Meaning
To hold a flame for someone who does not hold one back - to love on, hopelessly and often openly, after the affair is over or before it ever began. The torch is lit whether or not anyone asked for it. Gently melancholy, slightly mid-century; usually reported about someone, rarely confessed outright. Regional use: General English; American cabaret development.
Origin
The flame is love's oldest symbol, and the phrase hangs it on a wedding torch: Greek and Roman custom carried fire from the bride's hearth to her new home under the blessing of Hymenaios, god of marriage - the torch of union turned, in the idiom, into the one nobody lights for you. American cabaret made it a genre: the singer Tommy Lyman applied torch song to My Melancholy Baby, and the torch singer became the specialist in lamenting a love unreciprocated, lost, or impossible - the song 'Jim' (1941) vows to keep loving him anyway, and Johnny Mercer's barfly in One for My Baby resolves, in the last line, to extinguish the torch. The prose form carries the same weight: a Time review of 1955 has a character carrying a torch for her lost love, and the gossip columns keep the flame in trim. Its natural companions are the old flame and the torch song itself.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- carry the torch
- carrying a torch
- torch song
Usage Examples
- Half the department knew he carried a torch for the archivist; the archivist knew first.
- She carried a torch for the orchestra for twenty years, which at least kept the seats full.
- The reunion film is one long torch song, its singer still carrying the light after all this time.