Dylan's Visions of Sin (64 page)

There can be no doubting the melodious buoyancy of
Moonlight
, but how is it that this buoyancy comes out to play? For the song, on the face of it, makes much of things that
suggest, as against levity, gravity. A groan, and tears, and a funeral bell, for a start. But then the song achieves its sense of relief and release by incorporating within itself reminders of all
those things in life that cast shadows, those weights that make us seek relief and release in the first place and in the last place.
Moonlight
achieves light-heartedness not in spite of but because
of the many intimations of mortality, of sadness and loss, that it touches upon or that touch it.

The opening words may be, in their manner and movement, altogether unafflicted, but they do speak – with whatever stylization – of affliction. “The seasons they are
turnin’ and my sad heart is yearnin’”. True, the yearning – as soon as Dylan turns the corner of the line – turns out not
to be the deepest
kind of heartache (not actually, or not yet, yearning to meet
you
, my dear):

– for it is the songbird, the cooperative little competitor, for whom my heart is yearning and whose tone I want to hear and to emulate. But anyway, there is an endearing
continuity,inthe melodious slide from “sweet” to “meet”, of the one hope into the other:

But you won’t BE
alone
if I meet you. True, but you know what I mean, and one of the things that I most mean is that “alone” is at its best when it means just
you and me.
⁴⁶¹
Added to which, there is the comic effect of a refrain that keeps on ending with a rhyme on the word “alone”. Which cannot
leave it alone.

What happens is that a loss is spoken of, while exactly not being felt, even as an apocalyptic vision is then spoken of, but exactly not felt. We are being relieved of these.

Simple yet cryptic wording, “the day is losing”: does it mean
the dusky light [that] the day is losing?
This would be a retrospective touch. Or is the word-order
prospective?
The day is losing [sight of] the orchids, poppies, black-eyed Susan
.
⁴⁶²
Or is the thought more final than that, destined for the melting
of earth and sky?
⁴⁶³
The day is losing
: losing the fight; losing,
period
. What the song seizes is the indispensable truth that a light-hearted song
will end up being light to the point of weightlessness or emptiness unless
it calls to mind – but in such a way as not to call mournfully to heart – the dark
heavy aspects of life. “Black-eyed”, as the dictionary knows, is amenable to romantic feelings, but not to those feelings alone. So although it would be morbid to yield to the thought
of a bruise in the black-eyed Susan, or to wince from the knowledge that a black-eyed Susan is slang for a revolver,
⁴⁶⁴
we shouldn’t avert our
eyes, whether black or blue or brown, from the presence throughout the song of these darker possibilities, possibilities that are certainly not meant to be actualized into painful realities but are
not meant to be naively inconceivable, either; are meant, rather, to be glimpsed as everything that the song so blessedly floats free of.

Floats free of, or ushers us free of. It had been in
I Shall Be Free
that Dylan first played with and worked with the rhyme
heavy / levee
:

What raises a smile is the way in which “levee”, of all words, gravitates to the heavy, instead of levitating.

The air is thick and heavy? Not this musical air. It flies, lighter than those geese, even – as light as goose feathers. And yet this very effect depends upon the
light-hearted feeling that issues from the thought of the thick and heavy having been raised only to be dissolved, solved.

It is the bridge of the song that is then, naturally, the perfect place for the assurance “I’ll take you ’cross the river dear”.

– and, rest assured, I practise what I’m preaching. But peace and harmony and blessings and tranquillity are meaningless in the absence, not so much of
war and cacophony and curses and rage in themselves, as of any conceiving even of such ugly realities. Which is why those two reassuring lines about peace and tranquillity are
immediately succeeded by a kindly thought that would need only the slightest turn to become threatening:

We feel no danger from that last line, but then that’s what’s so sweetly secure about it. The tone is right to strike. Likewise, there is melting and melting: that
of earth and sky in the day of the Lord, as against that of music-making in our day or in the good old days – as when Herrick played melodiously
Upon Julia’s Voice
:

To hear again his songbird’s sweet melodious tone.

What befalls is happily casual, a casualness without fear of casualty. The rhyme is free to fall where it feels like.

How relaxed,
crimson / limbs an’
. And how relaxing, this confidence that the phrase “cast their shadows” won’t cast any shadow over the scene, and that
“cast” won’t fix things with “stone” to harden the heart as though it’s all cast in stone.

It is an exclamatory scene of delight, and the more delightful because cypress is usually associated not with gaiety but with funerals, with mourning.
⁴⁶⁵
Wordsworth steered clear of the cypress when he wanted a heartening scene (with many of the same properties: the birds, the trees, the wind and
water, the moon and all). But Wordsworth’s settling so securely into the scene then conveys less of authentic freedom because his lines have only a narrowly social sense of what such a night
is freed from:

On a night like this . . .

The bliss in
Moonlight
, with its anticipated further bliss (do meet me on this), is never shattered but it is suddenly pierced with the entirely unexpected welling of tears:

Suddenly, from nowhere, “My tears . . .”. They are flowing to the sea, but where are they flowing
from
? They don’t sound like tears of joy; rather, as if they
might be mildly luxuriating in their love-lorn grief. Inexplicable. In Tennyson’s terms:

Tennyson’s poem – which is moved to puzzle its head and its heart, “So sad, so fresh”, “Ah, sad and strange” – evokes a consciousness
that loves to stay with its mysterious grief; Dylan’s song, a consciousness that at once pulls itself together, flowing on to something quite other: “Doctor, lawyer, Indian
chief”. Out you go. But who’s counting?

Anyway, just accept the rueful realities, such as “It takes a thief to catch a thief ”, especially if you are yourself in the light-fingered business – here within
“Love
And Theft”
– of snatching up an unconsidered trifle here (from a nursery rhyme, or a book about a Japanese gangster), and a trifle there, from Donne and Hemingway. “For whom does
the bell toll for, love? It tolls for you and me”. For whom does it toll for? For sure, it doesn’t toll only for thee (Donne: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am
involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”), so we might as well have a “for” each. It was a funeral bell, no doubt about
that, but how unfunereal it all feels on this occasion, how much more like marriage bells for you and me. A bit like those cypress trees, freed from their dark associations. And then the same goes
for – goes from – the song’s last lines, where the pulse is healthy (as it might not always be), and where what is sharp is not going to hurt anybody, and where what is twisted is
given to us straight, and where a groan doesn’t sound remotely like a groan, given how blithely it is all sung:

Nothing is here for groans. The words that are dark find themselves lightened, and the heavy words lightened. Dylan, like Shakespeare,
⁴⁶⁶
loves
the range that the word “light” can command in English, from an effect of the light, the moonlight, to an effect of not being
weighted upon by anything heavy.

How long, still, will the question persist, “Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?”? At what point might even the most hopeful of lovers yield to hopelessness? There
was a moment of ominous jealousy in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(II, i):

Enter the King of Fairies at one door with his train, and the Queen at another with
hers

OBERON
: Ill met by Moonlight, proud Titania.

But the song lives in hope: Well met by Moonlight.

Forever Young

First things first. The First Cause is the Creator of the Universe. So: “May God bless and keep you always”. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with
God, and the Word was God. At once, in the first words of a song that constitutes a prayer, the Word is of God. “May God bless and keep you always”. The Lord bless thee and keep
thee.
⁴⁶⁷
The Father comes to the mind of a father. “I wrote it thinking about one of my boys” (
Biograph
).

The entrance is all the more forceful for its being gentle. This, and the way in which the initiating
May
. . . is set to distinguish itself from
one distinctive
opening to a Dylan song: an injunction crouched in the imperative. Imperious, sometimes, whether in dismissal, “Go ’way from my window”, or in enrolment: “Look out your
window, baby, there’s a scene you’d like to catch”. But often inviting: “Come gather ’round people”.
⁴⁶⁸

Such imperative openings are admittedly only one of the instantly embroiled ways in which a Dylan song may hit the fan running,
⁴⁶⁹
but they are
assuredly characteristic, from “Lay down your weary tune” and “Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me”, to “Don’t ya tell Henry” and “Look out
across the fields, see me returning”. But
Forever Young
is in no position to command (it kneels and it bows its head), and anyway God is not to be commanded, and so the opening is rightly a
prayer’s hope: “May God bless and keep you always”.

God, first, then, and then there is an intermediate step that has to be taken before the prayer can arrive at what it most or mostly calls upon as its ritual wording (
May you
. . .). The song
has passed at once from God to you (“May God bless and keep you always”), but now it moves on to a stepping stone that it never leaves behind:
your wishes
, which are not you exactly, or
are exactly not you. “May your wishes all come true”. The singer puts those first, or all but first, but he lets it be understood that the hope is not only that your wishes may all come
true but that so may all his wishes for you. Your wishes are granted pride of place, but it is clear that this rests upon a further act of trust: that your wishes are and will be wise ones. Just
think of all the wish-stories where the wish-fulfilment is the worst thing that could have happened, issuing in farce or tragedy. Be careful what you wish for, lest your wish be granted. But as to
your
wishes, may they all come true, for I trust your judgement, as I trust in God’s. “Trust ye in the Lord for ever”.