Ah, lovely song! Just a few restrained and enigmatic images, and yet they somehow pack this huge emotional punch... I agree that loss and bitterness comes through very clearly, and strong and conflicting emotions: "You'll ask me to pray for rain, with ash in your mouth, you'll ask it to burn again". I can see why it could make you think of a toubled end of a relationship, but I don't know...the beginning of the second verse suggests to me someone desperately trying to offer relief or refuge to another.
And think of the farmhouse, representative to me of something stable and unchanging. Home and family. But it's burning down, and the world of your childhood seems to be falling apart, with the dog dragging your mother's clothes through the mud, your mother drunk, your father pathetically trying to cling to something from another life. Notice that while this chaos is going on all around, the narrator's attention is all on the person whose life in undergoing this upheaval, he speaks directly and intimately to her, and each verse begins with "Give me your hand". For me, this isn't a relationship that's ending, but one that's just now taking off amid the wreckage of something that was once of central importance to this person's life. Maybe that's the contradiction in the last two lines: terrible loss, which somehow brings with it a kind of intoxicating freedom...
Ah, lovely song! Just a few restrained and enigmatic images, and yet they somehow pack this huge emotional punch... I agree that loss and bitterness comes through very clearly, and strong and conflicting emotions: "You'll ask me to pray for rain, with ash in your mouth, you'll ask it to burn again". I can see why it could make you think of a toubled end of a relationship, but I don't know...the beginning of the second verse suggests to me someone desperately trying to offer relief or refuge to another.
And think of the farmhouse, representative to me of something stable and unchanging. Home and family. But it's burning down, and the world of your childhood seems to be falling apart, with the dog dragging your mother's clothes through the mud, your mother drunk, your father pathetically trying to cling to something from another life. Notice that while this chaos is going on all around, the narrator's attention is all on the person whose life in undergoing this upheaval, he speaks directly and intimately to her, and each verse begins with "Give me your hand". For me, this isn't a relationship that's ending, but one that's just now taking off amid the wreckage of something that was once of central importance to this person's life. Maybe that's the contradiction in the last two lines: terrible loss, which somehow brings with it a kind of intoxicating freedom...