so integral to us and our daily lives, it can challenge our entire identity, changing who we are as people and who we become as we learn to move forward.
35) "Cause it's all over, it's not meant to be." She once again clings to fate to explain her loss. How many times have we heard or said "it just wasn't meant to be?" Sometimes the idea of fate stepping in is comforting, a momentary relief from guilt and endlessly wondering why.
36) "So I say words I don't believe." These words that she doesn't believe are the next lyrics: "goodbye, goodbye, goodbye." This loss is so shattering that, in her shock, she can not believe that it is real. She can't believe that it is all over, that she has to say goodbye.
37) Not only is she in disbelief about whatever external loss occured, but also about the parts of herself that she lost. She can't yet believe that she has lost her old sense of self; she can't yet say goodbye to her hopes and dreams. She isn't ready to create her new self.
38) This entire song circles through the stages of grief. She is in denial: she doesn't believe that she must say goodbye. She is angry at the forces of fate that have taken something invaluable away from her. She bargains, fixating on what "should" have stayed as her reality.
39) Her depression envelops the whole song, with tears streaming into her ears, sadness touching everything around her. And while she has not yet found it at the end of this song, you know that ultimately, she must also find acceptance.
40) Her old world and her old self have been shaken and taken away from her. But in the aftermath, as we all have done so many times in our lives, she must learn to collect the pieces and build herself a whole, new sky.
Links to other analysis threads below!
Maroon:
Maroon:
https://twitter.com/tweetsricochet/status/1590097793854869504
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