Dylan's Visions of Sin (53 page)

Dylan’s Verse 1

So there is only one line from Dylan’s first verse that has no Keatsian parallels: “There’s not even room enough to be anywhere”, and even this might be
thought to be touched by Keats’s words “But here there”. Here, there, and everywhere. Or anywhere. Beckett,
The End
: “I didn’t pay attention. Strictly speaking I
wasn’t there. Strictly speaking I believe I’ve never been anywhere.” Beckett,
For to End Yet Again
: “And dream of a way in a space with neither here nor there where all the
footsteps ever fell can never fare nearer to anywhere nor from anywhere further away.”
³⁷²

Verse 2

Verse 3

Verse 4

Enough.

No such parallels ever amount to proof (literary judgements don’t admit of proof, only of evidence), but there are too many likenesses for it to be likely that they are coincidences. T. S.
Eliot said, about the “borrowings” of the Elizabethan dramatist George Chapman, that the scholar’s “accumulation of probabilities, powerful and concurrent, leads to
conviction”; and Eliot wrote similarly on another occasion, of “many other parallels, each slight in itself but having a cumulative plausibil-ity”.
³⁷³

It adds a further dimension to these affinities that
Not Dark Yet
stands to Keats’s
Ode
very much as Keats’s
Ode
, in its turn, stood to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, “That
time of year thou mayst in me behold”. The continuity and community of the poets constitute a success that is a succession. And even as Dylan doesn’t exactly allude to Keats, but has a
different, a diffused, gratitude to his art (more than a source, a resource), so Keats doesn’t allude to the Shakespeare sonnet – and yet just about every word of the sonnet takes its
place and its turn within the
Ode to a Nightingale
. What in Shakespeare at first is a “time of year”, and then becomes a time of day, is all along a time of day for Keats – as it
was to prove, in due course, for Dylan. Sonnet 73 has its own way of saying and of singing “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there”.

Shakespeare speaks explicitly of night, “black night”. Keats is explicit, too; his
Ode to a Nightingale
has “tender is the night”, “this passing
night”, “the midnight”. But it is one of Dylan’s dark forbearances that “night” is never once brought into the light of day in
Not Dark Yet
. Oh, night casts its
shadow throughout but is best left unsaid. And you can feel this whether or not the song brings the sonnet or the
Ode
to your mind. I’m not offering the absence of the word
“night” as evidence of the presence of Shakespeare and Keats, for in terms of an argument this would be having it both ways. But there is a strong affinity with Keats in the way that in
the song
night
colours, darkens, the whole atmosphere while never being spoken of. For
winter
colours and darkens Keats’s
To Autumn
, being the only one of the four seasons not mentioned in
this profound poem to a season.

When you say that
It’s not such-and-such yet, but it’s getting there
, the such-and-such could be many a different word. But think how much thinner Dylan’s refrain would have
been as “It’s not night yet, but it’s getting there”. And this is a matter not only of understanding why night should be an intimation of mortality, not an announcement, but
also of sensing how much the refrain gets from the fact that we don’t speak of
getting night
but we do speak of
getting dark
. So that when we hear, and hear again and again, “but
it’s getting there”, the word “getting” is getting its full due, a simple inexorable compacting of the two things that it is up to: getting there and getting dark.

Keats said, with touching modesty and confidence in the face of the
personal extinction that he knew would soon be his, “I think I shall be among the English
poets after my death”. To set Dylan among the poets, there with Keats, is to give both poets their due. Not as a matter of the culture wars.
³⁷⁴
But because gratitude to Dylan is at one with his gratitude to Keats. Gratitude disowns envy. “’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot”.

Perhaps the
Ode to a Nightingale
came particularly to mind for Dylan’s song because the
Ode
is a poem couched always in song: “singest of summer in full-throated ease”,
“Provenc¸al song”, “Still wouldst thou sing”, “self-same song”. When Dylan sings “Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear”, he may want us
to recall that a burden may be a refrain, one that singers were said to bear. Keats, elsewhere: “Bearing the burden of a shepherd song” (
Endymion
, I, 136).

Dylan’s refrain or burden is “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there”. He bears it and bares it beautifully, with exquisite precision of voice, dry humour, and
resilience, all these in the cause of fortitude at life’s going to be brought to an end by death. And the word “burden” itself carries for Dylan, though not only for him, a sense
of sin: in
Dear Landlord
, “Please don’t put a price on my soul / My burden is heavy”; in
Yonder Comes Sin
, “The old evil burden that’s been dragging you down”;
and in
Foot of Pride
, “how to carry a burden too heavy to be yours”.
³⁷⁵
There was a
characteristically
memorable mixture of the direct and the circuitous in Dylan’s remark in an interview: “I sure would like to be spared of the burden to muse about what my fans think about me or my
songs.”
³⁷⁶
Not just spared the burden but spared of it, compacting “spared” and “relieved of”, and with
“muse” perhaps in touch with those presiding forces without which we wouldn’t be inspired into the arts at all. (Keats mused in the
Ode
about “many a musèd
rhyme”.) Some burdens Dylan is spared (how right he is about the artist’s at least having the right not to have to muse about his art), but not the burden that he has taken it on
himself to sing. From refrains he cannot refrain.

Not Dark Yet
seeks – in the great phrase from Freud – to make friends with the necessity of dying. This is fortitude not only as the subject of the song but as its element, its air.
Like Keats in the
Ode
, Dylan understands what it is to go even beyond making friends with this necessity, and he is willing to be – as human beings sometimes should be – half in love
with easeful death. Keats:

– and yet a painful thought. “Half in love with easeful Death”: but only half.

There’s much more to
Not Dark Yet
than time – its subject and its element – permits of. Oh, its being a song that starts with “Shadows are falling and I’ve been
here all day” – and then its having twenty-four lines, one for each hour of all day.
³⁷⁷
And the rapt beauty of the long instrumental
patience – a full minute – both before the final verse, and, of the same length, after it: not . . . yet, not . . . yet.

Or there are the felicities of rhyming, including the rhyming that is included within lines. Say, those that open and close upon the same sound.
This may feel like
pincers or forceps: “Feel like my soul has turned into steel”. Yet even this is about making friends with something (again, it feels to me, friends with the necessity of dying), since
“The friends thou hast”, we are urged in
Hamlet
, “Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel” (“soul” again steeled into “steel”). And I
can’t imagine a tauter evocation of hoops of steel than this having the line itself be hooped: “
Feel
like my soul has turned into
steel
”. (Dylan voices a pause after
“has”, the caesura there, so that “turned” is the turning point.) And with “steel” turned into “still” two words later (“into steel /
I’ve still got”) – and then with “still” still there in the last verse: “I’m standing still”.