Other favourites. The rhyme in Talkin’ World War III Blues, “ouch” up against “psychiatric couch”.
I said, “Hold it, Doc, a World War passed through my brain”
He said, “Nurse, get your pad, the boy’s insane”
He grabbed my arm, I said “Ouch!”
As I landed on the psychiatric couch
He said, “Tell me about it”
Ouch: no amount of plump cushioning can remove the pain that psychiatry exists to deal with – and that psychiatry in due course has its own inflictions of. (There’s a moment in the film Panic when the doleful hit-man played by William H. Macy is asked by the shrink as he leaves – after paying $125 for not many minutes – how he is feeling now? “Poor.”) Dylan’s word “pad” plays its small comic part; to write on, not like the padded couch (not padded enough: Ouch!) or the padded cell. Ouch / couch is a rhyme that is itself out to grab you, and that knows the difference between “Tell me about it” as a soothing professional solicitation and as a cynical boredom. Moreover, rhyme is a to-and-fro, an exchange, itself a form of this “I said” / “He said” business or routine.
Another rhyme that has spirit: “nonchalant” against “It’s your mind that I want” in Rita May:
Rita May, Rita May
You got your body in the way
You’re so damned nonchalant
It’s your mind that I want
You don’t have to believe him (I wouldn’t, if I were you, Rita May), but “nonchalant” arriving at “want” is delicious, because nonchalant is so undesiring of her, so cool, so not in heat.
Or there’s the rhyme in Mozambique of “Mozambique” with “cheek to cheek” (along with “cheek” cheekily rhyming with “cheek” there, a perfect fit). There’s always something strange about place names, or persons’ names, rhyming, for they don’t seem to be words exactly, or at any rate are very different kinds of word from your usual word.55
My favourite of all Dylan’s rhymes is another that turns upon a place name, the rhyme of “Utah” with “me ‘Pa’”, as if “U–” in Utah were spelt y o u:
Build me a cabin in Utah
Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout
Have a bunch of kids who call me “Pa”
That must be what it’s all about
(Sign on the Window)
That’s not a rhyme of “tah” and “pa”, it’s a rhyme of “Utah” and “me ‘Pa’” – like “Me Tarzan, You Jane”. And it has a further dimension of sharp comedy in that Dylan has taken over for his peaceful pastoral purposes a military drill, words to march by – you can hear them being chanted in Frederick Wiseman’s documentary Basic Training (1971):
And now I’ve got
A mother-in-law
And fourteen kids
That call me “Pa”
Yet there is pathos as well as comedy in Sign on the Window, for the Utah stanza is the closing one of a song of loss that begins “Sign on the window says ‘Lonely’”. But then “lonely” is perhaps the loneliest word in the language. For the only rhyme for “lonely” is “only”. Compounding the lonely, Dylan sings it so that it finds its direction home:
You’ve gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it
(Like a Rolling Stone)
Dylan knows the strain that has to be felt if you want even to be in the vicinity of finding another rhyme for “lonely”:
Sign on the window says “Lonely”
Sign on the door said “No Company Allowed”
Sign on the street says “Y’ Don’t Own Me”
Sign on the porch says “Three’s A Crowd”
Sign on the porch says “Three’s A Crowd”
(Sign on the Window)
Lonely / Y’ Don’t Own Me. No Company Allowed? Company is inherent in rhyming, where one word keeps company with another. And rhyme, like any metaphor, is itself a threesome, though not a crowd: tenor, vehicle, and the union of the two that constitutes the third thing, metaphor.
Arthur Hallam, Tennyson’s friend in whose memory In Memoriam was written, referred to rhyme as “the recurrence of termination”. A fine paradox, for how can termination recur? Can this really be the end when there is a rhyme to come?
Rhyme has been said to contain in itself a constant appeal to Memory and Hope. This is true of all verse, of all harmonized sound; but it is certainly made more palpable by the recurrence of termination. The dullest senses can perceive an identity in that, and be pleased with it; but the partial identity, latent in more diffused resemblances, requires, in order to be appreciated, a soul susceptible of musical impression. The ancients disdained a mode of pleasure, in appearance so little elevated, so ill adapted for effects of art; but they knew not, and with their metrical harmonies, perfectly suited, as these were, to their habitual moods of feeling, they were not likely to know the real capacities of this apparently simple and vulgar combination.56
Rhyme contains this appeal to Memory and Hope (is a container for it, and contains it as you might contain your anger, your laughter, or your drink) because when you have the first rhyme-word you are hoping for the later one, and when you have the later one, you remember the promise that was given earlier and is now fulfilled. Responsibilities on both sides, responsively granted.
So rhyme is intimately involved with lyric – Swinburne insisted on this, back in 1867: “Rhyme is the native condition of lyric verse in English: a rhymeless lyric is a maimed thing.” There are few good unrhymed lyrics of any kind because of the strong filament between lyricism, hope, and memory.57
Dylan loves rhyming on the word “memory” (and rhyme is one of the best aids to memory, is the mnemonic device: “Thirty days hath September, / April, June, and November . . .”). The line in Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, “With your sheet-metal memory of Cannery Row”, rings true because of the memory within this song that takes you back to the phrase “your sheets like metal”, and because of the curious undulation that can be heard, and is memorable, in “memory” and “Cannery”. And Cannery Row is itself a memory, since the allusion to John Steinbeck’s novel has to be a memory that the singer shares with his listeners, or else it couldn’t work as an allusion.
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.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow
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:
I march in the parade of liberty
But as long as I love you, I’m not free
– as was John Milton when he protested against irresponsible protesters:
That bawl for freedom in their senseless mood,
And still revolt when truth would set them free.
Licence they mean when they cry liberty.
(Sonnet
XII)
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:
Just like that bird am I in loss of time
Whene’er I venture on the stream of rhyme
(To Charles Cowden Clarke)61
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):
With your mercury mouth in the missionary times
And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes
And your silver cross, and your voice like chimes
Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?
“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:
The matter shall be grave, the numbers loose and free.
It shall not keep one setled pace of time,
In the same tune it shall not always chime,
Nor shall each day just to his neighbour rhime.
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:
Well my heart’s in the Highlands wherever I roam
That’s where I’ll be when I get called home
The wind, it whispers to the buckeyed trees in rhyme
Well my heart’s in the Highlands
I can only get there one step at a time
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:
His sheep seem’d to come from it as they stept,
One and then one, along their walks, and kept
Their changing feet in flicker all the time
And to their feet the narrow bells gave rhyme.
(Richard)
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:
You’ve had enough hatred
Your bones are breaking, can’t find nothing sacred
(Ye Shall Be Changed)
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:
I’m going back to New York City
I do believe I’ve had enough
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.
I started out on burgundy
But soon hit the harder stuff
Everybody said they’d stand behind me
When the game got rough
But the joke was on me
There was nobody even there to call my bluff
I’m going back to New York City
I do believe I’ve had enough
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:
So long, New York
Howdy, East Orange
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 tha
t the poetical inversion is not lapsed into, but called for:
He hangs in shades the orange bright,
Like golden lamps in a green night.
(Bermudas)
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:
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