Butterflies
Butterflies as a recurring image carrying multiple registers simultaneously: fragility (the wings can be crushed), brevity (the life is short), beauty (the wings are vivid and singular), transformation (the chrysalis register), flight (release from prior form), and the colloquial 'butterflies in the stomach' of new romance. In Taylor's writing the butterfly appears most often at the threshold of relationships: their emergence marking the start of love, their destruction marking its end.
The butterfly carries the charge of a beauty that was always going to be short - what cannot be held, what changes form, what dies in proportion to how alive it briefly was. The image's force often comes from its capacity to hold all five registers at once without resolving which is dominant.
Appears in 2 songs
“When the butterflies turned to dust that covered my whole room”
The butterflies represent multiple layers of the relationship: the excitement of new love (butterflies in the stomach), fragility, temporal beauty, transformation (chrysalis), and flight/freedom. Their turning to dust marks the death of all those qualities.
“Will it patch your broken wings?”
The broken wings image characterizes Betty as damaged, and crucially, from James's perspective she is the broken one, not him. Uncle Jerry reads this as further evidence of James's inability to take responsibility: 'she's broken. Not him. He's good. He's OK.'