Weather
Weather as emotional register, meteorological conditions used to externalise the speaker's emotional experience or the trajectory of a relationship. In Taylor's writing weather typically marks transitions: storms standing for tumult, snow and frost for a love gone cold, sunshine for a naivety later seen for what it was. The image extends across storms, snow, wind, frost, fog and the absence of rain, with drought operating as the register's inverse face. Rain, the condition she returns to most, now carries its own dedicated treatment as a motif in its own right.
Weather carries the charge of conditions imposed from outside the speaker, a register she cannot control but must inhabit. The shift from one weather state to another often marks the moment a relationship turns, fair conditions giving way to storm or frost as feeling curdles or cools.
Appears in 10 songs
“This is just / A storm inside a teacup”
Life's difficulties reframed as miniature storms, weathered easily rather than catastrophic, supporting the song's message of perseverance and reassurance
“Wet through my clothes, weary bones caught the chill”
The persistent moisture, cold, and mist of London serve as an emotional register for the misery of the relationship, the speaker is physically saturated by the environment, which mirrors her emotional state of being worn down.
“Autumn leaves fallin' down like pieces into place”
Autumn as an archetypal symbol of impending death, the season just before winter 'when all things die.' The falling leaves are compared to puzzle pieces falling into place, but Uncle Jerry notes the leaves don't actually form a picture, they're random, and asks whether the wind blows away the puzzle pieces like it blows away the romance.
“Rebekah rode up on the afternoon train, it was sunny”
Sunshine at the opening marks innocence and the absence of judgment, a bright beginning before the town's scrutiny darkens the narrative. Angela notes the arc from 'sunny' to the 'midnight sea' of the bridge as tracking the emotional trajectory of Rebekah's story.
“In from the snow”
Snow operates as an ambiguous death/purity image. Uncle Jerry reads it in the context of surrounding death imagery (spirit meets the bones, faith forgotten land) as a death symbol, winter, cold, covering the ground like a blanket over a grave, connecting it to Robert Frost's 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' where snow is surrounded by death imagery. But he acknowledges snow can also symbolize purity and freshness, and argues the poem deliberately leaves it unresolved: 'like the ivy, the snow is ambiguous in its meaning. And so she is stacking ambiguity on ambiguity.'
“Whether weather be the frost Or the violence of the dog days”
Weather represents the extremes of the speaker's emotional suffering, frost as the cold, death-bringing winter depression, and the dog days as the violent heat of summer that breeds poison, prevents healing, and portends death.
“The drought was the very worst When the flowers that we'd grown together died of thirst”
Drought operates as the inverse face of the song's weather register: the absence of rain reads as the absence of emotional nourishment, killing what the relationship had cultivated together. Uncle Jerry connects it to the Dust Bowl as an image of total devastation.
“Wild winds are death to the candle”
The wild winds represent the destructive external forces (public opinion, media, the wise men's warnings) that threaten to extinguish the fragile flame of the relationship. Uncle Jerry connects the line to Percy Bysshe Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind' and Emily Dickinson's 'Wild Nights,' noting the alliterative quality of the line.
“It's the kind of cold, fogs up windshield glass”
The winter weather sets both the literal holiday season and the emotional coldness of the situation, it is the 'damn season' in multiple senses.
“Screaming, crying, perfect storms”
The storm as the emotional turbulence of the performed relationship, screaming and crying rendered as weather, as spectacle, as entertainment.