Ivy
Ivy as a plant that points two ways at once: the evergreen that stays green all year (steadfastness, faith, love that lasts) and the climbing vine whose tendrils cover, tangle and slowly break apart the stone it grows on (clinging, persistence, quiet destruction). The image takes in the vine, the tendrils and the plant that grows over a house, which all share that double sense.
A love that sustains and consumes at the same time. The force of the image is that it will not separate the beautiful from the harmful: the same tendrils that hold on out of devotion are the ones cracking the stone.
Appears in 2 songs
“My house of stone, your ivy grows And now I'm covered in you”
Ivy operates as a dual symbol, simultaneously representing steadfastness, hope, and everlasting love (the evergreen plant that stays green year-round, as in 'the holly and the ivy') and representing invasion, tangling, choking, and covering over (the invasive ground cover whose tendrils can tear apart brick and stone). The ambiguity of ivy as symbol kickstarts the poem's pervasive ambiguity.
“Tendrils tucked into a woven braid”
The tendrils represent the binding force of religious upbringing and social conditioning, the things that were woven into the narrator's identity from childhood that she is still trying to untangle in adulthood. Uncle Jerry connects the word 'tendril' to the Latin root of religion (ligio/ligament, to bind).