The Woman Who Sits By the Window: “I Look in People’s Windows” and Beyond

If eyes are the windows to the soul, are windows the eyes to the soul?

With a discography spanning eleven albums, Taylor Swift has plenty of lyrical patterns and motifs throughout her songs. Windows are one recurring symbol that takes on a number of feelings and ideas. For Swift, they represent memory, patience, danger, and connection; these themes come up independently in songs from several albums. In most of the examples I found, references to windows are in passing and merely contribute to larger narrative meanings, but one song from The Tortured Poets Department takes a different approach. Swift’s shortest song to date, “I Look in People’s Windows” offers a concise but effective exploration of these themes and the power of this symbol to reflect the potential for human connection and loneliness.

Memory

Swift uses windows as a metaphor for memory, in both positive and negative contexts. In “Death By A Thousand Cuts,” the speaker admits to revisiting her happy memories from before the end of her relationship: “I look through the windows of this love / Even though we boarded them up.”¹ This example illustrates the figurative windows’ ability to grant and block access to past experiences. “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” provides a more sinister outlook: “The tomb won’t close / Stained glass windows in my mind / I regret you all the time.” In this song, the speaker cannot escape her feelings of “regret” surrounding a past relationship. The deceptively ornate “[s]tained glass windows” constantly confront her with bad memories, carrying with them the song’s religious trauma. Finally, “Midnight Rain” presents a more neutral reflection on memory: “So I peered through a window / A deep portal, time travel.” Here, the act of looking “through a window” transports the speaker back in time, vividly bringing her memories to life.

Patience

Another theme that windows symbolize is patience. This comes up most prominently in Swift’s earlier music with her youthful romanticization of passivity. In “Superman,” the speaker waits patiently for her lover to return: “I’m lovestruck and looking out the window.” She idolizes the muse and regards the window as a fundamental barrier between them. Then, the entire concept of “Come in With the Rain” rests on the window as a symbol of the speaker’s patience: “I’ll leave my window open… I’m right here hoping / That you’ll come in with the rain.” The speaker hopes for the muse’s valiant return, sacrificing shelter by letting the rain in through the window as well. In “The Other Side of the Door,” the more obvious barrier is the door, but the speaker’s window functions similarly: “all I really want is you / To stand outside my window throwin’ pebbles.” She wants to reconcile with the muse, but she doesn’t want to be the one to go after them, choosing instead to stay put and wait. In a departure from this pattern, the window comes to illustrate the speaker’s patience running out in “Peter”: “But the woman who sits by the window has turned out the light.” With maturity comes perspective in this TTPD song as “the woman” realizes that passivity and inaction are not worth it.

Danger

In some examples, windows represent vulnerability to danger. “Call It What You Want” acknowledges their role in the pursuit of shelter: “Windows boarded up after the storm.” Here the windows must be “boarded up” as a protective measure against the figurative “storm” and the dangers they might let in. In “evermore,” the speaker is left vulnerable to the outside world: “Staring out an open window / Catching my death.” The “open window” renders “death” an illness that the speaker is exposed to but seems unable to turn away from. In a twist on this idea, “Cruel Summer” posits the danger as thrilling: “Fever dream high in the quiet of the night, you know that I caught it… Killing me slow, out the window / I’m always waiting for you to be waiting below.” Once again, the speaker “caught” something through the window that is “[k]illing” her, but this time she hopes that the muse will be “waiting below” so that she can embrace the danger.

Connection

In their simplest form, windows represent the potential for connection. In “Our Song,” the window is a way for the speaker to reach the muse: “Sneakin’ out late, tapping on your window.” Swift presents a similar idea in “Hey Stephen”: “Of all the girls tossing rocks at your window / I’ll be the one waiting there even when it’s cold.” Despite her “waiting,” the speaker takes initiative by “tossing rocks” at the muse’s window. In “Stay Beautiful,” the muse is the one reaching out to the speaker: “He whispers songs into my window in words that nobody knows.” The window is a vessel for communication that allows for privacy and an exclusive vocabulary with “words that nobody knows.” Closed windows can also be barriers to connection, like in “Renegade”: “I tapped on your window on your darkest night / The shape of you was jagged and weak.” As the mere “shape” of the muse, who is struggling with their mental health, is “jagged and weak,” the speaker’s attempt at connection might prove unsuccessful.

“I Look in People’s Windows”

“I Look in People’s Windows” touches on all four of these themes. In the first verse, the speaker introduces the broken relationship: “I had died the tiniest death / I spied the catch in your breath out.” By beginning with past perfect tense, she indicates the order of events while minimizing her pain. The speaker is established as a keenly observant figure through synesthesia, where she “spied” the sound and feeling of the muse’s “breath.”² The precision of the internal rhyme (“died” / “spied” and “death” / “breath”) further emphasizes her attunement to the muse such that she catches the slightest variations in their behavior. For reasons unknown, the two were torn apart, pulled in opposite directions: “Northbound, I got carried away / As you boarded your train south.” The speaker’s passivity is justified by natural forces beyond her control: “A feather taken by the wind blowing / I’m afflicted by the not knowing.” She was “carried away” by the “wind,” which suggests that neither party was at fault for the split. Nevertheless, she now wants to know what’s going on with the muse, and the utter lack of contact is getting to her.

In the chorus, the speaker shares her penchant for spying: “I look in people’s windows / Transfixed by rose-golden glows / They have their friends over to drink nice wine.” The genericism of “people’s windows” reveals that she will turn to anyone and everyone. In this eerie image, the speaker does not attempt to interact with the people inside, instead passively observing them and waiting patiently for the person she wants to find. She is, however, “[t]ransfixed” by what she sees, the word implying a magical power that captures her attention. In many of Swift’s songs, gold represents real love and happiness, and the image of “rose-golden glows” further evokes softness and comfort in the connection that the speaker sees on the other side of the window. With her simple observational statement about the gathering inside, the detail that she notices is community and friendship, which brings out the root of the song: loneliness.

The speaker then explains how this all relates to the muse: “I look in people’s windows / In case you’re at their table / What if your eyes looked up and met mine one more time?” The notion that she might find the muse literally anywhere, in random people’s houses, emphasizes how far removed she has become from their life. The phrases “[i]n case” and “[w]hat if” also reiterate her desperation amidst the unlikeliness of this scenario. Even if they did see each other again, the speaker wouldn’t know what to expect—she’s simply putting the possibility out there. The windows encourage the speaker to conjure up memories of the muse and imagine what could have been. Rather than suggesting they rekindle their relationship, she expresses a simple desire to, “one more time,” be seen the way that she sees other people.

The second verse focuses on what the speaker doesn’t know: “You had stopped and tilted your head / I still ponder what it meant now.” With a return to the past perfect, she recalls the muse’s slightest sign of uncertainty, again paying attention to minute details. Her lack of understanding of this small action still bothers her as she seeks closure in the wrong places: “I tried searching faces on streets / What are the chances you’d be downtown?” The speaker has already tried turning to strangers in search of the familiar, her tragic optimism keeping her motivated. While this question sounds rhetorical, she’s seeking clarity in whatever form possible: “Does it feel alright to not know me? / I’m addicted to the ‘if only.’” The unspoken counterpart to this second question is the fact that the speaker does not “feel alright” not knowing the muse anymore. Hope is her weakness as she finds herself unable to give up on the “‘if only’” chance for happiness.³

The first half of the second chorus contains new lyrics that add a self-aware sense of humor: “I look in people’s windows / Like I’m some deranged weirdo / I attend Christmas parties from outside.” The speaker refers to herself as a “deranged weirdo,” taking on the windows’ association with danger by invading the privacy and personal lives of literal strangers. Her mention of “Christmas parties” reiterates her focus on being “outside” of large gatherings.⁴ Within the song’s setting, she is always excluded and doesn’t clearly belong in any social environment. Either she is forgoing her own parties in favor of this obsession or she has no one left to celebrate with. Ultimately, the speaker has found herself in a cycle of loneliness that centers around the window as a gateway that is perpetually out of reach. In this song, Swift touches on the major themes of memory, patience, danger, and connection, which she has associated with this symbol throughout her work to date. In this respect, she explores the human desire for connection, its tendency toward elusivity, and the ability of windows to provide (even misguided) hope in these situations.

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1. This chorus is melodically similar to that of "I Look in People's Windows," which suggests a similarity in theme as well as music and lyrics.

2. This muse is not explicitly romantic, but the nature of their relationship is not too important for this analysis.

3. This sense of wondering is similar to “Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus,” which I’ve also done an analysis of.

4. This links all the way back to "The Outside": "On the outside looking in / I've been a lot of lonely places / I've never been on the outside."