The Great War
- The Great War (Eras Tour, Liverpool)
- Death by a Thousand Cuts / The Great War (Eras Tour, Indianapolis)
“And maybe it's the past that's talking, screaming from the crypt”
The past erupts from its burial place, the crypt as both literal gothic image and metaphor for repressed history that refuses silence. The scream from the crypt is the return of the repressed, the relationship's unresolved aftermath breaking through the sealed stone.
“My hand was the one you reached for all throughout the Great War”
“I vowed not to cry anymore if we survived the Great War”
“There's no morning glory, it was war, it wasn't fair”
“I vowed I would always be yours 'cause we survived the Great War”
“Tore your banners down, took the battle underground”
“Flashes of the battle come back to me in a blur”
“I vowed not to fight anymore if we survived the Great War”
“We can plant a memory garden, say a solemn prayer, place a poppy in my hair”
“Looked up at me with honor and truth, broken and blue”
“All that bloodshed, crimson clover, uh huh”
the affair as war
“Cause we survived the Great War”
“So yeah, it's a war / It's the goddamn fight of my life / And you started it” — ivy
Community readers hear ivy's declaration that the love is a war and the fight of her life answered in The Great War, the catalogue's fullest treatment of a relationship fought and survived in the language of battle. One reader explicitly pairs the two, setting ivy's internal war beside the later song's named one.
drinking the poison alone
“I drew curtains closed, drank my poison all alone”
“Or the violence of the dog days” — evermore
Picked up by a community reader through the dog-days folklore the hosts trace in evermore - the tradition that anything you drink can turn to poison in the dog days. The Great War later makes the image literal and self-inflicted: curtains drawn, the poison drunk alone. The seasonal danger evermore holds at the level of weather becomes, in the later song, a chosen isolation.