Cold
Cold as a figure for emotional unavailability, indifference or cruelty. It most often turns a person or a relationship into an inhospitable place, somewhere the speaker is left to survive, and it recurs from the debut album onwards.
Cold is absence made physical: a partner's indifference felt as a climate she has been made to live in, or her own withdrawal rendered as a drop in temperature. Turning a person into a cold place strips them of warmth while keeping the focus on what their absence does to her.
Appears in 12 songs
“Barefoot in the wildest winter, catchin' my death”
Barefoot in deep winter is exposure as self-punishment, the speaker stepping out unprotected into the cold. The chill reads as emotional rawness, the second cold image after the grey November of the opening.
“Gray November I've been down since July”
Cold and winter imagery represents the speaker's depression and emotional death, November's grayness, December's unmooring, barefoot in the wildest winter. Uncle Jerry reads the winter as 'a symbol of death' and the cold as representing both literal exposure and emotional rawness.
“I walked through the door with you, the air was cold”
Cold as foreshadowing of the relationship's failure and as the emotional register of the entire song. Uncle Jerry argues that ending the first line with 'cold' is deliberate foreshadowing, the relationship will go cold, it's set in autumn (impending death/winter), and the coldness persists through the refrigerator light, the city's barren cold, and the first fall of snow.
“I've never been anywhere cold as you”
The coldness transforms the male figure from a person into a place, a desolate, inhospitable location. The metaphor dehumanizes him while expressing the emotional devastation of the relationship.
“If you wanna break my cold, cold heart”
The cold heart is the speaker's emotional state after years of exhaustion and romantic loss: she has shut down, her heart hardened and cold, barely alive. The doubling of 'cold' intensifies the image.
“Wet through my clothes, weary bones caught the chill”
Cold as the physical and emotional experience of staying in the relationship, the speaker's bones catch the chill, she is wet through, the entire London atmosphere is inhospitable.
“A red rose grew up out of ice frozen ground”
The ice frozen ground represents the hostile, cold environment of criticism and modern culture that Taylor (and the Lake Poets before her) must push through to create art. The cold is the barrier that beauty must overcome.
“My pain fits in the palm of your freezing hand”
The freezing hand is read as ambiguously referencing multiple possibilities: the hand of a dead person, the hand of the widow visiting in winter (connecting to the snow imagery), or a woman's characteristically cold hand. Angela reads 'freezing hand' as feminine: 'cold hands is like feminine... that feels like a woman's hand to me,' which supports the sapphic reading.
“This has frozen my ground”
The frozen ground figures the speaker's inability to move forward: she has been immobilised by emotional trauma. Uncle Jerry also reads it as nature imagery that makes her inner world infertile, incapable of producing anything new.
“The autumn chill that wakes me up”
The chill operates in several registers: the physical cold of autumn, the cold of the body after death, and the emotional chill of realising a loved one is aging and mortal.
“It's the kind of cold, fogs up windshield glass But I felt it when I passed you”
The cold operates on both literal and emotional registers, the winter setting and the emotional distance between two people who were once close, merging into the ache that defines their current relationship.
“Soldier down on that icy ground”
The icy ground represents the near-death of the relationship: emotional coldness and the literal cold of the battlefield merged. The partner lying on icy ground is both a fallen soldier and the relationship at its most dangerously close to ending.
“Cold was the steel of my axe to grind”
Cold here carries the emotional resentment and hardness the speaker felt toward her former partners, contrasting sharply with the warmth and tenderness of the rest of the song.