Sun
The sun as unavoidable, self-destructive exposure: a light the speaker chooses to look straight at, knowing it will hurt her. It is kept distinct from Daylight (the warm, sustaining light of recovered love); here the sun is the burning, blinding source she stares into rather than warms in. The image holds fixation and consequence together - looking at the sun is refusing to look away from what will damage you.
The sun is willing self-harm and unflinching exposure, the speaker's refusal to spare herself from what hurts. Where Daylight is the catalogue's sustaining light, the sun is its burning, blinding opposite.
Appears in 3 songs
“I'll stare directly at the sun, but never in the mirror”
The sun stands in for the speaker's chosen self-destructive exposure, looking directly at what damages her rather than at the self-confrontation a mirror would demand.
“My eclipsed sun”
The beloved should be warmth, life, and light, but the sun has been blocked out. Uncle Jerry reads the eclipse as cosmic imagery turning positive light imagery negative, and potentially as an oxymoron since the sun is supposed to give warmth but here it is darkened.
“Now the sun burns my heart and the sand hurts my feelings”
Sun as the agent of raw, exposed pain. The same sunlight that should warm instead burns the speaker's heart, the sun turned into one more ordinary thing that wounds in the rawness after a parting.