Dylan's Visions of Sin (14 page)

Every somebody is a nobody in the eyes of the Lord, or of the devil, come to that.

You may be a preacher, Mr Dylan, and it may be necessary to take this bull, whether papal or not, by the horns.

As printed in
Lyrics 1962–1985
, it was “You may be a preacher with your spiritual pride”, but what Dylan sings, “a preacher preaching”, is
much more telling, as adopting – and adapting – “a construction worker working”, and as suggesting that the preacher not only has spiritual pride but preaches it. He may
think that he is preaching against pride, but this is not what actually happens as soon as he opens his ripe and fruity mouth.

And then there is scattered another flurry of darts. Preacher is in touch with councilman, because of what council is. Taking bribes is in touch with cut, because of what it is to take a cut (my
usual percentage, I trust?). Taking bribes on the side is in touch with somebody’s mistress, because of what
The Oxford English Dictionary
knows carnally about
on the side
:
“surreptitiously, without acknowledgement. (Freq. with connotation of dishonesty: illicitly; outside wedlock.)”. “What would some of you say if I told you that I, as a married
man, have had three women on the side?” (1968). In the momentum from this verse into the refrain (a mounting momentum now), there is twice a “somebody” before hitting the
refrain:

The verse that follows is both the seed of the song and – because of the Sermon on the Mount – its flower.

And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his
glory was not arrayed like one of these.

“Might like to wear cotton, might like to wear silk”: Dylan sings this quatrain most elegantly, with an equable commitment to its being so
pat, rhythmically and vocally and syntactically, so symmetrical. The bed may be king-sized but it is a perfect fit. The danger of the fit and of the pat could not be better intimated (complacency
completely self-satisfied), intimated delicately to the point of daintiness, but without palliation. For the “But” is biding its time.

And so the song moves to its moving on. The turn that finally releases it from its perpetual motion is its decision to switch from what you may be, and what they may call you,
to what you may call me – and thence to what little difference this could ever make, given the inescapable truth of our all having to serve somebody. Earlier the song had dangled titles and
entitlements: “They may call you Doctor or they may call you Chief ”. They may call you these things servilely, but don’t forget that you, too, are gonna have to serve somebody.
“They may call you . . .” now returns, from the opposite direction, as “You may call me . . .”

On every previous occasion, not only the last line of the refrain but its first line had crystallized in an opening obdurate “But”. Dylan has always respected the
patient power of life’s most important little insister, “But”,
which will not be cheated or defeated. To bring the song to an end, while urging us not to
forget the unending truth of its asseveration, there is this time no opening “But”, only the conclusive one.
¹¹⁹

You’re gonna have to serve somebody. You may not like the thought, but there are forms of the thought that ought to do more than reconcile you to it. At Morning Prayer, the Second Collect,
for Peace:

O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom; Defend us thy humble servants in all
assaults of our enemies.

Thy humble servants, thou whose service is perfect freedom. It is perfectly paradoxical, like so much else.

Meanwhile, the crasser forms of covetousness keep up their assaults. The artist seeks to defend us against them.

It is one of the most enduring of proverbial reminders,
You can’t take it with you
. In the different accents of St Paul:

For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and raiment let us be therewith content. But they that will be rich fall
into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after,
they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

(1 Timothy 6:7–10)

Not that any of these matters are as simple as the confident repudiation of covetousness would like to believe. The realist Samuel Butler would again like to say a word:
It is only very fortunate people whose time is money. My time is not money. I wish it was. It is not even somebody else’s money. If it was he would give me some of
it. I am a miserable, unmarketable sinner, and there is no money in me.
¹²⁰

Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands

Sad to say, there has been many a sad-eyed lady. One of the most haunting, and haunted, is Dolores, she whose very name means sadness.
¹²¹
Swinburne’s
Dolores
(1866) opens with her hidden eyes, and soon moves to her flagrant mouth, all this then issuing in a question:

He covets her, even as she covets so much.

Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
opens with the mouth of our lady of pain, and soon moves to her eyes, all this then issuing in a question, one that is on its way to further questions:

He covets her, even as she covets so much. The seductive “mercury mouth” may be a death-dealing poison (thanks to a particular plant), or it may be a health-dealing
antidote (thanks to a compound of the metal).
¹²²
Swinburne has “Red mouth like a venomous flower” (and “eyelids that hide like a
jewel”); Dylan has “eyes like smoke”, and then “like rhymes”, “like chimes”.
¹²³
The first question (within
a song that puts so many searching questions), “Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?”, might summon the goddess who is summoned in
Dolores
, “Libitina thy
mother”. For she is the Roman goddess of burials, who since ancient times has been identified – in a sad misguidance – with the goddess of love, Venus herself.

Dolores
moves in time to that of which it speaks, “To a tune that enthralls and entices”, as does
Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
. Throughout,
Dolores
sings of
sins. Like
Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
, it insists upon listing – sometimes directly, sometimes to one side. It retails all of her energies, her incitements and excitements, her
accoutrements, her weapons, her pockets of resistance well protected at last, moving inclusively through all these with an indeflectibility that runs parallel to Dylan’s “With your . .
.”, the obdurate formula of his that sets itself, all through the song, to contain her and her properties, her wares. “With your sheets like metal and your belt like lace”,
“With your childhood flames on your midnight rug”, “With your holy medallion which your fingertips fold” . . . Part inventory, part arsenal, these returns of phrase are
bound by awe of her and by suspicion of her, alive not only with animation but with animus. The more times the initiatory “
With
your . . .” recurs, the more pressure it incurs,
both as threat and as counter-threat.

Swinburne’s “thy”, in comparison, loses terror in archaism, and it lacks the pointed needling of “With your . . .”. The run within
Dolores
, 205–67,
soon starts to feel of the mill: thy serpents, thy voice, thy life, thy will, thy passion, thy lips, thy rods, thy foemen, thy servant, thy paces, thy pleasure, thy gardens, thy rein, thy porches,
thy bosom, thy garments, thy body . . .

But again like the song, Swinburne’s poem has recourse to questions that are stingingly unanswerable:

These are no streetcar visions, but they, too, take flesh. Dylan’s song, for its part, is given form by its questions and by their specific shape.

– through to the end:

Their credulity is matched only by yours, my dear. (From “do they think” to “do you think”.) “And you wouldn’t know it would happen like
this”. Our Lady of Pain, wide-eyed as being credulous for all her worldliness, will meet her match in our gentlemen of pained surprise. “Oh, how could they ever mistake you?”

Dolores
would not have to be a source for
Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
(leave alone an act of allusion by Dylan) for it to illuminate the song’s art. More than decor is a
tissue. Overlappings include (in the order within Dylan’s song, though neglecting singular / plural differences): “mouth”, “times”, “eyes”,
“like”, “prayers”, “voice”, “visions”, “flesh”, “face”, “lady”, “prophet”, “man”,
“comes”, “[ware]house”, “the sun”, “light”, “moon”, “songs”, “kings”, “kiss”, “know”,
“flames”, “midnight”, “mother”, “mouth”, “the dead”, “hide”, “feet”, “child”, “go”,
“thief ”, “holy”, “finger[tip]s”, “face”, and “soul”. And Dylan’s “outguess” (“Who among them can think he could
outguess you?”) is in tune with Swinburne’s “outsing”, “outlove”, “outface and outlive us”.

What may be revelatory is that these apprehensions of languor and danger so often coincide in their cadences and decadences. Swinburne’s anti-prayer to his anti-madonna, an interrogation
that hears no need why it should ever end, may be heard as a prophecy of the Dylan song, a song that has been sensed, in its turn, as blandishingly hypnotic.
¹²⁶
Hypnotic, or even (in the
unlovely form of the word that F. R. Leavis liked when disliking Swinburne)
hypnoidal
.

T. S. Eliot – slightly to his surprise – found himself having to put in a word for Swinburne’s ways with words, his ways with all those words. (Surprise, because Eliot said of
his own choice of creative direction, as “a beginner in 1908”: “The question was still: where do we go from Swinburne? and the answer appeared to be,
nowhere.”
¹²⁷
) Eliot retained his sense of humour within his puzzled respect for Swinburne. I cannot imagine a better evocation than
Eliot’s of the kind of art that Dylan exercises in this song (itself unmistakably his and yet nothing like any other achievement of his), a kind that has moved some people to condemnation,
Michael Gray for more than one. Gray brands the song “a failure”.