In both Theocritus’ idyll 11 and Taylor Swift’s “You Belong with Me” they present a narrator talking to a person that they have feelings for and wonder why they person is not in love with them. The cyclops in Theocritus’ poem gives excuses for himself as to why Galatea does not want to be with him in the same way Swift’s narrator gives excuses for herself. They point out all the things that they do better and the reasons why the person they are writing/singing to should be with them and how they differ from what the person they want seems to be interested in. “Look at this beautiful life and love I could give you! Choose me!” both of these stories scream. We don’t get perspective from the narrators’ muses, though. Only the begging and asking for pity and forgiveness for their “otherness.”
The biggest difference, which isn’t present in Swift’s lyrics but in her music video, is that in the end the boy realizes that the narrator is the one he wants to be with and the narrator’s cries were worth something whereas I don’t believe Galatea ever falls in love with the cyclops or chooses to live with him.
“I know, you charmer, why you run away: because a shaggy brow spans my whole forehead one vast brow from ear to ear, with a single eye beneath, a broad nose over the lip. Yet, though this is how I am, I tend a thousand head and milking them, I drink the finest milk.” (30-34)