Dylan's Visions of Sin (61 page)

Hope

One Too Many Mornings

After one too many maulings, what hopes are left in love? Not many. But not none.
One Too Many Mornings
, firmly declining to decline into flat despair, has a resilience, for
all its sombre timbre. Yet what hope, exactly? This, at least: that in escaping one another, the sometime lovers may escape recriminations. That would be something, would offer some hope after all.
Not as being reconciled each to each (too late for that), but as reconciled in some measure to the world, to everything that is (sadly) the case.

The situation within
One Too Many Mornings
is plainly hopeless. Plainly yet darkly, for the whys and wherefores, even the rights and wrongs, are responsibly kept private. There is to be no
indulging in divulging. How it all came to this: no matter. Decorum is preserved, even though (or if only because) the love itself has proved beyond preservation. The rest of us are not party to
(or privy to) what went wrong, there isn’t even a hint. Once upon a time my love and I may perhaps have been hopelessly in love, but are now hopelessly out of love. Or out of the reach of
love. Too far behind, in both space and time, whether measured in miles or in mornings. Irrecoverably.

One Too Many Mornings
is a haunted haunting elegy, simply mysterious. It acknowledges that a transition must take place and may take time. The transitions within the song are then what
constitute its unique union of the clear-as-day and the dark-as-night.

The deserted street has desertion in the air.
The Deserted Village
stayed with the author of
The Waste Land
:

In Goldsmith’s poem, the art of transition is exemplified in perfection. If you examine it paragraph by paragraph, you will find always a shift just at the right moment,
from the descriptive to the meditative, to the personal, to the meditative again, to the landscape with figures . . .
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One Too Many Mornings
(a streetscape without figures) happens to have several of the same shifts. From the descriptive to the meditative to the personal: these are the
transitions in its opening verse. A description of the immediate present, “Down the street the dogs are barkin’”, is followed by a description of the present as it is getting to
be the immediate future: “And the day is a-gettin’ dark”. (Not dark yet, but it’s getting there.) Then comes a description-prediction of the next future:

Night doesn’t do the usual and fall, it comes in (a tide of darkness), and the two phrasings shade into one another, “As the night comes in a-fallin’”.
“The dogs ’ll lose their bark”: this is clear to the ear and to the mind, and yet is not – if you think about it – the same as saying that the dogs ’ll stop
barking. Not a lost dog but a lost bark.

At which moment, the shift (into another stage of the ensuing future) continues still from the descriptive to the meditative to the personal:

City lights: a city twilight of hope was later to drift into Dylan’s mind:

That ethereal twilight light, you know. It’s the sound of the streets with the sunrays, the sun shining down at a particular time on a particular type of building. A
particular type of people walking on a particular type of street. It’s an outdoor sound that drifts even into open windows that you can hear.
⁴⁴⁷

But the street in
One Too Many Mornings
is without people, is darkened and saddened and late.

The art of transition (Eliot’s phrase) may take more than one form, and
One Too Many Mornings
has – as
The Deserted Village
has not – movements or moves that intrigue or
puzzle. Each line may be clear, but the line of thought? The song is a conjunction of many feelings, and of its parts of speech it is the small, modest ones such as conjunctions that are the
necessary hinges. Sometimes the transition may sound, in the best possible way, slightly unhinged.

The articulated elusiveness that it is good to catch can be felt in a poem by Tennyson, this, too, being a song of lost love, lost, though, not by the death of love, but by the death of a loved
one.
Break, break, break
is both a funeral elegy and a love elegy devoted to his friend Arthur Hallam, whom Tennyson believed he would for ever be a thousand miles behind – even in
Heaven.
⁴⁴⁸

Break, break, break
opens to sounds from the outside world, and then it moves to the sounds inside my mind (“And the sound of a voice that is
still!”), the thoughts that arise in me.

In
Break, break, break
there is – as in
One Too Many Mornings
– a transparency that is matched with a puzzling obliqueness of reasoning or argument. In a sense, the
poem’s sense is plain enough; yet it has a riddling quality, too. For it escapes us, the thread of thought by which we are to swing across the gulf from the injunction “Break, break,
break” to the “And” of “And I would that my tongue could utter”; from the fisherman’s boy and the sailor lad and the stately ships to the “But” of
“But O for the touch of a vanished hand”; or from the returning injunction “Break, break, break” to the ultimate “But” of the poignant close:

The poem’s juxtapositions and conjunctions tantalizingly suggest a progression of thought that yet remains elusive. The heartbreak of which the
poem knows (when the poem begins, we do not know what it is that is being urged to “Break, break, break”: the heart is heard as a flickering suggestion) is not something
of which it can bring itself openly to speak. The dissociative gulf between the outer scene and the inner pain is one that such sturdy words of reason as “And” and “But” can
ultimately only pretend to bridge.
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The same might be said of the scene and the pain in Dylan’s song, and of his “An’” and
“For”:

The transition from the dogs’ falling silent to the silent night is lastingly perplexing. The sound of the dogs is outdoors (“an outdoor sound”, in the words
of that vignette by Dylan) and outside the mind, yes. But why “And”, as against “But”? And why “For”, exactly? Why do the last two lines suppose (
do
they?) that
they give the grounds for the previous two, the night lines?

It all has something of a dream’s contrariety, a dream’s secure unfounded air of reasoning. The vista of the street, with its doorstep, its room, its sidewalk, and its sign, feels
dream-lit. Here, as elsewhere, the song (like a painting by Edward Hopper) is at once overt and covert, lucid and opaque. And so is the thought that variously brings each verse to an end, a
rephrased refrain:

The Oxford English Dictionary
, under too (“more than enough”), finds a grim
pleasure in displaying all the sad variety of hell to
which “too” is happy to minister (as
One Too Many Mornings
is only too aware): “Expressing, sorrowfully or indignantly, regret or disapproval: To a lamentable, reprehensible,
painful, or intolerable extent.” Moreover, the phrase “
one
too many”, with its whitened knuckles and its clenched self-control (
one
too many, but who’s counting?), is
granted its own entry: “of something not wanted or of something that is repeated to excess”.

It cannot be more than a coincidence (but gather from coincidence while ye may?) that the very first
Oxford English Dictionary
citation for
one too many
(it is from Shakespeare) should include,
within an exchange of a mere four and a half lines, “down”, “the street”, “get” [gettin’], “came” [comes], “in”,
“from”, “my”, “door”, “for”, “whence” [where], “walk”, “one”, “when”, and “one too many”.
Is this, on second thoughts, one too many to be coincidental?

Dylan’s tragedy of errors feels nothing remotely like that. Far from conjuring for wenches, the song is abjuring one.

As to being
behind
(“in the rear of anything moving”, quoting Dryden, “to lag behind, with truant pace”), this, too, has its own doubling up, for there is a twinge of the
other sense, “in reference to the fulfilment of an obligation, esp. of paying money due: in arrear”. Each of the lovers is behind with the debt of love. The first citation in
The Oxford
English Dictionary
for such a sense (the fulfilment of an obligation) happens to be this from a sermon by Wyclif: “So many men in this world ben [be] behind of debt of love.”

It may be remembered that Arthur Hallam, to whom Tennyson paid his debt of love in
Break, break, break
, wrote that “Rhyme has been said to contain in itself a constant appeal to Memory and
Hope.”
⁴⁵⁰
Hope is abandoned in
One Too Many Mornings
, a song that may be thought to contain in itself a memory of an Australian ballad
beginning:

It is not only “hark the dogs are barking” and “morning” that suggest Dylan (or that may have suggested something to Dylan), it is the line-ending on
-ing
(“mustering”) as well as the strong assonance in
light / shine / Condamine
, an assonance that might be in mind and behind Dylan’s
mind / behind
,
sign / behind
,
side / mine /
behind
. These, and the thought uttered to his love, a thought more sombre in Dylan, “I can no longer stay”.

Dylan’s rhyme-scheme is on the face of it both simple and minimal. As in the Australian ballad, the second and fourth lines rhyme, and then, differently, the sixth and eighth. So the first
verse proffers
dark / bark
and
mind / behind
. But there are immediate cross-currents, soundwaves:

For “barkin’” offers something of a rhyme to the next line’s “dark”, and the
-in’
ending both to this first line and to the third line
(“a-fallin’”) will not only send an echo down the street of rhyming but will continue half heard in “one too many mornings”. So that of the eight line-endings in this
first verse, the only one that offers nothing of a rhyme is the fifth: “An’ the silent night will shatter”.

Praising “shatter” there as “an interesting example of poetic transference”, Michael Gray said: “The prose equivalent, stripped of this
transference, would be that the silence (of the night) will be shattered; as Dylan has it, the night will shatter.”
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Gray is right to think
that Dylan’s phrasing turns upon the commonplace that the silence of the night will be shattered. But what is so well judged in “shatter” is not anything about “poetic
transference” (prejudicial and nebulous, any such differentiation of poetry from prose), but that Dylan is seizing from the inside a standard oddity about the verb “shatter”: that
it can equally and equably mean both “to dash into fragments” and “to be dashed into fragments”. The same is true of “break”, and of a verb in the next verse,
“fade”, which would elsewhere be perfectly content to mean either “to lose colour or strength” or “to cause to lose colour or strength”.