Why am I, though touched by this, not persuaded by it? Because when Ross says “You were reminded that the ‘hotel society gathering’ was a Spinsters’ Ball”, his word “reminded” is specious. At no point in Hattie Carroll is there any allusion to this. You can have heard the song a thousand times and not call this to mind, since Dylan does not call it into play. Is Ross really maintaining that the performance alluded to a detail of the newspaper story that never made it into the song, which doesn’t say anything about a Ball, Spinsters’ or Bachelors’? And that such an allusion would then simply validate a thoroughgoing waltz?
Dylan must be honoured for honouring his responsibilities towards Hattie Carroll, and this partly because of what it may entail in the way of sacrifice by him. His art, in such a dedication to historical facts that are not of his making, needs to set limits (not too expanded) to its own rights in honouring hers. This, too, is a matter of justice.
Wordsworth famously recorded that “every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed: so it has been, so will it continue to be”.32 T. S. Eliot, sceptical of romanticism, offered a reminder, that “to be original with the minimum of alteration, is sometimes more distinguished than to be original with the maximum of alteration”.33
But is Dylan a poet? For him, no problem.
Yippee! I’m a poet, and I know it
Hope I don’t blow it
(I Shall Be Free No. 10)
Is he a poet? And is this a question about his achievement, and how highly to value it, or about his choice of medium or rather media, and what to value this as?
The poetry magazine Agenda had a questionnaire bent upon rhyme. Since Dylan is one of the great rhymesters of all time, I hoped that there might be something about him. There was: a grudge against “the accepted badness of rhyme in popular verse, popular music, etc. A climate in which, say, Bob Dylan is given a moment’s respect as a poet is a climate in which anything goes.” (To give him but a moment’s respect would indeed be ill judged.) This is snobbery – I know, I know, there is such a thing as inverted snobbery – and it’s ill written.34 (“A climate in which anything goes”? Climate? Goes?)
The case for denying Dylan the title of poet could not summarily, if at all, be made good by any open-minded close attention to the words and his ways with them. The case would need to begin with his medium, or rather with the mixed-media nature of song, as of drama. On the page, a poem controls its timing there and then.
Dylan is a performer of genius. So he is necessarily in the business (and the game) of playing his timing against his rhyming. The cadences, the voicing, the rhythmical draping and shaping don’t (needless to sing) make a song superior to a poem, but they do change the hiding-places of its power. T. S. Eliot showed great savvy in maintaining that “Verse, whatever else it may or may not be, is itself a system of punctuation; the usual marks of punctuation themselves are differently employed.”35 A song is a different system of punctuation again. Dylan himself used the word “punctuate” in a quiet insistence during an interview in 1978. Ron Rosenbaum made his pitch – “It’s the sound that you want” – and Dylan agreed and then didn’t: “Yeah, it’s the sound and the words. Words don’t interfere with it. They – they – punctuate it. You know, they give it purpose. [Pause].”
“They – they – punctuate it”: this is itself dramatic punctuation, though perfectly colloquial (and Dylan went on to say “Chekhov is my favorite writer”).36 Words: “they give it purpose. [Pause]”, the train of thought being that punctuation, a system of pointing, gives point.
Not just the beauty but the force will be necessarily in the details, incarnate in a way of putting it. So that any general praises of Dylan’s art are sure to miss what matters most about it: that it is not general, but highly and deeply individual, particular. This, while valuing human commonalty – “Of joy in widest commonalty spread”, in Wordsworth’s line. Joy, and grief, too.
Larkin, reviewing jazz in 1965, took it on himself to nick a Dylan album. (Hope I’m not out of line.)
I’m afraid I poached Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” (CBS) out of curiosity and found myself well rewarded. Dylan’s cawing, derisive voice is probably well suited to his material – I say probably because much of it was unintelligible to me – and his guitar adapts itself to rock (“Highway 61”) and ballad (“Queen Jane”) admirably. There is a marathon “Desolation Row” which has an enchanting tune and mysterious, possibly half-baked words.37
“Half-baked” is overdone. But “well rewarded” pays some dues.
A poem of Larkin’s has the phrase “Love Songs” in its title and is about songs, while itself proceeding not as a song but as a poem. For when you see the poem on the page, you can see that it is in three stanzas, and you could not at once hear – though you might know – such a thing when in the presence of a song. Larkin, we have already heard, thought that “poetry readings grew up on a false analogy with music”: “false because people can read words, whereas they can’t read music”. But this poem of his contemplates someone who used to be able to read music and play it on the piano, and who can still, in age, look at the sheet music and re-learn how it is done.
LOVE SONGS IN AGE
She kept her songs, they took so little space,
The covers pleased her:
One bleached from lying in a sunny place,
One marked in circles by a vase of water,
One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her,
And coloured, by her daughter –
So they had waited, till in widowhood
She found them, looking for something else, and stood
Relearning how each frank submissive chord
Had ushered in
Word after sprawling hyphenated word,
And the unfailing sense of being young
Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein
That hidden freshness sung,
That certainty of time laid up in store
As when she played them first. But, even more,
The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love,
Broke out, to show
Its bright incipience sailing above,
Still promising to solve, and satisfy,
And set unchangeably in order. So
To pile them back, to cry,
Was hard, without lamely admitting how
It had not done so then, and could not now.
A widow comes across the love songs that she had played on the piano when she was young; how painfully they remind her of the large promises once made by time and even more by love.38
That sentence exercises a summary injustice. It is not much more than perfunctory gossip, whereas Larkin’s three sentences are a poem. The poet makes these dry bones live – or rather, since he is not a witch-doctor and the poem is not a zombie, he makes us care that these bones lived. “An ordinary sorrow of man’s life”: that is how Wordsworth spoke of his lonely sufferer (in widowhood, likewise?) in her ruined cottage. Larkin, too, redeems the ordinary.
His is not a poem simply about life’s disappointments, but about realizing these disappointments. He reminds us that to realize is to make real. Here are three sentences that shrink as life cannot but shrink. From 106 words to 30 to 23. The first sentence has all the amplitude of the remembered past into which it moves. It has world enough and time, with lovingly remembered details calmly patterned (“One bleached . . . One marked . . . One mended”), a world “set in order”. It flows on, and its own words remark on what they are re-living – they “spread out”, they manifest a sense of “time laid up in store”. The first sentence can take its time – time is not doing the taking.
But from this leisure the second sentence dwindles. It begins with “But”, unlikely to be a reassuring start here, and instead of what is lovingly recalled, we have love itself. Instead of the actually loved, in its inevitable imperfection (the unmentioned
husband, the mentioned daughter), there is the daunting abstraction, love. Its brilliance is a “glare”, too bright to be ignored, somehow pitiless in its “sailing above”. And if love “broke out” in those songs, here, too, there is something of an ominous suggestion. Light breaks out, but so do wars and plagues. Love, too, can break hearts, or cannot but break hearts if we think of all that the abstraction love promised.
Then the further shrinkage into the last sentence, briefer, bleaker. Instead of the abstraction of the middle sentence, which was large and metaphorical and aerial, we reach a stony abstraction – no metaphors, no details, no grand words like “incipience”. Simply pain generalized, compacted into the plainest words in the language. Earlier the poem had opened its mouth and sung; in the end it bites its lip.
From copious memories recalling what promised to be a copious future, through high hopes, down to severe humbling. From a romantic compound, “spring-woken”, through a laconically dry one, “much-mentioned”, down to uncompounded plainness. From “a tidy fit”, through the promise to “set unchangeably in order”, down to “pile them back”.
Yet this is poetry, not prose, so it exists not only as sentences but as lines and stanzas. Larkin is a master of all such patterning. The pattern does not impose itself upon the sense, it releases and enforces the sense. See how he uses line-endings and stanza-endings – “see how”, because this is much more possible than “hear how”. Larkin’s point about “the disappearance of stanza shape” when you hear a poem read aloud can be extended to include our being able to see the valuable counterpointing of stanza shape and, say, sentence shape. A song’s stanzas are less concerned to stand, more to move.
Love Songs in Age has no stanza that is self-contained. There is a marked visual pause in passing from the first to the second stanza:
So they had waited, till in widowhood
She found them, looking for something else, and stood
Relearning how each frank submissive chord
Had ushered in
Word after sprawling hyphenated word,
(“Sprawling hyphenated”, because the sheet-music sets the words, subdivided and stretched out, below the musical notes, so Larkin can remind us of the different systems of punctuation that are poetical and sheet-musical.) The visual pause after “stood” is all the more effective because in the first six lines of the poem the lines have been placidly end-stopped, tidily congruous, the units of sense at one with (rather than played against) the units of rhythm and rhyme.
Then, with “stood”, a powerful pause enforces itself – the poem pauses, rapt, just as the widow pauses here, rapt into memory. Swelling in the second stanza is a change from the equable line-endings of the first. Instead of such a complete unit as “The covers pleased her”, there is the line “Had ushered in”, which has to move on from its predecessor and to usher in its successor. The ebullience of this middle stanza spreads out over its line-endings, the clauses proliferate and spill over (“. . . in / . . . wherein”). And then, at the very end of the stanza, a sudden drastic check:
That certainty of time laid up in store
As when she played them first. But, even more,
The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love,
With a harsh gracelessness, the second sentence is imperatively beginning, tugging across the cadences (and, duly, demanding a pause). If the opening of this second sentence, “But”, is threateningly ungraceful, how much more is the third: “So” thrust out with grim emphasis, cutting across the order that immediately precedes it, insisting doggedly on the truth:
Still promising to solve, and satisfy,
And set unchangeably in order. So
To pile them back, to cry,
Was hard, without lamely admitting how
It had not done so then, and could not now.
The point of running one stanza into the next is more than to create pregnant pauses, more even than to imitate the musical interweaving of love songs. It is to create the austere finality of the conclusion. Only once in this poem does a full stop coincide with the end of a line or with the end of a stanza. This establishes the fullness of this stop, the assurance that Larkin has concluded his poem and not just run out of things to say. The same authoritative finality is alive in the rhyme scheme. Larkin’s pattern (abacbdcdd) allows of a clinching couplet only at the end of a stanza. He then prevents any such clinching at the end of the first two stanzas by having very strong enjambment, spilling across the line-endings. The result is that the very last couplet is the first in the poem to release what we have been waiting for, the decisive authority of a couplet, rhyme sealing rhyme in a final settlement. But also with a rhythmical catch in the throat, a brief stumble before “lamely”: “Was hard, without lamely admitting how” is aline that cannot move briskly, has to feel lamed, because of the speed-bump between “without” and “lamely”. And then an inexorable ending, here and now: “and could not now”. The poem focuses time, much as time focuses itself for us in the dentist’s chair into a concentrated “now”.
The conclusive couplet isn’t the only subtly meaningful rhyming. The gentle disyllabic, or double, rhymes of the first stanza (pleased her / seized her, water / daughter) create softer cadences, all the more so because of the -er association among themselves. It is against this softer light that the glare of the last stanza stands out, its rhymes bleak. Only one rhyme in the poem is inexact, and with good reason: chord / word. That the words of life do not quite fit its music is one of the things that the poem knows.
Love Songs in Age is far more than a five-finger exercise in the manner of the poet whom Larkin most admired, Thomas Hardy. Like the best of Hardy, the best of Larkin lives in the context of an imagined life. The widow’s story is there, between the poem’s lines, treated obliquely and unsentimentally. The appeal is to experiences already understood (“That hidden freshness”, “That certainty”, “That much-mentioned brilliance”). “She kept her songs, they took so little space” – how much of an everyday sadness is here, of possessions sold off, a home relinquished, the life lived in what Larkin elsewhere calls (in Mr Bleaney) a “hired box”. The songs, she kept – the piano, she could not (though this, too, has to be glimpsed between the lines, especially in “stood / / Relearning . . .”). Self-possession is bound to be so much involved with possessions.
Yet the end of the poem makes a point rather different from the expected. It doesn’t say that she cried or wanted to cry, but that it was hard to cry without admitting how huge the failure of love had been in comparison with any triumphs of love. Not hard to cry, heaven knows, but hard to cry without dissolving, hard to admit any cause for grief without admitting too shatteringly much. “Admitting”: in its unostentatious truth-telling, it is a perfect Larkin word. Not that memory is merely unkind. When we look back across the whole poem, we realize that it was not only in the literal physical sense that “She kept her songs”. Meantime, the poem at least has set something unchangeably in order.
Such, at any rate, is my reading of the poem. To hear the poem read aloud, even by the poet himself, is a different story. Yet the story turns upon the same sad pertinent fact: that the only rhyme that is not a true rhyme, the only one that is a rhyme only to the eye and not to the ear, is chord / word. For ever refusing to fit, to be set perfectly in order. There on the page, like sheet-music that both is and is not the real thing.
Dylan said of Lay, Lady, Lay: “The song came out of those first four chords. I filled it up with the lyrics then.” And elsewhere he said something that suggests the economy that characterizes such a poem as Love Songs in Age: “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.”39
Love Songs in Age is a poem that imagines songs within it, and shows us what this might mean, humanly. I don’t know of a counterpart to this in Dylan: that is, a song that imagines poems within it, as against bearing them in mind. Poe
ts like Verlaine and Rimbaud, Dylan is happy to acknowledge. But when it comes to Dylan and the sister-arts, it is, naturally, the traditional sister-art of butter sculpture that most engages his interest, as does the traditional relation between the artist and his brother, the critic.
look you asshole – tho i might be nothing but
a butter sculptor, i refuse to go on working
with the idea of your praising as my reward –
like what are your credentials anyway? excpt for
talking about all us butter sculptors, what else
do you do? do you know what it feels like to
make some butter sculpture? do you know what
it feels like to actually ooze that butter around
& create something of fantastic worth? you said
that my last year’s work “The King’s Odor” was
great & then you say i havent done anything as
great since – just who the hell are you talking to
anyway? you must have something to do in your
real life – i understand that you praised the piece
you saw yesterday entitled “The Monkey Taster”
about which you said meant “a nice work of butter
carved into the shape of a young man who likes
only african women” you are an idiot – it doesnt
mean that at all . . . i hereby want nothing to do
with your hangups – i really dont care what you think
of my work as i now know you dont understand it
anyway . . . i must go now – i hve this new hunk of
margarine waiting in the bathtub – yes i said
MARGARINE & next week i just might decide to use
cream cheese –40
But, butter sculpture apart, it is famously the art of film that Dylan most likes to stage or to screen within his songs. And the greatest of such is Brownsville Girl.41 It starts Well.
Well, there was this movie I seen one time
About a man riding ’cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 3