Dylan's Visions of Sin (44 page)

The interpretation of dreams? Again the Book of Daniel, chapter 5:

And the king spake, and said to the wise men of Babylon, Whosoever shall read this writing, and shew me the interpretation thereof, shall be clothed with scarlet, and have a
chain of gold about his neck, and shall be the third ruler in the kingdom.

These wise men, unlike the Christmas ones, do not bring gifts, yet the successful interpreter is promised a gift of gold, though not of frankincense or myrrh.

Visions and dreams are among the limitlessnesses, and the final dream-vistas of the song are at once continuous with the previous glimpses and newly disturbingly disjointed:

This is exquisitely evoked, both line by line and in its mounting. The rhyme
trembles / rambles
engages auditorily in those two activities, and “bring” duly
brings in “wing”, or rather, “bring” spreads its wing to become
bro
ken
wing
. The off-rhyme
rainy / raven
thinks better than to seek perfection, and yet
the laminations of the lines are perfect in their way. “The bridge at midnight trembles”: who (it may be wondered with a slight tremble) can be out there at this time of night?
“The country doctor rambles”: rambling in his mind, is it? or a house call,at this hour? “Bankers’ nieces seek perfection”: where have they impertinently arrived from?
Not who do they think they are, but who do we think they are? And what kind of perfection, exactly? “Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring”: but the wise men were bringing gifts
to the infant Christ, a very different perfection from any that is likely to figure in the calculations of bankers’ nieces.

But then again (for the suggestions twist and turn) perhaps the Three Wise Men are not in fact the wise men in question, not because they are shadows of their former selves but because they are
later selves. For is it not the earlier wise men, the wise men of the Book of Daniel, who take precedence? “The wise men of Babylon”, “Then came in all the king’s wise
men”, “the wise men, the astrologers”. Far wiser than the wise men, the prophet Daniel went without gifts: “Then Daniel answered and said before the king, Let thy gifts be
to thyself, and give thy rewards to another.”

The riches of the song, of its instigations and recesses, constitute in themselves a range of gifts. Yet there remains something deeply dark about the song’s ending. The crucial decision
by Dylan can be felt in his leaving unrhymed in this last verse the words “perfection” and “hammer”. What is perfection up against? A hammer.
³¹⁷
And this involves the question of how it is, and of why it is, and of whether it believably is, that

This is another of the occasions in my experience of Dylan, my experience moreover of his greatest songs (for the other instances of my perturbation are
One Too Many
Mornings
and
Positively 4th Street
), when I don’t know what to think, or what to feel, or quite how to argue and to judge. For there is at the end of the song what feels like a
curious rounding on the woman. She has been evoked throughout the song in a way that is on the face of it incompatible with her being like some raven with a broken wing. Why is she like some raven
with a broken wing? Because she has now been hit with a hammer?

The end of the song should be felt as something of a surprise, to put it mildly. The beautiful equanimity of Dylan’s voicing and of the tune itself should not disguise this from us,
although clearly to speak of disguise may do the enterprise less than justice: not, perhaps, an attempt to evade the contrariety, but to bring home an evasiveness or a self-deception that threatens
all such laudatory lovings. The song seems to me to turn out to be saying something along these lines: “What I like about her is that she is so wonderfully independent of me, she
doesn’t really need me, other people do this, that, and the other, and she deliciously doesn’t, she, she, she – actually, come to think of it, far from being what I like about
her, it’s why . . .” – exit, muttering darkly something about going to get a hammer, and maybe breaking more than her wing, her spirit . . . She had been valued for not needing to
need him, yet now there is felt a need to be needed by her, a need that she
not
be so strong.

A fascinating situation, if I read it aright (and no doubt if I don’t), but one that raises – as so often do the love poems of Donne – the question of whether the situation is
being dramatized or not. Dramatized or inadvertently advertised? Are the feelings in the song realized as to their true nature, as inevitably tinged with falsity, their wresting of feelings from
what is true like ice, like fire? Does the doctor ramble, or can he be trusted to diagnose truly?

The song had begun with a simple haunting asseveration:

It ends no less simply but now differently haunted:

The violence that had been disavowed in the beginning has come to constitute the end. For violence is just below the surface of the lines:

All but silently (that is, tacitly), this invokes the raining of blows on somebody with a hammer.
³¹⁸
When “rain” and
“blows” and “hammer” go together, “perfection” is set to meet “hammer”, without rhyme but with reason. (So different from the unrhyming relationship
of “faithful” to “roses”, or from the unique and delicate unrhymedness of “softly”.) Is her perfection to be broken by some phantom hammer? Or was she never as
perfect as we – going along with her, going out with her – had supposed?

Dylan has had lots of shots at that line “The night blows rainy.” You can hear him sing in a 1965 out-take “The rain blows cold”. But then “cold” has no rhyme
at all, with a very chilling effect. On another occasion, you can hear him sing what is printed in
Lyrics 1962–1985
, “The night blows cold and rainy” – which
separates the word “blows” from
rain / rainy
, and so does something to mitigate the incipient violence. “Even the pawn must hold a grudge”. Even the king? Even Dylan,
whom I ungrudgingly admire?

The choice is, in my judgement, stark. If it is granted that the end must be allowed to retain its surprise, its shock even, then the question (when it comes not to valuing the song, but to
valuing it at its true worth) is whether the end is apprehended in the course of the song. And apprehended has to mean understood, or – to invoke Henry James’s term –
“placed”.
³¹⁹
So from the wing of a raven to
The Wings of the Dove
. The elaborations are those of love and resentment:

He was walking in short on a high ridge, steep down on either side, where the proprieties – once he could face at all remaining there – reduced themselves to his
keeping his head. It was Kate who had so perched him, and there came up for him at moments, as he found himself planting one foot exactly before another, a sensible sharpness of irony as to her
management of him. It wasn’t that she had put him in danger – to be in real danger with her would have had another quality. There glowed for him in fact a kind of rage at what he
wasn’t having;
an exasperation, a resentment, begotten truly by the very impatience of desire, in respect to his postponed and relegated, his so extremely
manipulated state. It was beautifully done of her, but what was the real meaning of it unless that he was perpetually bent to her will?

All he had originally felt in her came back to him, was indeed actually as present as ever – how he had admired and envied what he called to himself her direct talent for
life, as distinguished from his own, a poor weak thing of the occasion, amateurishly patched up; only it irritated him the more that this was now, ever so characteristically, standing out in
her.
³²⁰

There she is, there they are, in Henry James’s imagining. And, if we allow for this and that, in Dylan’s imagining.

Every time I write a song, it’s like writing a novel. Just takes me a lot less time, and I can get it down . . . down to where I can re-read it in my head a
lot.
³²¹

Read books, repeat quotations, draw conclusions.

Sugar Baby

When it comes to the way they walk, there are songs that stroll and songs that stride, those that prance and those that saunter. Amble or gambol, meander and maunder. Foxtrot,
lope, and pace. How a song moves those who hear it, this will be intimate with how it does itself move, particularly when it is of movement that it sings. Just imagine all the ways there are to
talk the walk. Indefatigable:
Pressing On
. Pricked:
If You Gotta Go, Go Now
. Hobbling: “My toes too numb to step”. (I don’t believe you, thought Mr. Tambourine Man.)
Hobbled:
Cold Irons Bound
. Or following a direction: “Sugar Baby get on down the road”.

Matthew Arnold heard the truth, long ago, far away:

The superior character of truth and seriousness, in the matter and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority of diction and movement marking its style
and manner.
The Study of Poetry
. The same would go for the study of song, the study of how song goes. Especially when a song’s concern is a going one.

Two idioms were the parents of this Sugar Baby, parents who – despite not exactly getting on with one another – were determined to make a go of it. They are the idioms
to go
without
(“You went years without me”) and
to keep going
(“Might as well keep going now”). Their child would be
keep going without
. Meanwhile, lurking in
the brains behind pa and ma is the thought of getting going, which is why the words “get” and “got” get to usher in “went without” and “keep
going”:

Might as well keep going? Or might as well keep going without me? Might as well keep going, without any mention of “me”.

When something is sung, a vocal fluctuation can make it impossible even to imagine what the counterpart would be in a poem, let alone what an equivalent would be.
Sugar Baby
depends upon
the way in which (outside the refrain that furnishes the contrast) the music and the voice, from the beginning, are reluctant to accommodate themselves to the shaping that the words’
sense-units would demand, were the words not in a song but in a poem. A poem may play one system of punctuation (the usual marks) against another (the line-ending that has no terminal punctuation),
and to this, a song may add the unexpected tilt or pause, the hesitation or edge, that the voice and the music can express and impress.

Metre, prosody, lineation, rhythm: time for a crèche course. Accent, or stress, is what we are to hear – and listen for – in poetry, particularly poetry in the English
tradition. This might take the line that no poet ever quite perpetrates:
ti tum, ti tum, ti tum, ti tum, ti tum
. That is, an unstressed syllable and then a stressed one, all the way to
“Detroit Detroit Detroit Detroit Detroit”. Or, with the stress the other way round, the vast vista in
King Lear
, never to be forgotten:

But then the complication, as we all know, is that there are degrees of
stress, so that in conversation as well as in poetry, the life in any utterance
is not disposed to have its sounds be simply either stressed or unstressed, either the one or the other. For life and verse like to touch upon matters diversely, with gradations, taking the measure
of things.

In music, the principle of measurement (for that is what metre means) will subordinate accent or stress to quantity or length: how long it takes to utter something. Bars come in lengths.
Quantity or length, it is true, was also in some classical poetry the ground rule (Greek more than Latin),
³²²
and there have been intermittent
attempts in English poetry to imitate this classical precedent. More memorably, there have been poems (for instance, by William Cowper and by Thomas Hardy) that sound as though they are setting the
one principle and practice against the other, quantity or length against stress or accent.

How long it takes to utter something is not the same as how much stress you put on it, for there may be a word that takes little emphasis but has a clutch of consonants and vowels reluctant to
slip along. An effect of stress versus quantity, then, can act as an embodiment of a human contrariety: fate versus resolution, say, or stoicism versus pain, or grief versus relief. Of a particular
motion of mind that you are brought to hear, you may feel that it is somehow not natural to move in this way or in these contrarious ways. But art, naturally, cannot afford to limit itself to
movements that are natural. For it may be under strain that a truth will be found to reveal itself, brought to light’s intensity from the hiding places of its power. “Plenty of places
to hide things here if you wanna hide ’em bad enough”.

We feel a strain in the strains of
Sugar Baby
. “You got a way of tearing the world apart. Love, see what you’ve done”. What, on the face of it, could be simpler than the
words “a way of”? But the simplicity is torn. For in terms of accent or stress (poetry’s terms), the words would run equably from the stressed into the unstressed:
“wáy of ”. But in terms of length or quantity, the two words are granted, by the music and the voice, and by the bleak break after the word “of ”, a plain equality:
“wáy óf”.