Ivy
Ivy as the plant whose symbolic register splits in two directions at once: the evergreen that stays green year-round (steadfastness, faith, everlasting love) and the invasive vine whose tendrils cover, tangle, and tear apart stone (clinging, persistence, destruction of what it grows on). The image extends to adjacent figures (vine, tendrils, the plant that grows on a house) that share the same doubled register.
The doubled charge of a love that is at once sustaining and consuming. The image's force lies in its refusal to separate the beautiful from the harmful: the same tendrils that hold on with devotion are the ones that break 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).