Her Freezings and Thawings

Song Meaning

The lyrics paint a stark picture of rebirth and decay, juxtaposing the vibrant life emerging from a cemetery with the wilting remnants of past beauty. The opening lines immediately establish this contrast: "flowers are all blooming in the cemetery" and "fertile things are rising to the surface." This imagery suggests a powerful, almost unsettling natural cycle where death is a precursor to new growth, a theme reinforced by the repeated image of "heads now break the soft new ground." The phrase "her freezings and thawings" becomes the central metaphor for this cyclical process, implying a person whose emotional or physical state undergoes extreme shifts, leading to periods of dormancy and sudden, forceful emergence. The second stanza introduces a more specific, almost jarring, visual. The "wilted" roses in "Memoriam Bay" are contrasted with a "supple daffodil" that is likened to an "areola" from a "seventh grade anatomy textbook." This comparison is striking, linking natural beauty to a raw, biological image, perhaps suggesting a return to fundamental, unadorned life after a period of decay. The shift to the "college" stanza, with its image of "vomit" in a stairwell, introduces a layer of mundane, unpleasant reality. Yet, this is quickly followed by the reassuring, albeit understated, sentiment, "it's probably gonna be alright," hinting that even amidst unpleasantness, a sense of resilience or normalcy persists. The lyrics then return to the theme of emergence, this time with a more visceral description. "Her soil cleaves and out she rings" and the repeated, almost absurd, simile of a "once-swallowed bowling ball" emphasize a forceful, perhaps even painful, expulsion. This imagery, combined with the repeated refrain of "penetrating icebergs, and their crests are dawning / By her freezings and thawings," solidifies the idea of a powerful, inevitable transformation driven by extreme internal fluctuations. The repeated "freezings and thawings" suggests a volatile internal landscape that ultimately births something new, however unconventional its appearance or origin.