Romance of the Useless Key: "Third Snow Song" by the Mountain Goats

Here is a song about the lengths to which a man will go to read a plaque: "Third Snow Song" by the Mountain Goats.

 

This song refuses to state its theme. There is no refrain to tie it all together, no overt expression of what this all means. That makes commenting on it feel a lot like commenting on "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams. But you know me, have I ever been afraid to comment on "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams. The answer is no, I have never been afraid to comment on "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams. You know the poem, but don't you want the occasion to read it again?

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Here we have a poem that withholds its theme. That's because it wants to show you something, and telling you would just make you feel like you'd already seen it. That's why people talking about this poem inevitably keep repeating the poem to make their point. Reading the poem gives you the experience, and you can't do much more than point at it.

Darnielle's song is the same, but more so. He doesn't even tell you that a seemingly insignificant thing matters. He just makes it matter. Part of this is the repetition of certain lines (accompanied by the rare chord changes):

That's a whole lotta water.
That's a whole lotta water. 

These lyrics imitate the action (as my boy Aristotle would put it) of being astonished by something familiar. This river has been there forever, but our hero is seeing it as though it were a sudden event. Where this fits into the drama, insofar as this poem has a dramatic element, is that we were starting to wonder whether the hero might not just go home, it being so bitter cold. How will the sight of all this water affect him?

We don't know yet, but we see him, for some reason, removing a key from his key chain, a key he's "forgotten the purpose of." As we used to ask about MacGyver, what's he doing with that thing? That's how the drama develops, with the decision already made but the audience in the dark. We finally get an answer in the last lines:

I hammered it against the ice.
I hammered it against the ice. 

Evidently, he's decided to clear the bridge dedication with what he has available to him, and in doing so, he's given purpose to a purposeless thing. That's kind of romantic. It also is a reflection of what the song itself does: here we have someone taking one of the more useless things he's ever done and making it into a story about determination and resourcefulness. There are worse things you could do in a song.

Do I still have questions? Yes, I do: 

1.  It's left mysterious why the sight of the water affects the hero the way it does. Is this something we should try to fill in? If not, how do we receive Darnielle's withholding of the explanation? (This is a question I think we should ask about all Darniellean withholding.)
2. Like "The Recognition Scene," this song makes a lot out of something small and even a little feckless. Is there a similar inversion of genre here? Is there another formula Darnielle is messing with by undercutting an expectation of grandeur?
3. How cold is it where you are? It's getting warm again here in Texas.