Cold
Cold as emotional register - coldness as a figure for emotional unavailability, indifference, or cruelty. In Taylor's writing cold most often transforms a person or relationship into an inhospitable place or environment, and recurs across the catalogue from the debut onwards.
Cold carries the charge of emotional absence made physical: the partner's indifference experienced as an environment the speaker has been forced to inhabit, or the speaker's own withdrawal rendered as a temperature drop. The person-as-cold-place image dehumanises while centring the speaker's experience of the other's absence.
Appears in 8 songs
“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.
“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'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.
“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.
“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 realizing 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.