Dylan's Visions of Sin (82 page)

318
I believe that it was Tom Davis, in Birmingham long ago, who pointed out to me some of these dark energies.

319
See this page
.

320
Book Eighth, chapter 1.

321
Whaaat?
(the 1965 interview with Nat Hentoff, in full, differing from
Playboy
, March 1966),
see
this page
. See
see this page
.

322
Kenneth Haynes helped me to see and hear this.

323
In MODERNISM /
modernity
, vol. 7, 2000. “Rhymes like
love : of
have signifying possibilities that were first
taken seriously in the early twentieth century because they satisfied the intentions of the modernist aesthetic.” Such a rhyme is felt to be “mismatched”, marked by
“incongruent effects”, because of the tradition that deemed certain classes of word to be below the dignity of rhyming, even of comic rhyming. Prepositions, for instance (though phrasal
verbs or prepositional verbs were granted some licence: “Shakespeare’s ‘drinkes it vp’: ‘cup’; Herbert’s ‘creepes in’:
‘sinne’”). Edward Bysshe, in
The Art of English Poetry
(1702), had issued a list of the parts of speech that should not be rhymed on, for instance “the Particles
An, And, As, Of, The, &c
.” Anne Ferry writes with imaginative acumen about what it is to rhyme on such a word as “but” or “of”, even – Marianne
Moore’s inaugurative move in 1916 – to have an end-rhyme of “the” with “be”. The essay is on poetry, not song, but much in it would illuminate Dylan’s
decisions in timing and in a kind of rhyming that his lineation, as voiced, can bring home.

324
Three lines later in
Foot of Pride
: “He looked straight into the sun and said revenge is mine”. Blind
revenge. As for me: “I got my back to the sun ’cause the light is too intense”.

325
Preface to Harry Crosby,
Transit of Venus
(1931), p. ix. On temperance in relation to “no limit” (which in
Sugar Baby
is “There ain’t no limit to the amount of trouble women bring”),
see this page
.

326
There is many a song called
Sugar Baby
, and Dock Boggs has one. (It is in the recorded
Anthology of American Folk
Music
, edited by Harry Smith.) The first citation for “sugarbaby” in the
OED
(“sugar” as a term of endearment) is from
Gone with the Wind
(1936), chapter
XXVI: “Scarlett said gratefully: ‘Thank you, Sugarbaby’.” (In
Sugar Baby
the regrets are tinged with weary thanks, less said than glimpsed – thanks, I suppose.)
The instance in
Gone with the Wind
is presumably no more than a coincidence, but the ferret enjoys unearthing the fact that the preceding sentence in the novel ends “in the sun”.
(Dylan, “to the sun”.) Dylan famously sings “gone with the wind” in
Song to Woody
, which shares with
Sugar Baby
the phrase “down the road” (and
mentions “Walkin’ a road”) and which has “a thousand miles” (
Sugar Baby
, “a thousand times”), as well as “It looks like it’s a-dying
an’ it’s hardly been born” (
Sugar Baby
, “Just as sure as we’re living, just as sure as you’re born”).

327
But with a saddened impetuosity, only the slightest of breaks in the run of the words.

328
The time-word “day” again gets the time of two syllables later in the song:

Any minute [the expected four]

of the day [three, two of them allotted to
day
]

the bubble could burst

329
As printed in
Lyrics 1962–1985
, not “Lord” but “Well, I’m walkin’ down the
line”. But seek your Maker.

330
Dylan-lovers posted word of this soon after “
Love And Theft
” appeared, but I should never have known of the
Austin / Shilkret song were it not for my colleague Jeremy Yudkin, who generously made a tape of it for me in November 2001; I am much in his debt.

331
Dylan pinpoints and punctures such a political rallying-cry as “Which side are you on?”: “Praise be to
Nero’s Neptune / The Titanic sails at dawn / And everybody’s shouting / ‘Which Side Are You On?’” (
Desolation Row
).

332
Sing Out!
(October / November 1962), reporting Dylan in June 1962. Dylan at Carnegie Hall in 1963, introducing the song:
“Met a teacher who said he didn’t understand what
Blowin’ in the Wind
means. Told him there was nothin’ to understand, it was just blowin’ in the wind. If he
didn’t feel it in the wind, he’d never know. And he ain’t never gonna know, I guess.
Teachers
.” (Anthony Scaduto,
Bob Dylan
, 1971, revised edition 1973,
see this page
.)

333
At Gerde’s, April 1962, the song opens with harmonica introduction and has the harmonica between verses and at the end.
The Witmark demo tape, July 1962, has no harmonica.
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
, July 1962, does best by the song, establishing itself as the performance against which all others are
heard and (though not necessarily measured) weighed: it opens with guitar, but has harmonica between the verses and at the end. Blown with breath’s wind. Dylan does not sing the verses in the
order in which they have been printed in
Lyrics 1962–1985
(1985). The printed sequence is: the first verse, but then the last one sung, and then the second that is sung. But
Broadside
(late May 1962) printed the verses in the order in which he sings them.

334
The song was recorded on 9 July 1962. Harold Macmillan’s words, which became famous at once, had been delivered on 3
February 1960 in Cape Town: “The wind of change is blowing through this continent and, whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.”
Forever
Young
: “When the winds of changes shift”. What a singular difference the plurals make.

335
“Before he sleeps in the sand” in the early sheet-music (
Broadside
, late May 1962).
Lyrics
1962–1985
prints “a white dove”, but Dylan sings “the white dove”: of peace in the world, of mercy from the Flood, and of pentecostal message. True, he
wasn’t a Christian in 1962, but he copyrighted
Long Ago, Far Away
long ago, in the same year as
Blowin’ in the Wind
. “And to talk of peace and brotherhood / Oh, what
might be the cost! / A man he did it long ago / And they hung him on a cross”. Several of the early songs have more than a turn-of-phrase that is Christian.

336
Whaaat?
(the 1965 interview with Nat Hentoff, in full, differing from that in
Playboy
, March 1966),
see this page
.

337
The rhyme, as it were, of “exist” with “exist” (no shifting or paltering) lends to the people something
of a heartening geological stubbornness: “Yes, ’n’, how many years can a mountain exist / Before it is washed to the sea? / Yes, ’n’ how many years can some people
exist / Before they’re allowed to be free?”

338
He sings it otherwise than as printed in
Lyrics 1962–1985
, dropping it (in singing) from the third line of the
first verse, but adding it at the start of the second and third verses.

339
Eliot in 1929, recalled in B. C. Southam,
A Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot
(sixth edition 1996),
see this page
.

340
“Lord Randall playing with a quart of beer” (
Tarantula
, 1966, 1971,
see this page
).
Early nineteenth century,
Lord Randal
is in most anthologies of ballads or of Scottish verse.

341
Dylan: “Well my heart’s in the Highlands gentle and fair”. Burns: “My heart’s in the Highlands, my
heart is not here”.

342
T. S. Eliot in his essay
John Dryden
(1921):
The State of Innocence and Fall of Man
“is an early work; it is
on the whole a feeble work; it is not deserving of sustained comparison with
Paradise Lost
. But ‘all the sad variety of Hell’! Dryden is already stirring” (
Selected
Essays
, 1932, 1951 edition,
see this page
).

343
For the feminine ending
móuntains
(as against
h´ılls
), see the commentary on
The Lonesome
Death of Hattie Carroll
(
see this page
), where again the body of the song is a cadence; both songs play the dying fall of the feminine ending against a refrain of
masculine ending or endings.
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
hoops together the opening and the closing of each verse by beginning and ending with the masculine:
son
(as it happens)
/
one
and
hard / fall
.

344
Dylan sings “dark”; as printed in
Lyrics 1962–1985
, “black”.

345
Seven Types of Ambiguity
(1930, second edition 1947), pp. 36–7.

346
Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca
(1927);
Selected Essays
,
see this page
.

347
This picks up a warning from earlier in the verse: “I heard the sound of a thunder that roared out a
warnin’”.

348
In singing, Dylan transposes the printed words, “think it and speak it”.

349
Desolation Row
. “Everybody is making love / Or else expecting rain”. The train of thought? That the recumbent
lovers share an intuition with the cows, who lie down (keeping that patch dry?) when expecting rain.

350
That Dylan hadn’t forgotten
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
when he came by
Slow Train
is suggested by the
endings upon “it”: “Oh, you know it costs more to store the food than it do to give it” / “They talk about a life of brotherly love, show me someone who knows how to
live it” / “A real suicide case, but there was nothin’ I could do to stop it”.

351
“I’m well dressed, waiting on the last train” (
Things Have Changed
). “There’s a
long-distance train rolling through the rain” (
Where Are You Tonight?
)

352
Browning knew Shakespeare’s song well before he started writing. From
King Lear
: “Childe Roland to the dark
Tower came, / His word was still, fie, foh, and fum, / I smell the blood of a British man”. Michael Gray is good on Dylan and Browning (
Song and Dance Man III
, 2000,
see this page
), but doesn’t mention this instance. In the order of the song, the two have these in common (but I’m assimilating, for instance, singulars and plurals:
Dylan, “highways” / Browning, “highway”): “mountains”, “highways”, “dead”, “mouth”, “what did you see” /
“Not see?” (at the start of the verse), “a baby”, “black”, “blood”, “water”, “what did you hear” / “Not hear?”
(at the start of the next verse), “starve”, “laugh”, “a man”, “burning”, “dark”, “poison”, “executioner” /
“hangman”, “ugly”, and “the souls”. Stronger may be the relation of Dylan’s “the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world” not only to
Browning’s “my whole world-wandering” but to Browning’s immediately succeeding his other phrase, “the whole world”, with a ship’s going down in a
storm.

353
The eighteenth-century ballad
Edward, Edward
was and is in
The Oxford Book of English Verse
, as well as in most
anthologies of ballads and of Scottish verse.

354
Beckett: “It is made of dead leaves. A reminder of beldam nature” (
Closed Place
).

355
Studs Terkel Show
, WFMT Radio, Chicago (3 May 1963).

356
As printed in
Lyrics 1962–1985
: “wounded with hatred”.

357
Printed in
Lyrics 1962–1985
, “And I walk out on my own”. Dylan sings “And I, I walk out on my
own”.

358
“Well, if I don’t be there by morning / I guess that I never will” (
If I Don’t Be There by
Morning
, Dylan with Helena Springs).

359
“Well, I try my best / To be just like I am / But everybody wants you / To be just like them” (
Maggie’s
Farm
).

360
14 October 1818;
Letters
, ed. H. E. Rollins (1958), vol. I,
see this page
.

361
“They don’t want me around” and “A thousand miles” / Psalms 3:6: “I will not be afraid of
ten thousands of people, that have set themselves against me round about”.

362
See how
Señor
ends with what is doubly a rhyme:
for, Señor
.

363
Psalms 130:3: “If thou, L
ORD
, shouldest mark iniquities, O L
ORD
, who shall
stand?”

364
Music by Jerome Kern, words by Otto Harbach. Kern: “They asked me how I knew / My true love was true?”. Dylan:
“They ask me how I feel / And if my love is real / And how I know I’ll make it through”. There are other small overlaps. In the order within the Kern song: “here
inside” / [Dylan] “here in”; “laughed” (and “laughing”) / “laughter”; “my love”; “today”; “friends”;
“Tears”; “say”; “heart”; “realize” / “real”. And there is “doubt” against “I believe”. It is extraordinary how
different in its effect, as a cadence and a sentiment, is “Smoke gets in your eyes”, from the wording elsewhere in Dylan: “Smoke is in your eye” (
When the Night Comes
Falling from the Sky
).

365
R. A. Knox’s question-and-answer.
Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks
, eds. J. A. Gere and John Sparrow (1981),
see this page
.

366
As to exaggeration and artistic accomplishment, there is T. S. Eliot on how Pope’s
Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot
“depends upon the justice and reserve, the apparent determination not to exaggerate” (
John Dryden; Selected Essays
,
see this page
).

367
Irish Times Magazine
(29 September 2001), the Rome interview.

368
In the bridge here, the only word at the end of any line that doesn’t have a link to another end word is “me”.
This uniqueness has its poignancy and oppugnancy.