Dylan's Visions of Sin (65 page)

So now the prayer can return to
you
– but be patient just a moment longer, for its first thought, now that it has returned, is of others. “May you always do for others”. Put
others first, within this veritable series of things that are to come first. And, first and last, may you be granted an understanding of human reciprocities:

A mistaken pride might have put yourself before others. We have put that behind us, and yet an equally mistaken pride may sometimes stand between us
and being ministered to by others. It may be no less blessèd to receive than to give. So there is a pressure, mild but firm, given to the word upon which this ensuing thought turns, the word
“And”:

And – no less important – let others do for you.

The prepositional phrase “do for”, in this positive sense,
⁴⁷⁰
does well: “to act for or in behalf of; to manage or provide
for”.
The Oxford English Dictionary
brings home the age-old association of “do for” with what Providence provides, with God’s wishes on our behalf. “God did for
them” (1523). “When God does for man,heexpects that man should do for God” (1658). “If ye do for them which do for you, what thank are ye worthy of?”: a question asked
by the Son of God (Luke 6:33).
⁴⁷¹
The turn of phrase that we might expect at this moment in
Forever Young
is not “do for others” but
“do unto others”, and this not just because it is more often heard but because Dylan later has it within the refrain of
Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others)
:

The archaic joins the demotic in “Ya got to do unto others / Like you’d have them do unto you” (Do unto others
as
. . ., right?) to establish a jaunty
jocularity, whereas
Forever Young
needed something at once more simple and less familiar:

Anyway, the usual way of putting it can open a whole other can of worms
that turn. George Bernard Shaw: “Do not do unto others as you would they
should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.”

Meanwhile, as the song makes its way – at once pressing on and circling back for ever – there can be heard the forward movement of mind and of voice from “for others”
through “for you” to “forever”, itself then repeated for what must seem ever.

True, the song is of the simplest. But then these effects are themselves of the simplest. Inspired, they are a matter of order, of ordering things aright, as is true of every ritual and perhaps
of every prayer.

“
Forever Young
, I wrote in Tucson,” Dylan remembered. “I wrote it thinking about one of my boys and not wanting to be too sentimental. The lines came
to me, they were done in a minute. I don’t know. Sometimes that’s what you’re given. You’re given something like that. You don’t know what it is exactly that you want
but this is what comes. That’s how that song came out. I certainly didn’t intend to write it – I was going for something else, the song wrote itself – naw, you never know
what you’re going to write. You never even know if you’re going to make another record, really.”
⁴⁷²

“May you always know the truth”: including this truth about such creations, that I don’t know, you don’t know, you never know, you never even know. The
simple repetitiveness of all those hovering remarks, their easy brooding and giving (“Sometimes that’s what you’re given. You’re given something like that”), are very
endearing and truthful in relation to this song that is likewise so happy to repeat itself forever as it unfolds its wishes (“You don’t know what it is exactly that you want”) for
another’s well-being.

In
Ode on a Grecian Urn
, Keats had been explicit not only with “for ever” but with “happy”:

Ah, “happy” recurs so often as to feel immitigably sad: four times in those three lines, and this after the sigh “Ah, happy, happy boughs!”

Forever Young
may wish “May you be happy”, but this is the wish that is
unheard. (Heard wishes are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter?) This is the
more telling in that the song lives within a society that knows the truth to be self-evident, that among our inalienable rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The song silently
declares its independence of any such claims for, or to, happiness. “May your heart always be joyful”: joy is something else, as is clear if you try thinking of utilitarianism as
committed to the greatest joy of the greatest number. Although
Forever Young
may breathe the wish that its beneficiary be happy, it doesn’t voice this. For the direct pursuit of happiness has
a way of leading you astray, away from happiness proper as well as away from all the allegiances owed to values other than happiness. The song settles for the larger hopes:

“Forever”: Keats had rung the changes on the word, or rather, words (in his better day, usually two words,
for ever
):
⁴⁷³

There is poignancy in Keats’s so ordering things that “for ever young” is the sixth and last “for ever” of his sequence. In Dylan, it is
“young” that forever succeeds “forever”, four times in each verse. Its brother, “always”, sounds as though it is always going to lag behind (for ever panting?):
“always” only twice in the first verse, and only twice in the second verse . . . But in the end it catches up and matches up: it, too, comes four times in the last verse. The sibling
synonyms are finally all-square.

Dylan had at once known the truth about where the danger lay: “too sentimental”. Poets have long been alert to the need to ward off sentimentality in such prayers. Yeats, for
instance, in
A Prayer for my Daughter
, immediately follows his “May . . .” (“May she be granted beauty”) with “and yet”, in a thorough and prompt prophylaxis
against being too sentimental:

Then there is Philip Larkin, no less wary of “the usual stuff / About being beautiful”, who seeks to escape sentimentality in his poem for Sally Amis, first by means
of a rueful pun in the title,
Born Yesterday
(I wasn’t born yesterday, even if she was), and then by jeering relaxedly at the . . . – well, wishers:

– at which point Larkin, sensing that this way of putting it was in danger of overestimating how much understatement he could count on, has to spend eight lines getting
out from under just about everything that we mean by
ordinary
, and then has to end his poem by wishing ditchwater on her – only to have to hasten immediately into explaining away this even
blunter word of his:

This is as sentimental as they come, given the fact that by no stretch even of Larkin’s imagination is
dull
what a skilled, vigilant, flexible, unemphasized, enthralled
catching of happiness is called. Larkin’s sally fails, lapsing into what is just one more form that sentimentality may take: a miscalculated risk taken mistakenly and then rescinded.

In
Forever Young
, on the other hand, Dylan does catch what you might call a skilled, vigilant, flexible, unemphasized, enthralled catching of happiness. And of values other than happiness. His
prayer (that he not be too sentimental) is among those answered.

There is a special grace in the song’s resisting the temptations of sentimentality. Sometimes the vigilance is a matter of sensing something dark that is in the air.

Dylan’s knowing at least something of the work of Blake
⁴⁷⁴
might mean that this wish (for a child, too) could be
seen in contrast to
For Children: The Gates of Paradise
, where Blake – in a famous caricature – projects a demented demandingness. The shrilling thrilling insistence is both a title and
a claim to entitlement:
“I want! I want!”
⁴⁷⁵
“A tiny man mounts a ladder propped against a quarter moon, while two others watch
him. In the background are seven stars in a dark, cloudless sky.”
⁴⁷⁶
Anything but that, please. May you – in quite the opposite spirit
– build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung.

Forever Young
is a dedication to hope. Among the poems that Dylan values is one by Rudyard Kipling, and it came to his mind, he says, in the wake of the terrorism of September 11th, 2001.
“My mind would go to young people at a time like this.”
⁴⁷⁷
Gentlemen-Rankers
imagines hopelessness, so it needs to speak of Hope, and
– like
Forever Young
– it speaks of Truth (rhyming it with “youth”), and it prays for the young – a word that the poem rhymes, as Dylan’s song does, with
“rung”. Dylan is in hopes.

Kipling, in the four lines that Dylan was later to quote, imagines what it must be to have done with Hope and Honour, and to be lost to Love and Truth:

“And climb on every rung”: but “down the ladder rung by rung”, and not
even climbing down, dropping down. “God help
us”. “May God bless and keep you always”.

Plainly it is a simple positive sense that commands this occasion on which “true” and “truth” can calmly succeed one another as the due process for
consummating their consecutive lines. It is the occasion for “true” and “you” to rhyme again, as they had done in the first verse. (The final verse, with something of
surprise, is to move on from this rhyme
true / you
, reaching forward with a different movement in the rhyme
swift / shift
and its meaning.)

May you always see the lights surrounding you. (Some hear “light” in the singular. As printed in
Lyrics 1962–1985
, it is “lights”, which
avails himself of the sibilant succession in “lights surrounding”. More than one light is more generous, less likely to harden into a one-thing-necessary.) First, may such lights always
be there. Next, may you always perceive that there are such lights that benignly surround you – and that are close at hand, not distant like the stars. And may you always see to it that there
be such lights. Perhaps, without overdoing things and issuing a halo, the lights surrounding you may be lights that you bring with you, no less than those that life may bring to you. To see the
lights surrounding you, especially when you know the truth (which is often not a bright thing to be seen with delight), is never to lose sight of hope.

“And see the lights surrounding you”: this breathes a larger air. But there is a touch, too, of something salutarily unsentimental about the sequence in
which the line figures. For when the phrase “surrounding you” is at once followed by “May you always be courageous”, we may be reminded that what surrounds us
in this life, all too often, is not light but darkness. (So the word “lights” would be touched with an emphasis.) The word “surround” often has its dark side. Dylan has
elsewhere “Surrounded by fakery” and “controversy surrounds him”; danger lurks in the line, “Well, he’s surrounded by pacifists who all want peace”, and
what might have seemed to be a benign surrounding, “He’s surrounded by God’s angels”, turns to be dark: