Cemetery
Graves, tombstones and graveyards give Taylor a setting for things that are dead, dying, or refusing to stay buried. Often the grave stands for a relationship caught between alive and dead: in loml the couple are "killing time at the cemetery", never quite buried, a love that won't finish dying. So Long London boils a break-up down to "two graves, one gun", both people killed off by a single moment. Elsewhere the grave is a state she gets pulled out of, as in The Fate of Ophelia where someone digs her out of it. It can mark grief that won't move on, like the widow in ivy who visits the stone every day, or a literary destination, as in the lakes "where all the poets went to die". Even Anti-Hero puts depression on "the graveyard shift", surrounded by the dead. And in The Great War the grave goes underground and gothic, the buried past "screaming from the crypt" and refusing to hold its dead.
A grave is where something is meant to be finished, so when Taylor returns to one it's usually because something isn't finished at all. The recurring move is the thing that won't stay buried: the relationship that keeps almost-ending, the grief that visits daily, the self that gets dug back up. When the grave does mean a clean death it tends to be mutual, both people buried together, which makes the ending feel shared rather than one-sided.
Appears in 8 songs
“My house of stone, your ivy grows”
Read another way, the house of stone is a grave, the stone a headstone with someone lying dead beneath and the ivy growing over it. Uncle Jerry gives the line this burial reading directly, set beside the widow at the graveside elsewhere in the song.
“And the old widow goes to the stone every day”
The stone is a tombstone, and the widow's daily visit establishes the cemetery as a central setting. Uncle Jerry reads 'my house of stone' as a grave, connecting it to Emily Dickinson's 'Because I could not stop for Death' where death pauses at 'a house that seemed a swelling of the ground.' The cemetery is where the living and dead lovers continue their relationship.
“Spineless in my tomb of silence”
The tomb/crypt imagery serves double duty: it evokes the literal trenches and graves of WWI and the speaker's emotional burial, silenced, unable to speak or fight back, entombed in her own withdrawal from the conflict.
“And maybe it's the past that's talking, screaming from the crypt”
The past erupts from its burial place, the crypt as both literal gothic image and metaphor for repressed history that refuses silence. The scream from the crypt is the return of the repressed, the relationship's unresolved aftermath breaking through the sealed stone.
“You dug me out of my grave and Saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia”
The grave represents the speaker's prior state of emotional death, paralleling the graveyard scene in Hamlet Act 5 where Hamlet and Laertes fight over Ophelia's grave. Being dug out of the grave represents romantic resurrection.
“Two graves, one gun”
The death of both parties in the relationship, whoever they were before is now dead and buried. The one gun signifies a single bad moment or action that killed them both.
“Still alive, killing time at the cemetery Never quite buried”
The cemetery represents the relationship's liminal state, not fully alive, not fully dead. The love is on the brink of death but 'never quite buried,' connecting to the speaker's inability to lay the old love to rest.
“The tomb won't close”
The tomb that will not close reworks the resurrection: the stone meant to seal the dead is rolled aside and stays open, and the speaker's buried feelings refuse to stay down. Angela pictures an old family vault with its door standing open; Uncle Jerry hears the tomb of Christ that opens three days on.
“Take me to the Lakes, where all the poets went to die”
The poets going to the lakes to die is both literal, Wordsworth and Dorothy are buried there, Hartley Coleridge died there, and figurative, representing the lakes as a final resting place for artists who chose nature over the modern world.
“When my depression works the graveyard shift”
The graveyard shift places depression in the landscape of death, the depression works among the dead, surrounded by graves, making it a death-adjacent state.