Dylan's Visions of Sin (11 page)

The indeflectible internal rhyme
greed / seed
then has “seed” succeeded immediately by “Seem” rounding the corner of the line, and this with a
two-edged effect, compounding the insistence (clinched by this assonance and consonance) and yet at the same time mitigating it. For to give emphasis to “Seem” must be to hold open some
hope. This final verse does not say that power and greed and corruptible seed are all that there is. Only (only!) that they seem to be all that there is. At which point one realizes the conjunction
of the Old Testament’s “this land” and “seed” with the New Testament’s offering its hope: “being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible,
by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever” (the First Epistle of Peter 1:23). So the song’s “corruptible seed” cannot but call up the affirmation that makes
divine sense of it by antithesis: “not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God”.

This final verse of Dylan’s has begun with a repudiation of hopefulness, for the line “Well, God is in his heaven” does not follow through to the naivety of the famous moment
in Victorian poetry (dramatized naivety, there, for Browning’s poem
Pippa Passes
is darkened by the larger older sadder story within which it has its young hopes):

When Dylan moves from “Well, God is in his heaven” to “And we all want what’s his”, he ignites a flash of doubt. We want
to seize what is not ours but his? Or we do want what he wants, want what is his wish? It is an equivocal line to take, and furthermore the benign reading is itself equivocal, since not necessarily
to be taken straight. Do we genuinely pray, “Thy will be done”? Or is our prayer lip-service? (We kid others and ourselves that we all want what’s His.) But Dylan’s run of
lines does keep open the respectful colouring of “And we all want what’s his”, since he moves at once to a chastening “But”, where otherwise the rotation of
“But” wouldn’t fit:

Dylan does not go along with the blitheness of “God’s in his heaven – / All’s right with the world!” But his song does not rebound into
All’s wrong with
the world
, it proceeds as “power and greed and corruptible seed / Seem to be all that there is”.
Blind Willie McTell
, which contemplates cruel injustice (“Hear the
cracking of the whips”, cracking its rhyme with “the ghosts of slavery ships”), does not succumb either to hopefulness or to hopelessness. Try hope. (And while you’re at it,
try faith and charity.) Remember that those verses of the Epistle of Peter proclaim “the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever”, and remember that this hope is immediately
reasserted there in the face of mortality and loss:

For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away: but the word of the Lord endureth for
ever.

Yet not only the word and the voice of the Lord, but the words and the voice of a great singer.

What kind of answer can those last two lines of this final verse, the enduring refrain, be to its first four lines? Only an answer at once partial and heartening; McTell’s
singing is one of the things that there is. And we arrive at this conclusion, at art’s being a glory of man that does not wither, via the two lines about the singer of this song itself:
“I’m gazing out the window / Of the St. James Hotel”. I admire and love the way in which this claims so little, even perhaps claims nothing, does no more than report one of those
moments when, abstracted from evil, you gaze out of a window in contemplative regard that is not self-regard.
⁹⁴

It is as if the question of envy doesn’t even arise. And yet it is knowing this, knowing that envy does not even arise, that plays so generous a part throughout this lucid mysterious
song.

If Dylan were someone who never sang the blues (someone who limited
himself to
Living the Blues
), then this might be a comparatively easy
generosity, rather as someone who is a tennis champion might have little difficulty in granting that no one can play table tennis like A. N. Other. And if Dylan were someone who sang only the
blues, then this might be demanding too much of him – or of us when it came to trusting his self-abnegation. The refrain is perfectly pitched and poised. And even the form that the
magnanimous praise takes –

– is one that very humanly and decently combines the utmost praise with a somewhat different inflection, one that emphasizes McTell’s uniqueness, not simply or
solely his superiority. That no one can sing the blues like him: this endearingly combines the superlative and the highly individual, without having to enter competitively into the proportions of
the one to the other. Perfectly judged, and determined to do justice to McTell. More, determined to see and hear justice done at last to him.

After the final refrain, there is no more to be said. Or sung. But there is more to hear, the fully instrumental that is yet an end in itself.

It was the repudiation of envy that brought the hoot owl into the picture or into the soundtrack. This, with a courteous comedy. Keats had assured his nightingale that the poet’s heartache
was not caused by envy: “’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot”. Dylan’s night bird sings beautifully in its way, and its way is one with which neither Blind Willie McTell
nor Dylan is in any way in competition. The owl doesn’t fuss about how big or how enthusiastic his audience is:

Like the rain in
Lay Down Your Weary Tune
, the hoot owl “asked for no applause”. Hooting, the opposite of applause, is how they drive you off the stage. The
hoot owl could well be – though it is happily not – pleased with itself. But then so could the others who are good at what they do, whom we now meet:

Well, “well” is a word that had opened this verse (as it will again the final verse), and that chimes with Blind Willie McTell. The owl does well, as others do, too
– but, come on, admit it,

Those others have their accomplishments – to wit the owl, and the maidens to woo – but when it comes to the blues . . . And what an accomplishment is the placing of
the phrase “Can strut their feathers well”. It doesn’t forget the owl and his feathers (which it is important not to ruffle), and it brings together so much that makes up what it
is to strut. There is “to brace or support by a strut or struts; to be fixed diagonally or slantwise”. (I used to hear “Construct their feathers well”.) But plainly this
should then be puffed out with “to puff out” (
The Oxford English Dictionary
quotes “His lady looked like a frightened owl, with her locks strutted out”). Moreover,
there is “to walk with an air of dignity” (this, particularly “of a peacock or other fowl”). And given Dylan’s full phrase, “Can strut their feathers
well”, there is the performing art: to strut one’s stuff = to display one’s ability.
⁹⁵
The young Dylan strutted his stuff as Blind
Boy Grunt.
⁹⁶
I don’t know whether there enters into this tribute to Blind Willie McTell any shade of Dylan’s ruefully remembering this. It
is sure, though, that the song takes blindness seriously, tragically. The first word of
Blind Willie McTell
, inviting
us to trust that it is not being insensitive,
is “Seen”. There is a shape given to the senses throughout the song. The first verse’s opening, “Seen”, moves to the third verse’s opening, “See”
– and then to the last verse as it nears its ending: “I’m gazing out the window”. The second verse brings us to our sense, the one that brings us Willie McTell and which
brought him, in his blindness, so much of what fostered him: “Well, I heard”. And this is the sense of which we hear tell in the fourth verse: “I can hear them rebels yell”.
The word “yell” is in a different register from the other words in the song (even from “bootlegged whiskey”), and, like a sudden yell, it bursts in on us like
Tennyson’s use of the down-to-earth word “scare” in the high heavenly world of his classical poem
Tithonus
: “Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears?”

But it is the third verse, there at the centre of the song, that is moved to a celebration of the senses’ riches, even while almost all of what the senses yield is a sad business, the
wages of sin, the South’s sin, though not the South’s alone:
⁹⁷

In this verse, the movement
See / Hear
is extended into
See / hear / Hear
, hearing being of its very nature the sense that matters most to song and to Blind Willie
McTell. The stroke of genius, it strikes me, is the sudden arrival, wafting in along the way, of “Smell that sweet magnolia blooming”. The eye and the ear have been known to put on
airs, too confident that they are the two senses that rule; how good that the sense of smell puts in its unexpected claim. Good, too, that the smell of burning does not overpower the sweet
magnolia. It is a rich moment, snuffing the air. As Dylan put it in 2001, “There’s a secret sanctity of nature.”
⁹⁸
Even within
tragedy the life that is nature may reassert itself. The tragedy could be that of
Strange Fruit
.
⁹⁹
Smell the sweet
magnolia after the lynching:

Strange Fruit
invokes the magnolia to point a moral; Dylan, to adorn a tale, hauntingly. “See them big plantations burning”.

The fresh flesh of the magnolia, which incited the poet William Empson,
¹⁰⁰
anticipates the sudden arrival of the four lines about the “woman
by the river” and “some fine young handsome man”, no tragedy now but a pastoral moment that thankfully gratifies the remaining two senses (touch and taste, the bodies and the
whiskey) that we had not been sure of – a moment that is not rescinded, though it is changed, by what immediately follows, the return of tragedy: “There’s a chain gang on the
highway”.

The tragedy of blindness is not lessened, it is widened, in the tradition that sees the blind poets as inspired by their suffering. There is Homer. There is Milton, who calls up as his
inspiration not only Homer but three other poet-prophets, and who prays that through his blindness he may “see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight”. And, perhaps even more
darkly, there is the cruelty that inflicts blindness upon birds in the belief that they will sing the better. A hideous castration for the caged bird-chorister. This is the suffering behind the
lines that open a poem by Dylan Thomas:

– a question that may have combined with a nursery rhyme
¹⁰¹
to prompt two moments in Dylan:

Our pity for the blind horse and for the blinded bird might serve to remind us how free of self-pity is the art of Blind Willie McTell. Dylan:

What made the real blues singers so great is that they were able to state all the problems they had; but at the same time, they were standing outside of them and could look at
them. And in that way, they had them beat. What’s depressing today is that many young singers are trying to get
inside
the blues, forgetting that those older singers used them to get
outside
their troubles.
¹⁰²

They could look at them: true of Blind Willie McTell.

Ballads love myth, including the myth of love, the blindfolded archer Cupid. Ballads respect legends, including those of the master-bowman: Robin Hood, or (on
Desolation Row
)
“Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood”, Einstein who had no time for Time’s Arrow. Eddington: “I shall use the phrase ‘time’s arrow’ to express this one-way
property of time which has no analogue in space.”
¹⁰³
The maidens have their feathers; style in literature has been characterized as the feather
in the arrow, not the feather in the hat.