Song Meaning

After the party ends, a profound melancholy settles in. "Jacks in their boxes" and "clowns have all gone to bed" signal the close of revelry. Yet, the lingering "happiness staggering on downstream" isn't joyful. Instead, it leaves "Footprints dressed in red," a stark, unsettling image of pain. This aftermath reveals a landscape of decay. A "broom is drearily sweeping / Up the broken pieces of yesterday's life," painting a picture of fragmented pasts. The imagery of a "Queens is weepin'" and a "King has no wife" suggests a profound, perhaps royal, loss, hinting at a significant relationship or status that has crumbled. The wind, initially whispering, now appears to cry out, giving voice to this pervasive sorrow. The lyrics employ striking, almost hallucinatory imagery to convey emptiness. The idea of "traffic lights they turn blue tomorrow" offers a surreal inversion, casting a strange, cold light on the scene. These lights "shine their emptiness" down on the narrator's bed, directly linking the external world's desolation to a personal void. The wind's emotional intensity escalates from a whisper to a cry, and finally, to a scream, mirroring the deepening, inescapable grief associated with "Mary." The power of these lyrics lies in their evocative, dreamlike quality, which transforms personal grief into an elemental force. The wind, personified with "crutch, its old age and and its wisdom," grapples with memory, asking if it will ever remember all those names it has blown in the past. Its final whisper, "No, this will be the last," suggests a poignant acceptance or a definitive end to a particular cycle of sorrow, making the repeated name a deeply resonant, almost mournful echo.