Read Dylan's Visions of Sin Online
Authors: Christopher Ricks
Dylan's Visions of Sin
Dylan’s Visions of Sin
Christopher Ricks is Warren Professor of the Humanities, and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute, at Boston University, having formerly been professor of English at the
Universities of Bristol and Cambridge. He is a member of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, of which he was president from 2007 to 2008.
‘Structured around the concepts of sin, virtue and grace, Ricks’s close reading and imaginative cross-referencing will indeed uncover meanings in Dylan’s
songs that would never have occurred to you.’
Anthony Quinn,
Daily Telegraph
‘Zips along with irrepressible good humour . . . Ricks’s work has the lustre of a lifetime of engagement with greatness.’
Peter Aspden,
Financial Times
‘Fascinating, there are wonderfully penetrating and illuminating moments to be found. I was never less than stimulated and frequently stirred.’
John Preston,
Sunday Telegraph
‘Ricks is an exemplar of the diminishingly seen art of “close reading”, an explicator of Milton, Keats, Tennyson and Eliot . . . Such clockwork analysis never
seems to drain Dylan’s work of its vitality, but rather to renew a listener’s amazement . . . In doing so he’s found the songs all the more extraordinary, not wanting in any
measure . . . Ricks’s book leads you back into Dylan’s music, no small virtue.’
Jonathan Lethem,
New York Times Book Review
‘Compelling, convincing, and challenging work of literary scholarship.’
Alan Taylor,
Sunday Herald
Also by Christopher Ricks
Milton’s Grand Style
Tennyson
Keats and Embarrassment
The Force of Poetry
T.S. Eliot and Prejudice
Beckett’s Dying Words
Essays in Appreciation
Allusion to the Poets
Reviewery
Decisions and Revisions in T.S. Eliot
True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht and Robert Lowell under the sign of Eliot and Pound
Editor
The Poems of Tennyson
The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse
Tennyson: a Selected Edition
Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1900–1917
by T.S. Eliot
The Oxford Book of English Verse
Selected Poems of James Henry
Joining Music with Reason: 34 Poets, British and American, Oxford 2004–2009
New and Selected Poems
by Samuel Menashe
The Expelled / The Calmative / The End / First Love
by Samuel Beckett
Tennyson: Selected Poems
What Maisie Knew
by Henry James
Table Talk & Recollections
by Samuel Rogers
Christopher Ricks
This digital edition first published by Canongate in 2011
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Copyright © Christopher Ricks 2003
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in Great Britain in 2003 by Viking, 80 Strand, London,
WC
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R ORL
, England
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 85786 201 3
eISBN 978 0 87586 202 0
Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire
Contents
Sins, Virtues, Heavenly Graces
The Sins
The Virtues
The Heavenly Graces
Index of Dylan’s Songs and Writings
Sins, Virtues, Heavenly Graces
Of the seven deadly sins, Roger considered himself qualified in gluttony, sloth and lust but distinguished in anger.
Kingsley Amis,
One Fat Englishman
Any qualified critic to any distinguished artist: All I really want to do is – what, exactly? Be friends with you? Assuredly, I don’t want to do you in, or select
you or dissect you or inspect you or reject you.
Maybe so. Anyway, Bob Dylan has made it clear that he is not favourably disposed towards critics in general (for all his being a favourite of so many of them), and – in particular –
not favourably disposed towards critics who “dissect my songs like rabbits”.
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Pulling rabbits out of hats, on the other hand, provided that he provides the hats: this may on occasion be something else.
As a student at Cambridge long ago (1928?), the young William Empson impressed his teacher, the not much older I. A. Richards, by his spirited dealings with a Shakespeare sonnet. “Taking
the sonnet as a conjurer takes his hat, he produced an endless swarm of rabbits from it and ended by ‘You could do that with any poetry, couldn’t you?’” But only if the
poetry truly teems, and only if the critic only
seems
to be a conjurer. What, then, is the critic’s enterprise? To give grounds for the faith that is in him, in us, in those of us who
are grateful. It is a privilege.
Dylan is not the first artist to clarify his responsibilities as he does: “I’m the first person who’ll put it to you and the last person who’ll explain it to
you.”
2
William Empson himself had a comically modest turn of phrase for the thing he needed first of all:
the right handle to take hold of the
bundle
. Dylan handles sin. Manhandles it, sometimes, as burly burlesque.
Jeremiah preached repentance
To those who would turn from hell
But the critics gave him bad reviews
Even threw him to the bottom of the well
(
Yonder Comes Sin
)
Jeremiah’s in the well. “And they let down Jeremiah with cords. And in the dungeon there was no water, but mire: so Jeremiah sunk in the mire” (Jeremiah
38:6).
She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me, written by an English poet from the fourteenth century:
Handling Sin.
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Handling sin is for
me the right handle to take hold of the bundle. My left hand waving free.
“Fools they made a mock of sin.”
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Dylan’s is an art in which sins are laid bare (and resisted), virtues are valued (and manifested),
and the graces brought home. The seven deadly sins, the four cardinal virtues (harder to remember?), and the three heavenly graces: these make up everybody’s world – but Dylan’s
in particular. Or rather, his worlds, since human dealings of every kind are his for the artistic seizing. Pride is anatomized
in Like a Rolling Stone, Envy in Positively 4th Street
, Anger
in
Only a Pawn in Their Game
. . . But Dylan creates Songs of Redemption (Allen Ginsberg’s phrase), and so – hearteningly – Justice can reclaim
Hattie Carroll
,
Fortitude
Blowin’ in the Wind
, Faith
Precious Angel
, Hope
Forever Young
, and Charity
Watered-Down Love
.
What, in Dylan’s eyes, are the words of his to which people have mostly turned a deaf ear? “The things I have to say about such things as ghetto bosses, salvation and sin, lust,
murderers going free, and children without hope –”
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“The glamour and the bright lights and the politics of sin”: this wide-sweeping fiercely lit line was held aloft by an interviewer. The line is from Dead Man, Dead Man. Interviews
can be a form of living death, and Samuel Beckett once declined to be interviewed, saying to his friend: Not even for you, and in any case I have no views to inter. The politics of sin?
It just came to me when I was writing that’s the way it is . . . the diplomacy of sin. The way they take sin, and put it in front of people . . . the way
sin is taken and split up and categorised and put on different levels so that it becomes more of a structure of sin, or “These Sins are big ones, these are little ones, these can
hurt this person, these can hurt you, this is bad for this reason and that is bad for another reason.” The politics of sin; that’s what I think of it.
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But it is in Dylan’s music, not in his musings, that what he most deeply thinks of sin can be heard and felt. The word “sin” haunts the songs, with a range of
insinuations such as should make us think.
People tell me it’s a sin
Because he sinned I got no choice, it run in my vein
And there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden
That hollow place where martyrs weep and angels play with sin
Where charity is supposed to cover up a multitude of sins
To the sin of love’s false security
I didn’t commit no ugly sin
I’m gonna baptize you in fire so you can sin no more
They like to take all this money from sin, build big universities to study in
Well, if you can’t quit your sinnin’ . . .
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And if Dylan can’t quit your sinnin’?
Desolation Row
is a masque of the sins, worthy (in its pageant of unworthiness) of the Seven Deadly Sins who cavort in Marlowe’s
Doctor Faustus
– Doctor Faustus,
otherwise known as Doctor Filth, aided and abetted by his nurse:
She’s in charge of the cyanide hole
And she also keeps the cards that read
“Have Mercy on His Soul”
Her sin is her life-threatening officiousness. She has been preceded in the parade by Ophelia: “Her sin is her lifelessness.”
Desolation Row
sees and shows a Vision of Sin. Tennyson saw and showed
The Vision of Sin
:
I had a vision when the night was late:
A youth came riding toward a palace-gate.
The hour is getting late. One rider was approaching. The wind began to howl:
Then the music touched the gates and died;
Rose again from where it seemed to fail,
Stormed in orbs of song, a growing gale.
There are seven deadly sins, but only four cardinal virtues (Justice, Prudence, Temperance, and Fortitude). Seven to four? But do not despair, for here come the three heavenly graces: Faith,
Hope, and Charity. Seven-a-side, then. But there is imbalance still. The antonym of guilt is innocence, the antonym of a virtue is a vice – but what, pray, is the antonym of a sin?
Furthermore, isn’t it rather bewildering that the sins, as they mount their masque, enjoy masquerading as one another? For lust can be seen as one form that may be taken by greed or
gluttony, as can covetousness or avarice. “One sin very naturally leans on another”: there is something appropriately creepy about this seventeenth-century description (by Thomas
Wilson) of the pleasure that sins take in their leanings, in their
overlapping
.
A sin will have to be set, first and foremost, in opposition to the goodness that opposes it. Gratitude will have no truck with envy. Thomas Wilson again:
Every virtue consists in denying some corrupt inclination of our depraved nature; in opposing and resisting all temptations to the contrary vice; charity, in opposing
continually self-love and envy; humility, in resisting all temptations to pride, etc.
But some of the discriminations that need to be made are more elusive. How confident can we be, for instance, in distinguishing a sin from the goodness to which it is
immediately adjacent? Envy, bad: emulation of an honourable
kind, good. Sloth, bad: relaxedness, good. Pride, bad: pride, good.
And then there are sins of omission. “Forgive me, baby, for what I didn’t do” (
Maybe Someday
).
In the Summertime
, before it came to shake its head sorrowingly
(“Fools they made a mock of sin”), had asked: