The Icicle Melts

Song Meaning

The lyrics paint a stark picture of grief and disbelief following a child's death. The opening questions, "When will the icicle melt?" and "When will the picture show end?" immediately establish a sense of frozen despair and a desire for a painful reality to cease. This feeling is amplified by the narrator's regret over reading the paper, which revealed the tragic news: "a child, child, child, child, he was taken away." The repetition of "child" underscores the innocence lost and the profound shock of the event. The central tension lies in the unbearable sorrow of a mother who has lost her baby. The chorus offers a fragile hope, suggesting a "place for the baby that died" and a future "time for the mother who cried" when she will "hold him in her arms sometime." However, this comfort is immediately undercut by the chilling phrase, "'Cause nine months is too long, too long, too long," implying the child's life was cut short before its natural completion, perhaps even suggesting a miscarriage or stillbirth, adding another layer of tragedy to the loss. The song's power comes from its raw, almost childlike simplicity in confronting immense pain. The repeated questions in the verses and the direct, accusatory question in the second verse, "How, how could you hurt a child?" reveal a profound bewilderment and anger at the circumstances. The shift in the final chorus from "she will hold him" to "you will hold him" is particularly striking, suggesting a direct address to the perpetrator or perhaps a desperate plea for divine intervention, intensifying the emotional weight of the loss and the lingering questions of "why."