Dylan's Visions of Sin (7 page)

As for rhyming on “forget”:
True Love Tends to Forget
, aware that rhyming depends on memory, has “forget” begin in the arms of “regret”, and end, far
out, in “Tibet”. The Dylai Lama. And
True Love Tends to Forget
rhymes “again” and “when”, enacting what the song is talking about, for rhyme is an
again / when
. And rhyme may be a kind of loving, two things becoming one, yet not losing their own identity.

Or there is Dylan’s loving to rhyme, as all the poets have loved to do, on the word “free”.
If Dogs Run Free
does little else than gambol with the rhyme (but what a good
deal that proves to be). Or there are “free” and “memory” in
Mr. Tambourine Man
.

There the word “free” can conjure up a freedom that is not irresponsible,
and “memory” asks you not to forget, but to have in
mind – whether consciously or not – another element of the rhyme: trustworthy memory.

Dylan wouldn’t have had to learn these stops and steps of the mind from previous poets, since the effect would be the same whether the parallel is a source or an analogue.
⁵⁸
But Dylan is drawing on the same sources of power, when he sings in
Abandoned Love
:

– as was John Milton when he protested against irresponsible protesters:

Licence is different from liberty, don’t forget – and Milton makes this real to us, by rhyming “free” with “liberty”. Licence is not rhymed
by Milton (though it grates against “senseless”), and is sullen about rhyming at all. Does it rhyme? In a word, no? But whatever Milton’s sense of the matter, my sense is that he
would never have sunk to poetic licence, though Dylan could well have risen to it.

What did Milton himself mean by “Licence they mean when they cry liberty”? That true freedom acknowledges responsibility. The choice is always between the good kind of bonds and the
bad kind, not the choice of some chimerical world that is without bonds. That would be licence. D. H. Lawrence warned against idolizing freedom, happily alive to rhyming in his prose even as poetry
is: “Thank God I’m not free, any more than a rooted tree is free.”

Milton described his choice of blank verse for his epic as “an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome
and modern bondage of rhyming”. But he knew that there are such things as good bonds, and he valued rhymes all the more because he knew that their effect could be all the greater if not every
single line had to rhyme. T. S. Eliot began the final paragraph of his
Reflections on “Vers Libre”
(1917): “And this liberation from rhyme might be as well a liberation of
rhyme. Freed from its exacting task of supporting lame verse, it could be applied with greater effect where it is most needed.”
⁵⁹

A particular pleasure attaches to rhyming on the word “rhyme”.
⁶⁰
Keats:

The beginning of
Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
is superb in what it does with its first three rhyme-words, as simple as can be in the mystery of such spells, three by
three, with the triple rhymes interlacing assonantally with the triple “like” (
eyes like / like rhymes / like chimes
):

“Times”, “rhymes”, and “chimes” are rhymes because they are chimes that come several times. (“And your eyes like smoke”: a chime
from
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
.) “Your prayers like rhymes”: rhymes being like prayers because of what it is to trust in an answer to one’s prayer. With his voicing, Dylan
does what the seventeenth-century poet Abraham Cowley did with
different rhythmical weightings for this same triplet of rhymes in his
Ode: Upon Liberty
. “If
life should a well-ordered poem be”, then it should avoid monotony:

Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
uses the rhyme on rhyme poignantly.
You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go
uses it ruefully, in singing of “Crickets talking back and
forth in rhyme”. For all rhyme is a form of talking back and forth, something that crickets are in a particularly good position to understand, rubbing back and forth, stridulating away.
“I could stay with you forever and never realize the time”: that is Dylan’s rhyming line upon rhyme, and this is the way in which the loving thought is realized.
“Forever” is so entirely positive, but then so, on this occasion, is the negative word with which it rhymes, “never”.

Even as a yearning is realized – which is not the same as a hope being realized in actuality – in
Highlands
:

The whisper here rises to a determination when “time” comes, in due time, to consummate the rhyme with “rhyme”; and furthermore when “roam”
finds itself not only rhyming with “home” (“roam” takes you away – “wherever I roam” – but “home” calls you home again) but when
“roam” is rotated into “rhyme”, a tender turn. But then rhyme, too, works “one step at a time”, the feet being metrical. Hopkins:

Like Hopkins, Dylan fits together rhymes in favour of rhyme. In the seventeenth century Ben Jonson notoriously, in mock self-contradiction, gave the world
A Fit of
Rhyme against Rhyme
. Dylan is well aware of the hostility that rhymes can evoke, in readers (or listeners), and between the rhymes themselves. For although there is a place where rhymes can
whisper (think of it as the Highlands), there are ugly places where rhyme needs to grate hideously, to make you yearn to break free, to change:

Dylan can be a master of war. The friction of “hatred” against “sacred” sets your teeth on edge, or makes you grit them. “You know Satan sometimes
comes as a man of peace.”

Rhyme can give shape to individual lines and to a song or poem as a whole, which is where rhyme-schemes come in. A change in the rhyming pattern can intimate that the song or the poem is having
to draw to a close, is fulfilling its arc. Life is short, art is long: true, but art is not interminable. Think back to early days with Dylan’s endings, and to how he chose to end Just Like
Tom Thumb’s Blues. The last two lines:

End of song. And it feels like a due ending for the perfectly simple reason that, in this final verse (one that, in closing, starts out “I started out”), all the
lines (odd and even) rhyme – something that is not true of any previous verses.

The other verses rhyme only the even lines. You don’t have to be conscious of it, but it works on your ear to tell you that there’s
something different about this final verse: all its lines are rhyming away. Whether or not you consciously record this, you register it. An ending, not a stopping. And (“I’m going back
to New York City”) it has an allusive comic relation to his first album, where the first of his own two songs, Talking New York, has as its ending:

Why was that such a wittily wry ending? First, because of the Orange as against an apple. New York is the Big Apple, so there’s a subterranean semantic rhyming going on,
sense rather than sound, Big Apple versus East Orange. But the ending depends, too, upon the fact that “orange” famously is a word that does not have a rhyme in English. Dylan was asked
once about this:

Do you have a rhyme for “orange”?

“What, I didn’t hear that.”

A rhyme for “orange”.

“A-ha . . . just a rhyme for ‘orange’?”

It is true you were censored for singing on the “Ed Sullivan Show”?

“I’ll tell you the rhyme in a minute.”
⁶²

Apple
, on the other hand, is easy as pie. Dylan uses the awry feeling at the particular part of such a blues song, where the last throw-away moment throws away rhyme,
and goes in instead for a sloping-off movement. “Howdy, East Orange”. So long, rhyme.

The reason that Andrew Marvell’s lines about the orange are so delectable is that the poetical inversion is not lapsed into, but called for:

The inversion of “the orange bright” is justified by there not being a rhyme for orange anyway, and if Marvell had said, “He hangs in
shades the bright orange”, he’d have had to set out for a mountain range a long way from Bermuda. (That’s right, Blorenge, in Wales.) Even the great rhymester Robert Browning
never ventured to end a line of verse with the word “orange”.

There’s a deft comedy that Dylan avails himself of here, in making something from the simple fact that some words do and other words don’t rhyme. True, the voice that exults in
forcing “hers” into rhyming rapport with “yours” (“I don’t wanna be hers, I wanna be yers”) is one that never rests when it comes to wresting and
wrestling, but there are limits . . .

Emotionally Yours
: the phrase signs off, the usual formula unusually worded and unusually used. The song takes the great commonplaces of rhyme and makes them not quite what you would have
expected. But then love is like that in its comings and goings. The first rhyme in
Emotionally Yours
is
find me / remind me
– itself a reminder that every rhyme is an act of
finding and of reminding (that’s what a rhyme is, after all). Later there is rock
me / lock me
, this
not
locked into position (no feeling of being trapped), and with “rock
me” – “Come baby, rock me” – having the lilt of a lullaby, not the drive of rock. It’s a song about how someone can be indeed “emotionally yours” but
not yours in every way (not domestically, for instance – not available for marriage, for who knows what reasons?). Every verse signs off, as if in a letter at once intimate, cunning, and
formal, “be emotionally yours”. Dylan sings it with a full sense that it is a deep pastiche of a good old old-time song, with stately exaggerated movements of his voice, especially at
the rhymes – and he makes it new.

And how does this song,
A Valediction: forbidding Mourning
, like John Donne’s great poem about absence, end so that we are “satisfied”? Satisfied that though the song
ends, the gratitude doesn’t. Again it’s the rhyming that realizes the song’s story. After a clear pattern:

– after these:

Shake me / take me
: this is unexpected only in the benign impulse recognized in “shake” there. And
unraveling / traveling
: this is unexpected only in
its sudden twinge of darkness. “As he lay unravelling in the agony of death, the standers-by could hear him say softly, ‘I have seen the glories of the
world.’”
⁶³
But
hold me / help me
? How easily “Come baby, hold me” could have slid equably into “come baby, fold
me”, with “my arms are open wide” simply waiting there to do the folding. But “Come baby, hold me, come baby, help me”: the rotating of “hold me” into that
unexpected calm plea, at once central and at a tangent, “help me”. The turn has the poignancy of Christina Rossetti, who thanks the Lord
For a Mercy Received
: