Graves & Burial
Graves, tombs, crypts and headstones give Taylor Swift a place to put things that are finished, and the burying matters here as much as the burial place. Community members suggested that her graves work in three ways, and the songs bear it out. Burial that will not hold: loml's couple are never quite buried, and the tomb will not close in Would've, Could've, Should've. The grave returned to: the old widow goes to the stone every day in ivy. And the grave shared, an ending both people come to, in So Long, London's two graves and one gun. Somewhere can be a grave without the song saying so, and the lakes is here because it is where the poets are buried. Related motifs include Rising from the Dead, Skeletons and Bodies.
A grave is where something is meant to be finished, so a return to one usually means something is not finished at all. The recurring move is what will not stay buried: the relationship that keeps almost ending, the grief that visits daily, the self dug back up. Where the grave does mean a clean death it tends to be shared, both people buried together, which makes the ending mutual rather than done to her.
Appears in 14 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.
“But I whispered at the grave”
The refrain is a should-have, and in the last chorus it is whispered at a grave. The song has been an elegy from its first chorus without saying so, and the line charming for two verses turns tragic in the third.
“But they'd already picked out your grave and hearse”
Picking out the grave and hearse makes the cancelling a funeral other people had already planned. The arrangements were made while the target still thought the situation could be saved, so the outcome was settled before it was noticed.
“Buildin' up like waves crashin' over my grave”
The body responds to something that never happens. Laboured breath, a screamed name, and waves building over her own grave, all without touching his skin. Pleasure and death occupy the same fantasy, which is the only place either occurs.
“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.
“You wear the same jewels that I gave you As you bury me”
The speaker is put in the ground by the same person still wearing what she made. Burial is not an ending here but the condition everything after it happens under, which is why the song never leaves the graveside.
“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.
“Or a clean kill each time that Aimee stomped across my grave”
The idiom is someone walking over your grave, which means a shiver. Aimee stomps, and does it each time, so the phrase takes on the weight of the unfair fight and the unclean kill it follows. The grave gets stood on.
“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.
“For digging up the grave another time”
The grave is the dead relationship. Digging it up is the act of sifting through old memories and reimagining them with a different outcome. Uncle Jerry reads it as a metaphor for returning to something that should be buried and 'changing them because I didn't say that one thing.'