Altar
An altar is where a couple stands to get married, and also, in older religious stories, the place where something is offered up and sacrificed. Taylor uses both senses together. In So Long, London the speaker "died on the altar waitin' for the proof": she's standing where a wedding should happen, waiting for a commitment that never comes, and in the same breath she's the sacrifice, giving herself up for a relationship that takes everything and gives nothing back. The altar is the place she keeps faith and the place that faith costs her.
The altar stands for devotion that turns into sacrifice. The speaker offers herself up, in love or in something close to worship, and gets absence or refusal instead of the union she's waiting for. It sits close to Taylor's other waiting-and-giving images, where staying faithful is the very thing that does the damage.
Appears in 2 songs
“I died on the altar waitin' for the proof”
The altar operates with lexical ambiguity across three registers: a wedding altar (she waited for a marriage proposal that never came), a sacrificial altar (she gave herself up for the relationship), and the altar of the Catholic priest in Odd Man Out (where the characters seek refuge).
“The altar is my hips”
The body is made the altar, the place of worship relocated from the church to the lovers' own intimacy.