Dylan's Visions of Sin (22 page)

– or when hearing of a triste tryst with a good time who has been had by all:

A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed
: Jonathan Swift’s poem, “Written for the Honour of the Fair Sex”, reveals how Corinna, back at midnight from the
streets, “Takes off her artificial hair” and her eyebrows, takes out her falsies and her false teeth . . . A strip-tease? Jeeze.
She
can’t find her knees. Don’t even
think of what she will look – and worse than look – like in the morning. “Who sees, will spew; who smells, be poisoned”. After Swift’s savage sewerage,
I Shall Be
Free
smells pretty sweet-natured. And that is because, unlike in Swift, there is a man in the song who shall not be free from bodily ridicule: hot-footed perhaps, bare-naked for sure (a
compound epithet that, far from being stripped, is tautological . . .). She took off her this, and her that, and her other. And me? “I took me a woman”. And then I took off. (“Out
the window!”) “She looked alright”? Serves him right. The real right thing, after the while, is (
of course
) not lust but desire. No question. Blake posed the question, and
poised it with perfect justice.

I Want You
gives voice to a yearning for this reciprocated requirement, this double desirement. Poignant and pained (all the more pained because
there is such a prospect of pleasure if only she will want him back), the voice repeats – with patience and with passion – “I want you”, four times in each of four verses,
the third time in each verse succeeding the three words with the plea “so bad”, and the last time preceding them with the pleasing “Honey”.

In the world of
Handy Dandy
the easy woman can assure him: “She says, ‘You got all the time in the world, honey’”. But not here. There is an aching wait just after
we pass the last “because”, for all the world as if there soon will not be all the time in the world.

And because I                    want you
¹⁶⁷

And in any case time is on someone else’s side.

For there is a rival, and he sounds too cutely and flutily pleased with his own suitability, and the rhymes get cutting:

In due course, “Was I?” will be clinched as a rhyme, a rhyme with a cause (“Because I”) and with a pause:

The heartfelt inconsequentiality of this love song (what a game, Truths and Inconsequences) has always made it especially teasing and pleasing. There is a magnanimity evoked in
the person of the other woman, the less loved one –

– and magnanimity is in the body of the song, too, when it turns back from the competitive to the appetitive. “I want you”. And I feel the want of you. But a
tricky preposition, “of ”. If only I could feel the want of you as a wanting that emanates from you. Not that I’d order you around, even if love could be ordered. There are no
imperatives in the song. Many declaratives, and one reiterated declaration, a declaration of love. And of desire.

I Want You
opens with the rhyme of “sighs” and “cries”. It closes with a sigh and a cry still, with “I” audible on its way to “you”:
Was
I
Because I
lied
ride
side
I want
you
.

Touching, and the more so for the hint of touching oneself. “I want you so bad”. Blake again:

To Blake might be added Ecclesiastes, chapter 12, on the time “when desire shall fail”.

“True love they’ve been without it”: not only fathers but sons and daughters. But it is not necessarily too late, which means that
it is necessarily not too late.

Scorn and discomfiture and discomfort have their burlesque part to play. But, in some other room, so do corporeal confidence and the peace of mind that it alone can bring. Such
is
Lay, Lady, Lay
, a comedy of command and demand.

How much longer? The old question in many a Dylan song is how long you can go on urging.
¹⁶⁸
Don’t Think Twice,
It’s All Right
. Here it’s how long you can go on asking somebody to lay across your big brass bed. Or,
Anglicè
, lie across it. Everyday American English, with its
established divergences from the old-country matters, is what enforces this way of putting it to her. Still,
lay
across my bed? Yet if you were to say, with Queen’s English
correctitude, “Lie, lady, lie”, this would open up an ungentlemanly possibility: “Lie, lady, lie – you usually do on these occasions”. And so on. Men accusing of
mendacity the fair sex. It is true that the American usage might permit of its own ludicrous train of thought (“Lady, lady, lay the table – or, if you prefer, an egg”), but at
least there wouldn’t be the casting of aspersions. Remember another opening of Dylan’s, the first words of
Fourth Time Around
, positively fourth:

She was deaf, or – in the case of
Lay, Lady, Lay
– will she be deaf to his importunate cries? There’s a certain point at which she either does lie
across your big brass bed or she does not. You would sound fatuous if into the small hours you continued to urge “Lay, lady, lay”. The repetition is there, very strongly, from the
beginning, but there’s a real question about how, with dignity, you extricate yourself once you’ve issued this injunction. So rhyming (which can be a way of effecting release or relief)
becomes a distinctive part of the story. Added to which, rhyming is sure to be crucial to any song that begins with words such as “Lay, lady, lay . . .”, where “lady” feels
like or feels for a relaxedly languorous and open and welcoming expansion of “lay”. Expansion and contraction constitute the movement of the phrase “Lay, lady, lay” and of
the song that bears those words as its title. Less common than you might think, in Dylan, to have the words of the title be absolutely identical with the opening words of the song. A perfect
congruity is intimated, as it is in one of the other instances,
If Not For You
, which begins, yes, with the words “If not for you”.