Weather
Weather as a stand-in for feeling: outside conditions used to show what the speaker feels or where a relationship is heading. It usually marks a turn - storms for upheaval, snow and frost for a love gone cold, sunshine for a naivety she later sees through. It runs across storms, snow, wind, frost and fog, with drought as its dried-out opposite. Rain, the condition she returns to most, now has its own motif.
Weather is the part of feeling that comes from outside and cannot be controlled, only lived through. The shift from one kind of weather to another often marks the moment a relationship turns - fair conditions giving way to storm or frost as feeling sours or cools.
Appears in 12 songs
“Thunder like a drum”
Thunder like a drum pushes the storm metaphor down into the bridge, the weather standing in for the small upsets the song weighs. Uncle Jerry hears the conceit sustained, the storm inside a teacup rolling on.
“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
“Met the magenta sunrise”
The magenta sunrise at the start of the song possibly refers to an old sailors' rhyme. A red or pink sky at night means fair weather ahead, but in the morning it means a storm is coming. Read that way, the relationship starts under a warning that neither of them heeds. That fits the verse's admission that neither of them knew at the time that she was a liar. Madhavi also offers a more speculative reading. Airborne particles, including pollution, can change the colour of a sunrise, so the beautiful sky may be coloured by something harmful.
“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 symbolise 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.
“Feeling lucky today, got the sunshine, could you tell me what more do I need”
Fair weather standing in for an untested future. The speaker counts the sunshine among the day's luck and asks what more she could need, and the brightness answers a question she has not yet had to face. The same song sets rain against it, the weather she is trying to see through.