Dylan's Visions of Sin (37 page)

“I don’t even know why we come”. This is not the stuff of which heroes are made.
²⁷⁵
Oh, it took courage to be down there, in the
midst of protest, the three of us. But there are limits. In the unmousy words of
Tarantula
: “it’s every man for himself – are you a man or a self?”
²⁷⁶

In
Some Other Kinds of Songs
. . .
²⁷⁷
Dylan imagines a scene:

It would be nice to be sure that a man of this stripe was rushing off to the civil rights meeting in order illiberally to disrupt it, but we had better admit that he just might
be going to it to support it. For many a good cause politically is supported by people who don’t begin to practise at home what they preach abroad. “What do you think about that, my
frien’?”

Oxford Town
does not avert its eyes or ears from the fact that you can’t
count on liberals to be heroes. So? Why should you expect it of them? The song is
not in the business of urging its listeners to feel superior to the voice they overhear, the voice of someone decent, who was up to going down there but who is not up to dealing with tear-gas
bombs. Now is the time for your tears? – but it is not pleasant to think that now is the time and place for tear-gas tears. The idealism, though it is not ridiculed, is felt to falter, all
too naturally:

People do well not to go in for protestations about their protest-marches. Robert Lowell cast into verse a letter from Elizabeth Hardwick:
²⁷⁸

Bigoted bullies like Bull Connor who wield cattle-prods against protesters, these
Oxford Town
has no time for, but this does not prevent it from setting reasonable limits
to the amount of time that it has for liberal fellows or liberal fellow-travellers, the limits then being the amount of time that the liberals themselves will courageously commit themselves to.
“Goin’ back where we come from”. I don’t blame you. But I can’t idolize you or idealize you either. And the song is saved from being in any danger of
self-righteousness because it is mediated to us through the voice of someone who has no wish to be a martyr, makes no priggish claim to be a hero, and is not despised for not being a martyr or a
hero. “I don’t even know why we come”.

“Ev’rybody singin’ a sorrowful tune”. Singing it insincerely? Hypocritically? Playing along with it? This line is parallel to the earlier one with which
it is paired: “Ev’rybody’s got their heads bowed down”. In genuine sorrow?
In pretended sorrow? Or prudentially, heads ducking below the parapet?
The word “down” is bent on dragging the song down, four times in the first six lines, from “Ev’rybody’s got their heads bowed down”, through “Ain’t
a-goin’ down to Oxford Town” and “He went down to Oxford Town”, to “Guns and clubs followed him down”.
²⁷⁹

“Ev’rybody singin’ a sorrowful tune”. But as Robert Shelton wrote of this song, “Melody and tempo are jaunty, the lyrics are not.”
²⁸⁰
The brisk buoyant strumming that opens the song does not ever let up or let you down in
Oxford Town
. It gives you something sorrowful, “but then again it
doesn’t”, for the unsorrowful tune does not play along with what the words lay bare. Such counteraction is characteristic of a song that does so much interweaving. The
“Ev’rybody” of “Ev’rybody’s got their heads bowed down” and “Ev’rybody singin’ a sorrowful tune” becomes, two lines later, the
wistful wishful “Somebody” of

Somebody else, as always. Not
whatever
, but
whoever
. The patterned song is about patterns of behaviour. And “Sun don’t shine above the ground”,
of the first verse, becomes in this last verse “Two men died ’neath the Mississippi moon”. And just as “sorrowful tune” might have a romantic colouring, ugly in the
circumstances, so another of the quiet horrors in the song is the contrast within the phrase “’neath the Mississippi moon”, for it, too, might have a disconcertingly romantic
colouring:

That is
Stuck Inside of Mobile
. Fortunately you don’t have to be stuck inside of Oxford Town. “Better get away from Oxford Town”. The minimal hopeless
“Better” of “Better get away” is not at all a good thing, and it returns in “Somebody better investigate soon”, where nothing is any longer being shouldered and
somebody is relapsing into shrugging the whole thing off. Verse 1, “Ev’rybody’s got their heads bowed down”. Verse 2, “Better get
away from
Oxford Town”. Verse 3, “He come to the door, he couldn’t get in”. Verse 4, “We got met with a tear gas bomb”. “Got” and “get”, get it? At
which point there is verse 5, which has got rid of “got” and “get”. Nobody is going to get caught or punished.

A silkily sinister ending. Even tinged, perhaps, with
hope they don’t find out anything
, a dark thought that is in touch with the bright thought that ends a very
different early song about politics,
Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues
:

“Somebody better investigate soon”. As printed in
Lyrics 1962–1985
, though (and as can be heard on a bootleg tape),
Oxford Town
ended not with this
“soon” that will never be realized, but by circling back to repeat the first verse of the song:

Circling is good, both as being wary and as going nowhere, but there is a more effective circling back without the repetition of the opening verse (a touch easy, that), in the
coming back round to the “Ev’rybody” lines. “Ev’rybody’s got their heads bowed down”: “Ev’rybody singin’ a sorrowful tune”.

The sorrowful tune is embodied in the sound that ends the word “tune” or the closely related sound that ends the word “from”. This sound has its unremitting and
encircling drone or hum. For all the lines of this song rhyme, and every line can be heard to sound (like “line” and “rhyme”)
n
or (in the fourth verse)
m
. Not
so, you might say, for what about “ground” in the very first verse? But “ground” there is denied its
d
by rhyming with “Town”, even as “bend”
in the third verse is denied its
d
by rhyming
with “frien’”, and even as “bomb” – with its silent
b
– is rhymed with
“from”. And what might this steady drone or hum do within the song? Create a tone of semi-military menace without remission, not letting up, a background (or a backgroun’) that
bows heads down and brings everything down to Oxford Town. Think of the sounds of the bagpipe and of how the chanter’s penetration is set against the drone, the brown air that the drone
suffuses through it all.
²⁸¹

The short words go about their work. Meanwhile, “Mississippi” and “investigate” are the long words in the song, and there they are in two successive lines, the two
closing lines.

Two men stayed in Mississippi a day too long. Somebody better see that justice is done to all this. As somebody truly did.

Prudence

Et cetera. Polonius, to his son, Laertes, in
Hamlet
. “These
few
precepts”? With a further twenty-two maxim-packed lines awaiting delivery? He must be
kidding. You can feel the young man’s relief when at last his father arrives at “This above all”, with the end in sight or in hearing. Look out kid, one wants to say to Laertes,
except that this is what his father (allowing for a change of idiom) is repeatedly saying to him. Polonius maximizes precepts. Some centuries later, such prudential considerations came to be the
ammunition of the Maxim gun that is
Subterranean Homesick Blues
.

Prudence says
Beware
, and
Be aware
, and
Be wary
. Whether or not the times are a-changin’, time is of the quintessence.
No Time to Think
: such
is the title and the refrain of a timely song. American English, with its pleasure in and profit from built-in obsolescence, has its distinctive relation to time, to time’s
passing.
²⁸³
In terms of the transitory language, it is not that there is no time to think, but rather that one of the things that must be promptly
thought about is that there’s no time. The refrain that marks the particular whirligig of time that is
No Time to Think
makes a punctuation point of adding, every time, “And
there’s no time to think” – until the last time, the last verse. Then the refrain-line both expands and contracts. It expands, in that it takes over the whole of the last verse.
It contracts, in that in the final end when the time comes for the last refrain, time so presses (“No time to lose”) that, instead of “And there’s no time to think”,
the refrain is curtailed to “And no time to think”:

“No time to lose or say goodbye”: yet the song is about to effect its own way of saying goodbye (farewell is too good a word, so I’ll just say goodbye), at
once loyal to its refrain and departing not only with it but from it. Minutely. A prudent move, with perfect timing.

Prudence can sound something less than a virtue. Virtuous, merely? A soft touch, a touch too timid or tepid? Too puny to stand up there with Justice and Fortitude? Perhaps this virtue should be
placed on a humbler plinth, alongside Temperance, the other less muscular one. But be careful (Prudence warns), for Prudence does have its glint, its steely sense of what a warning is and of how
this differs from a threat – it then being understood that the difference may not be all that great. The pliability is wirier and wilier than you might think, and for Dylan it can grab best
as “you better”:

For “you better” grabs it even faster than “you’d better”. Every letter, every microsecond, might count now that
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
. Not that it is all over until the fat lady sings instead of the thin man.

“Look out the saints are comin’ through”. Prudence is always on the lookout. The advice that it gives may need to be repeated but will need to be varied, otherwise the hearer
stops listening. “Take what you need” / “Take what you have gathered from coincidence”. The taker, meanwhile, must be careful not to be taken.

His blankets, your door. He’d probably take that too,
²⁸⁴
if he could, when taking his leave.

The first verse begins “You must leave now”. The last verse gives notice of closing-time by opening with “Leave your stepping stones behind”. How could you not? Stepping
stones are more of a fixture than are Longfellow’s footprints, Longfellow with his shipwrecked sailor (Dylan’s sailors sound shipwrecked, too, seasick and rowing home):

Take heart, take what you need (it may be heart).

In the making of those lines, something may have called to Dylan, don’t forget, something that followed him and that at the same time he followed. For the meeting of
stepping stones with the dead happens to resemble a meeting with a dead poet, a poet not forgotten – as is only right when his poem, remember, bears the title
In Memoriam
, and when we
remark the same imaginative associations in the opening lines of section I: