Dylan's Visions of Sin (20 page)

Come gather round, winds . . . Not just the best of them all, the best of us all.

Baez: “Right, it was just endless.” Such was indeed the impression that the song meant to give (to give, rather than to make, since it is not in the making-an-impression game). So
how does Dylan bring it to an end without stopping it in its track? With some movements of mind. First:

“The last of . . .” is an intimation of an ending, and Dylan then tips us a wink of his hat by doing what he has not once hitherto done in the song:
not
following the four-line verse with the four-line refrain. Instead, and trusting that this registers upon us, he moves at once to another four-line verse, and then – with great imaginative
coherence in the substitution –
he has this verse be fully reminiscent of the refrain, of which it offers a variant along the same rhymes. So that the end runs like
this:

The turn at the successive endings, from “hymn” to “hum”, is finely judged, a rotation of the sound (in the benign spirit of the Dorset poet William
Barnes, who uses such para-rhymes happily,
¹⁵³
not ominously as Wilfred Owen does in his pangs from the Great War) that asks for no applause but
deserves it. The strength of strings is all in such interlacing, a relaxation that is altogether other than lax.

Mr. Tambourine Man

So lithe is the movement of
Mr. Tambourine Man
that to number it among the songs of sloth might seem perverse or even counter-intuitive. The song may talk of being
“too numb to step”, but that is not the way it walks.

I don’t believe you, one is happy to report, since the gait of the song is quite other. “My weariness amazes me”? Weariness, my foot. An amazing thing for the
song to maintain. Refreshing and refreshed is how it sounds.

Would not sloth be sluggish? Yet there are affinities between
Mr. Tambourine Man
and some other songs engaging with sloth, those that breathe
relaxation and
escape, relief and release.
¹⁵⁴
For instance,
Lay Down Your Weary Tune
, which started with its refrain, as though it had already arrived
– in good time and with all effort over – where it was hoping to come to rest:

His weary tune amazes him? No matter, the time has come to lay it down.
Mr. Tambourine Man
opens, likewise, with a refrain that is an injunction, yet not this time to
himself, to lay down a tune, but to someone else, to take up a tune, to play a song.

A singer will sometimes wish to sing his refrain no more. “Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear” (
Not Dark Yet
). So a singer may wish that, for just
one time, another would sing to him, sing for him. The first line of
Mr. Tambourine Man
takes us back to Dylan’s first album, but with a difference. “Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I
wrote you a song”. And so he did, but right now he may not feel too good, and would appreciate it if someone would write a song for him. Or play a song for him. So “Hey, hey, Woody
Guthrie, I wrote you a song” becomes “Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me”, with a heart-lifting lilt when this “Hey!” modulates into “play”. And
for me
, instead of my always having to be the one, always having to do it (I know, I know, and I’m not complaining exactly) for other people. What in
Lay Down Your Weary Tune
had been “And rest yourself ’neath the strength of strings” has become a promise to stir myself if you will just be so kind as to stir me:

play a song for me

In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you

“I’m not sleepy”, but this does not mean that what I stand in need of is a lullaby.
Mr. Tambourine Man
is not out to
lullify.

Lay Down Your Weary Tune
had delighted in the music of the rain, because such a music-maker “asked for no applause”.
Mr. Tambourine Man
asks for little or no applause,
for it wants to keep up the playful subterfuge that the song that it really values is not the one it is singing but the one that it is requesting, asking another to sing. “Yes, to dance
beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free”. Free, among other things, of any obligation either to offer or to ask for applause (even while the waving does look like encouragement).
What is the sound of one hand clapping? Quite something, as when an audience is asked – even before anything has been performed tonight – to give the performer a big hand. Big-hearted.
An advance.

“Yes, to dance . . .”: the affirmative energy of this is partly a matter of its finally fulfilling the promise that had been given earlier:

In fairy stories, the dancing spell is not something that you would like to have cast on you (unable to stop dancing, your weariness will amaze you, and as for the spell, there
will be no escaping it on the run), yet Dylan has put this in such a way as to escape any thought of the curse of exhaustion. Instead the murmur is
relax
. For the spell is not being cast on
you, it is being cast your way.

“Yes, to dance . . .”: the “Yes” is able to work wonders, for it comes after a succession of negative formations throughout the song. The refrain: “I’m not
sleepy and there is no place I’m going to”. The first verse: “not sleeping”, “no onetomeet”. The second verse: “can’t feel”. The third verse:
“not aimed at anyone”, “no fences”. The final verse is the only one that is a negative-free zone, and this despite all the dark things in it.

– whereupon, the word “Yes” is a sudden exultant freedom:

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free

True, a negative formation can carry a positive message (“there are no fences facin’”), but there is no substitute for a cry of
“Yes”.

The comedy of the song is a matter of its criss-cross. It is marked not by mock-modesty, but by a mocking modesty, by bantering and antics. Take “the jingle jangle morning”.
Jingle-jangle is a characteristic creation of the English language, and
The Oxford English Dictionary
lists its low companions: “dilly-dally, dingle-dangle, ding-dong, clink-clank,
etc.”

An alternating jingle of sounds; a sentence or verse characterized by this. Something that makes a continuous and alternating jingle; a jingling ornament or trinket.

But although the compound “jingle-jangle” is admirable, it is not admiring. “Such a paltry collection of commonplace tunes, handled clumsily” . . .
“jingle-jangles its way through the piece” (1899). The same goes for “jingle”:

The affected repetition of the same sound or of a similar series of sounds, as in alliteration, rime, or assonance; any arrangement of words intended to have a pleasing or
striking sound without regard to the sense; a catching array of words, whether in prose or verse.

At which point, the dictionary reaches its verdict and its sentence: “Chiefly contemptuous”. “Frivolous hearers, who are more pleased with little jingles, and
tinkling of words than with the most persuasive arguments” (1663). The comical audacity of the song makes sure that it, too, is among Dylan’s Songs of Redemption: jingle and jingle
jangle are redeemed from the contempt that has been visited upon them. “Commonplace tunes”? “Without regard to the sense”? “The affected repetition”? No, the
effective repetition. I had not known the terminology of the tambourine until
The Oxford English Dictionary
evoked the “pairs of small cymbals, called jingles, placed in slots round
the circumference”.
¹⁵⁵

Alliteration, rhyme, or assonance: it would not be true to say that
Mr. Tambourine Man
consists of nothing else, but it is true that the song – like all such lyrical creations
– is fascinated by the relations between these resources of sound and everything else that is the case, all those things in life that
are not words but that we often
need the life of words to help us catch. There is, for instance, the indefatigable standby, a rhyme on “rhyme”, “And if you hear vague traces of skippin’ reels of
rhyme”, where the vague traces of skipping ropes and of spinning wheels swirl exuberantly along with those skippin’ reels.

The furthest reach of rhyme in every verse of the song is the one that has the eighth line hearken back to the fourth line. In the final verse, this is “tomorrow” completing the
thought of “sorrow”, a rhyme that Dylan often uses and never fails to vary.
¹⁵⁶

The rhyme
sorrow / tomorrow
is the song’s final rhyme except for the return to the final refrain, and the sense of this rhyme’s simple predictability is
perfectly right. Relax, again; forget about it. But there is, over and above and below this, the vocal timing of the words across and against the musical cadence. Don’t forget about this
voicing, his stationing of “until tomorrow” so that it is both gingerly and gingered up: “Let me forget about today until tomorrow”. “Far from the twisted reach of
crazy sorrow”: yet not so far as to be beyond reach of the rhyme, the longest stretch that a rhyme is here called on to make.

“Let me forget about today until tomorrow”: simple, but cryptic. This is not your usual reminder that procrastination is the thief of time. It may want us to hear the Sermon on the
Mount, but not along the established lines:

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

(Matthew 6:34)

Rather the reverse. Let me forget about tomorrow today.

A song that delights in what might be deplored as “jingle jangle” is
likely to intensify its rhyming. The first triplet of rhymes in the first verse,
sand / hand / stand
, moves then to “sleeping”, which will in the end be consummated by the off-rhyme, “dreaming” – but only after crossing the stepping stones
of the next triplet of rhymes, with their assonantal bridge to
sleeping / dreaming
:
feet / meet / street
. And then as the song nears and then reaches its ending, with the third and
fourth verses, we hear the conclusiveness realized. For the last verse inaugurates itself with a sound that is far from having disappeared:

– a sound that rings from the previous verse:

Whereupon the rhymes and assonances find themselves at once free and driven (driven deep in memory), with
leaves / trees / beach / reach
mounting to this climax:

Free / sea / memory / deep / me
: this presses forward while never forgetting the first verse of the song with its
sleeping / feet / meet / street / dreaming
. But
then it doesn’t forget an earlier rhyme (
sand / hand
), either. For when the “one hand” picks up, a moment later, “the circus sands”, it circles back to the
beginning:

Nothing simply vanishes, and the circus sands return to sand.

Sloth is a form of escape, but not “escaping on the run” since that would ask too much energy. Dylan has said: “I don’t write songs for
escape”,
¹⁵⁷
but that isn’t the same as not writing songs that comprehend the yearning to escape, and respect it and suspect
it. Wilfrid Mellers gave us the dope: