Wasteland, Baby!

Fear and fire of the end of the world = apocalyptical-like destruction alluding to the dramatic end of relationship, and the fearing its end. In an apocalypse the world is laid to waste just like a broken relationship.

The history of the world and relationships is cyclical, it repeats ("All the things yet to come are the things that have passed"). Creation, then destruction, creation, then destruction… “Breaking of glass” and “bonfire that burns” are images of this destruction. “Old enough hands” probably refers to the hands of a clock because this stanza of the song seems to be dealing with time.

Just like the world can end, the relationship too might end. And perhaps the strength of the love can really only be appreciated when the relationship slips into nonexistence (“known in its aching”). A powerful love would result in an equally powerful devastation if it did end (“shown in its shaking”). But Hozier relishes the idea of the relationship’s potential destruction almost as much as he relishes the relationship itself (“I’m in love with you / And I love too / That love soon might end”). To him, a relationship is a glass sitting on a shelf or logs in a fireplace – potential energy which can be made kinetic. This is accomplished by pushing the glass so it crashes upon the floor or lighting a match to burn the wood. A relationship is equally as vulnerable. It’s able to be destroyed and this looming threat makes the relationship all the more exciting.

Broken relationship = wasteland

“And the day that we watch the death of the sun That the cloud and the cold and those jeans you have on That you gaze unafraid as they saw from the city ruins”

On the day that the relation dies out, there’s really nothing else you can do but stand back and look over the devastation. The “city” represents the creation of the relationship that two people built together and the “ruins” are its destruction. “Death of the sun” refers to the relationship’s expiration as well. “Gazing unafraid” is important because it shows that Hozier accepts the outcome because he has been expecting it all along and wasn’t naïve to its possibility.

As he sees it, a relationship is to a wasteland much like wood is to ashes. It’s one idea converting into another form rather than two opposing ideas. The ashes are still wood, their form is just different. Therefore he finds a coexistent equilibrium between these two seemingly opposing states: a thriving relationship is concurrently a devastated wasteland. There is no distinction between them. One is not necessarily a precursor to another because this is not a linear timeline. It is a cycle.

“Are the death of all things that I've seen and unseen Are men but the start of all things that are left to do?” Here he talks about the “death of all things” which is typically seen as an end, but in the following line he mentions the “start of all things.” In this way we can assume that death can be both an end and a beginning. The “seen” things are anything that exists at the time of Hozier’s life. The “unseen” things do not exist yet, but are things that will exist in the future. If death is the same as nonexistence, and the “unseen” things do not exist yet, then are they dead already? This again is an allusion to the cyclical nature of life, then death, then life, then death…

In the Bible, God created man on the last day, the 7th day of creation. Though it was the final day of creation, it was also the “start of all things.” (“Are men but the start of all things that are left to do?”) Thus an end and a start occurred simultaneously, blurring the distinction between otherwise contrasting ideas which are held in a never-ending loop that persists throughout all of time.