What if the fight in “Afterglow” didn’t end with the sunrise?
Take a closer look at Taylor Swift’s “The Great War,” exploring its connections to “Afterglow,” “ivy,” “peace,” and other songs hidden within the lyrics. Through recurring wartime imagery, botanical symbolism, and patterns of betrayal and secrecy, Krys Sloane reveals how the song expands one sleepless night into a much more sweeping cliffhanger.
For listeners interested in deeper song meaning, layered storytelling analysis, and the invisible threads connecting Taylor Swift’s lyrics across albums.
The Great War watch the lyric video
Track 14 on Midnights
Written by Taylor Swift and Aaron Dessner
Produced by Taylor Swift and Aaron Dessner
Listen to the album: https://amzn.to/4cXiv3W
Referenced in this Episode
New York Times + Popcast: Taylor Swift Songwriters’ Interview: https://youtu.be/5B8-TJ8vsKY?si=V8EHIYfJkzCyeAgD
Crimson & Clover by Tommy James and the Shondells: https://youtu.be/XS0niyiKlcw?si=eQjfwh9_EwhJ89Xw
Podcast theme music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/soundroll/happy-feet
The Off the Record episode for this song is waiting for you. Become a Patreon supporter!
Full Deep Dive: Read the Breakdown
There’s a beautiful tension between “The Great War” and “Afterglow.”
Like all songs on Midnights, “The Great War” revisits a sleepless night in Taylor’s life.
In it, we return to the fight Taylor first told us about in “Afterglow,” off the Lover album, where she attacked and punished her partner for things he didn’t do.
“Afterglow” treats the fight like something that, once identified, could be prevented in the future. Something contained and fixable. Hand in hand, they can still have their happily ever after and head off into the sunrise after that night.
But looking back at that night from a distance, “The Great War” recognizes the event as just one in a series of similar nights. An ongoing fight based on a painful history with increasing collateral damage.
And if it’s a war, then survival can’t be assumed. It’s uncertain. It’s not “we’ll make it through.” It’s “if we make it through.”
And, I gotta tell ya, I wasn’t expecting a look at one night in the past to turn into a cliffhange
ALBUM PLACEMENT
“The Great War” opens the 3am Edition bonus tracks, and it acts like a Track 1 for that whole section of the album. It sets the tone for everything that follows.
The main album closes with “Mastermind,” which is all about control and strategy. It’s calculated. It’s deliberate. It’s her manipulating the system and working within it to get the outcome she wanted.
Taylor has talked about her love of juxtaposition, and her placement of The Great War after Mastermind is an excellent example of that.
[NYT INTERVIEW CLIP PLAYS]
Instead of control, what you get here is confession. Instead of strategy, you get reactivity. Instead of calculation… instability.
And beyond that, in its role of Bonus Track tone-setter, you get a song that encompasses a much wider set of experiences. You can hear the loss and remembrance of “Bigger Than the Whole Sky,” the escapism of “Paris,” the divided loyalties of “High Infidelity,” the dissociation of “Glitch,” the resurfaced trauma of “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve,” and the fear of betrayal in “Dear Reader.”
VERSE 1 – WHAT SHE CARRIED INTO IT
Verse 1 opens on the same scene as “Afterglow,” but she’s not merely retelling the story. She’s examining it from a distance. Seeing what was already there before the fight even started, and better understanding what came next.
In this verse, she gives us the bruised knuckles from “Afterglow”’s bare-knuckle boxing match and layers in the lack of courage from “peace,” the conflicted dreamland of “ivy,” the banner tearing from “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve,” and her symbolic death from “Look What You Made Me Do.”
And underneath all this, she layers in a botanical reference, describing the knuckles as “bruised like violets,” which introduces a theme that will carry through the rest of the song, providing hints at the underlying causes of this conflict.
These botanical references point back to other relationships she’s written about.
Violets often represent innocence, modesty, and loyalty. They can also mean sorrow over a loss. In this combination of meanings, I see “Dear John.” That early relationship where youthful innocence was ruptured and trust was betrayed by a partner who promised loyalty but ended up a traitor.
You know how when you’re in a moment and you’re reacting badly, bigger than the moment really calls for? Well, that’s how I see this. “Sucker punching walls,” and “cursed you as I sleep-talked” are pretty outsized reactions to bickering with a loved one.
There was an initial moment that caused the narrator to react in “The Great War,” but that’s not what she’s reacting to, really. It’s something else spilling over. And that is why it keeps going even outside of the direct confrontation. Why the anger continues even in her sleep. It’s not a reaction to what’s happening now, but what’s been happening throughout her past that’s been building toward this conflict.
Then, after that explosion outward, she pulls inward. “Spineless in my tomb of silence.” The tomb representing a symbolic death, reminiscent of the old Taylor dying in “Look What You Made Me Do,” off reputation. Here, unable to reconcile the emotional reaction she’s experienced with the minor infraction that caused it, she just shuts down completely. And she feels like a coward for doing so, something she’s told us about in “peace,” from folklore, where she feels the danger within herself causing her to lose courage.
And as the narrator continues, we get a hint at a song yet to come on the album, as she tears his banners down, which she’ll reference in “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve.” What she does with this line is expand the scale of the fight. Banners are signals to others that you’re standing with the people whose side you’re meant to be on. They’re for battles among many people, not for personal arguments with individuals. So here, she’s hinting that she’s not just fighting with him, she’s fighting against something bigger.
Then she takes the battle underground, perhaps into the trenches referenced in “epiphany,” off folklore, but more likely into her tomb of silence, where she can examine the causes more closely.
So, when she tries to name the cause, “maybe it was ego,” “maybe it was her,” and she doesn’t land on anything definite, we start to understand what she was grappling with: there isn’t a clear explanation for what started this, because it is the result of an accumulation of causes.
Things the narrator brought with her into that night.
CHORUS 1 – COST + PATTERN
Things like the betrayal by someone she thought was a friend, and the lack of trust she extends to others because she may consider herself untrustworthy. Let’s dig in.
[FIRST 2-3 LINES OF CHORUS PLAY]
The bruised knuckles and silence from the first verse have become bloodshed now, and the “sweet dream” is over. Contrast that with “Afterglow,” where the dream-like state is still intact, and he can meet her there, in that warm place after the fight. Here, the dream is interrupted.
But before we get there, we get a deeply layered line introducing the second botanical: “crimson clover.” A three-leaf clover symbolizes a trinity, and a four-leaf clover carries ideas of faith, hope, luck, and love. Different connotations include renewal, and prosperity, too. And in all that, I see “Look What You Made Me Do,” where a betrayal that splashed into public spectacle required the narrator to reinvent herself.
This line also name-checks a 1968 song about a dreamlike state you can’t quite avoid, “Crimson and Clover” by Tommy James and the Shondells, where the lyrics create a feeling of inescapable repetition.
[CLIP OF CRIMSON AND CLOVER CHORUS PLAYS]
In “ivy,” clover shows up in a song about secret longings, blooming in spring and representing a forbidden renewal. A reminder of the narrator’s private betrayal of her partner.
Here, in “The Great War,” that field of clover has been stained crimson by the bloodshed of her battle.
Then she tells us what he did in the middle of all this. He reached for her hand. His response was connection. Even while the fight was happening, even while she’s reacting from trauma he didn’t create, he keeps reaching for her. He’s not absent from the war. Or, more importantly, on the other side of it. He’s right there in it with her. On her side.
[MY HAND/THROUGHOUT LINE PLAYS]
But that right there is where she tells us this fight was bigger than one night, than one fight, bigger than one battle, even. This was war. And not just any war.
The Great War was what World War I was called before anyone knew there would be a World War II. It was also called “the war to end all wars,” representing the hope and tragedy of the time. People wanted to believe the suffering had been in service of a more permanent peace. They wanted to believe the worst was truly over. Survivors met each other in the afterglow, not yet seeing what was still to come.
And so, throughout this war, he keeps reaching for her. The narrator, however, does not react in kind. She remembers “tears on the letter,” a more solitary kind of processing. It reminds me of “evermore,” where letters are written and burned, not shared. While he reaches outward, she again turns inward, not trusting him enough to share her innermost thoughts. So, she simply vows not to cry anymore if they get through this.
And that’s where the chorus leaves us: with the damage visible, the connection still present, and a promise that depends on whether or not they survive.
BOTANICAL PATTERN – BETRAYAL IN ALL ITS FORMS
I need to pause here and acknowledge that this is my interpretation of the song.
It’s grounded in the patterns I see in Taylor’s writing and the context of when she wrote it, but it is still just one way to hear it.
Taylor writes her songs to be layered, and a little vague, so that each of us can take what we need from them.
This song has a lot of layers. One of my favorites is the botanical references. The meanings of the flowers she names within the songs.
It seems like kind of an odd thing at first, so many flowers in a song about war, but the symbolism of flowers became important in wartime to convey messages of love without appearing indiscrete, and afterwards as a way to share messages of hope and grief without words.
I believe the flowers mentioned in this song represent the various betrayals the narrator has experienced. Four times others have betrayed her, and once where she feels she betrayed someone else.
Two flowers have been mentioned already: violets and clover.
Violets represent innocence and loyalty, but here they’re used to describe bruises, so it’s a damaged innocence, a broken loyalty. A betrayal that took away her naivete. One that set the baseline for mistrust in her. As in “Dear John.”
Clover has multiple meanings, and with each of them considered, you get a trio of people connected to hope and renewal, love and prosperity. But here, it’s blood-stained clover. Visible repercussions of a betrayal that invited public participation. In “Look What You Made Me Do,” we hear about the loss of control over personal narrative, an escalation beyond a private space, and that this betrayal caused the narrator to leave behind the person she was before it happened.
The next flower we will encounter is the poppy. They were essentially the official flower of remembrance after The Great War. Poppies symbolize devastating loss and sacrifice. Here, the narrator places one in her own hair, representing her own loss. Which points to “My Tears Ricochet,” a song detailing how someone important to her worried more about their own reputation than her wellbeing, taking something of incredible value to her and leaving her for dead. A betrayal that stripped her of something she considered foundational in her own identity.
The final flower mentioned in the song is the morning glory, which traditionally represents an enduring love that cannot be requited. It’s love in vain. Morning glories often appear on gravestones to signify that the departed are still loved even though they are no longer among us. It could be a nod to the betrayal of death, in losing someone too soon, as in “Bigger Than the Whole Sky,” the next song on the Midnights album.
I see the morning glory as having a dual meaning, and we’ll explore that further in context when we get to that line.
There’s one botanical reference that haunts the edges of this song, and I’ve already mentioned it in verse 1. It’s “ivy.” There are numerous references to the song “ivy” throughout “The Great War,” in the clover, taking her hand, visiting graves and dreams, grieving for the living, and playing with fire. It is ever-present, and it’s the overwhelming feeling in her mind that she is the one not worthy of trust. But the narrator doesn’t name it explicitly the way she does the other botanicals, because this is her secret. We’ll talk more about this in verse 2.
VERSE 2 – AN ATTEMPT AT REPAIR
In verse 1, we hear about what the narrator did on that night. In verse 2 we hear about how her partner reacted.
He’s approaching it like something that can be worked out. He’s writing “good faith treaties” seeking to end the fighting, assuming both parties want peace and will act with integrity.
But she doesn’t meet him there.
She closes the curtains. Drinks her poison all alone, like a captured World War I spy. Like someone with something to hide. Showing just how far she’s willing to go not to talk about what’s really going on.
From her partner’s perspective, he’s just trying to bring her out into the open. So he tells her she has to trust more freely.
And this is where all those layers of betrayal come into play. For him, she’s just icing him out for no reason. For her, those betrayals are why trust isn’t something she can simply call upon.
Which is where the next line comes in, “diesel is desire, you were playing with fire.”
Diesel is a slow-burning fuel, and tied to desire, becomes an emotion that doesn’t just go away. But desire for whom? She’s definitely hinting at something here.
Meanwhile, she is the fire he’s playing with. In the second verse of “peace,” the narrator tells us that she’s a fire, and then in “ivy” she fears that her partner will “burn the house down” if her betrayal is ever discovered.
This is why she keeps shutting him out. Even though she has trouble trusting because of the betrayals she’s endured, what she really fears is him realizing that he can’t trust her.
This verse also reconnects us to Afterglow, reminding us that her attacks were not earned. They were constructed.
In “Afterglow” she asked, “Why’d I have to break what I love so much?” In “The Great War” she answers:
[MAYBE IT’S THE PAST/I JUSTIFIED IT PLAYS]
She’s reacting out of pain, but also from trying to protect her secret. So instead of working with him to repair what went wrong, the narrator ends up reinforcing a pattern.
CHORUS 2 – ESCALATION
The second chorus starts with that same crimson clover line, reiterating the layered reference to repetition, and then further expands the scale of the fight. What began in verse 1 as bruised knuckles has become bombs reducing things to embers.
She punished him with silence and then “went off like sirens” in “Afterglow.” She echoes that eruption here. What was once muted has detonated, and still, he reaches for her. He is remarkable in his consistency.
Next, she says they should always remember, which was something that survivors felt was important after World War I. Remembrance often took the form of a moment of silence.
This time, though, she did not go quiet and turn inward. She simply vowed not to fight anymore if they could just get through this.
BRIDGE – RECOGNITION
What started as a fight between two people has been increasing in scope and severity throughout the song, and here in the bridge she says, “it turned into something bigger.” And what she’s referring to is all those battle scars from the songs represented by the botanical references. This was never just between them. That sense of betrayal she describes doesn’t come from anything he’s done in that moment. It’s the narrator’s past that taught her to expect betrayal.
In the haze, she’s easy to set off. It doesn’t take much. A small movement, something incidental, and suddenly the reaction is already in motion. Those “hairpin triggers” set off a war within her, and she attacks blindly. Her response is immediate, and disproportionate, and it was loaded long before this moment.
So, when the damage finally becomes visible, she sees him “broken and blue” (tying us back again to Afterglow), brought down in a fight he barely belonged in. And even there, even in that position, he’s still meeting her with the same thing he’s brought the whole time. Honor. Integrity. Acceptance of her exactly as she is.
Finally, everything else falls away.
Because for the first time, she’s not reacting to her internal struggle. She’s reacting to what’s actually in front of her. She sees him clearly, separate from everything she’s been projecting onto him, and the fight stops. Realizing she could lose him, she ends the attack.
Only then does the weight of it register. Not what she was actually doing, but what it almost cost her. And even then, she still doesn’t tell him the whole truth.
VERSE 3 – MEMORY GARDEN
Instead, we jump directly to the aftermath of war and the last two botanical references we’ve been talking about.
[LINES 2 AND 3 OF VERSE 3 PLAYS]
First, is the poppy she places in her hair. Then the morning glory, which I mentioned has two meanings in this song. The first meaning is a reference to loving someone who has passed. And the second meaning is a fragile but enduring love. One like that described in “Afterglow.” Yet, here, she says there’s NO morning glory, which tells us this doesn’t end the way she thought it would when she wrote that song.
After World War I, memory gardens and the flowers within them became symbols of remembrance. They honored what had been fought for and what that fight had cost.
I’ve connected each flower to a song representing a relationship that wounded her. This garden is her acknowledgment of the damage she caused by carrying the ghosts of those relationships into this one.
In this garden, she’s attempting to lay these ghosts to rest in order to move on. And in recognition of that, we get a new instrument in the song: a snare drum. It’s playing something that resembles a funeral march or 21-gun salute accompaniment. It only appears within this verse, then fades away as quickly as it appeared.
She’s planting a memory garden, placing a poppy in her hair, and saying a prayer. Since there is no morning glory here, we’re not getting a rosy sunrise to wander off into, but she does say “we will never go back.”
And I love this line because like so many of hers, it has two meanings. Just like the survivors of The Great War, they can’t go back to who they were before this fight began, but they also hope they have learned enough to ensure they never return to a fight like this.
FINAL CHORUS + OUTRO – DECLARED RESOLUTION
The final chorus finishes the thought that they’ll never go back to the bloodshed, saying the worst is over.
In the first two choruses, Taylor sings “if we survived,” but in the third chorus they have survived. And with that shift, the vow changes too. It’s no longer conditional. It’s not tied to survival anymore. It stands on its own: she won’t fight like that again.
That mirrors where “Afterglow” leaves us. At the end of that song, she asks to be let back in, promises to change, and holds onto the idea that what they have could still be intact. Here, she’s not asking. She’s stating it. They’ve come through something destructive, and she’s choosing to believe that it won’t repeat.
That belief is important, because everything we’ve seen in this song suggests how difficult that would actually be. The attacks weren’t tied to a single moment. That reaction was built from everything she carried into it, everything she never fully brought into the open.
But in this moment, she’s holding onto the fact that they survived.
She’s buried her ghosts (while maintaining her secret) and stepped forward with the conviction of someone who understands what she nearly lost.
They made it through, not untouched by the fire, but “burned for better.” Changed, refined, and stronger for having endured it.
Having faced the worst of herself, she could finally choose hope. And, despite not fully opening herself up to him, she believes that’s enough to keep it from happening again.
Looking back at that night in “Afterglow,” “The Great War” recognizes it as just one in a series of similar nights. An ongoing fight based on a painful history with increasing collateral damage.
Since it was a war, survival couldn’t be assumed. It was uncertain. It was not “we will make it through.” It was “if we make it through.”
And since it was The Great War, even when they made it through, there was still another war ahead of them.
