Dylan's Visions of Sin
Page 11
Dolores moves in time to that of which it speaks, “To a tune that enthralls and entices”, as does Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. Throughout, Dolores sings of sins. Like Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, it insists upon listing – sometimes directly, sometimes to one side. It retails all of her energies, her incitements and excitements, her accoutrements, her weapons, her pockets of resistance well protected at last, moving inclusively through all these with an indeflectibility that runs parallel to Dylan’s “With your . . .”, the obdurate formula of his that sets itself, all through the song, to contain her and her properties, her wares. “With your sheets like metal and your belt like lace”, “With your childhood flames on your midnight rug”, “With your holy medallion which your fingertips fold” . . . Part inventory, part arsenal, these returns of phrase are bound by awe of her and by suspicion of her, alive not only with animation but with animus. The more times the initiatory “With your . . .” recurs, the more pressure it incurs, both as threat and as counter-threat.
Swinburne’s “thy”, in comparison, loses terror in archaism, and it lacks the pointed needling of “With your . . .”. The run within Dolores, 205–67, soon starts to feel of the mill: thy serpents, thy voice, thy life, thy will, thy passion, thy lips, thy rods, thy foemen, thy servant, thy paces, thy pleasure, thy gardens, thy rein, thy porches, thy bosom, thy garments, thy body . . .
But again like the song, Swinburne’s poem has recourse to questions that are stingingly unanswerable:
Who gave thee thy wisdom? what stories
That stung thee, what visions that smote?
Wert thou pure and a maiden, Dolores,
When desire took thee first by the throat?
What bud was the shell of a blossom
That all men may smell to and pluck?
What milk fed thee first at what bosom?
What sins gave thee suck?124
These are no streetcar visions, but they, too, take flesh. Dylan’s song, for its part, is given form by its questions and by their specific shape.
Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?
Who among them do they think could carry you?
* * *
Who among them can think he could outguess you?
Who among them would try to impress you?
* * *
But who among them really wants just to kiss you?
Who among them do you think could resist you?125
* * *
Oh, how could they ever mistake you?
How could they ever, ever persuade you?
– through to the end:
Who among them do you think would employ you?
Oh, who among them do you think could destroy you?
Their credulity is matched only by yours, my dear. (From “do they think” to “do you think”.) “And you wouldn’t know it would happen like this”. Our Lady of Pain, wide-eyed as being credulous for all her worldliness, will meet her match in our gentlemen of pained surprise. “Oh, how could they ever mistake you?”
Dolores would not have to be a source for Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands (leave alone an act of allusion by Dylan) for it to illuminate the song’s art. More than decor is a tissue. Overlappings include (in the order within Dylan’s song, though neglecting singular / plural differences): “mouth”, “times”, “eyes”, “like”, “prayers”, “voice”, “visions”, “flesh”, “face”, “lady”, “prophet”, “man”, “comes”, “[ware]house”, “the sun”, “light”, “moon”, “songs”, “kings”, “kiss”, “know”, “flames”, “midnight”, “mother”, “mouth”, “the dead”, “hide”, “feet”, “child”, “go”, “thief ”, “holy”, “finger[tip]s”, “face”, and “soul”. And Dylan’s “outguess” (“Who among them can think he could outguess you?”) is in tune with Swinburne’s “outsing”, “outlove”, “outface and outlive us”.
What may be revelatory is that these apprehensions of languor and danger so often coincide in their cadences and decadences. Swinburne’s anti-prayer to his anti-madonna, an interrogation that hears no need why it should ever end, may be heard as a prophecy of the Dylan song, a song that has been sensed, in its turn, as blandishingly hypnotic.126 Hypnotic, or even (in the unlovely form of the word that F. R. Leavis liked when disliking Swinburne) hypnoidal.
T. S. Eliot – slightly to his surprise – found himself having to put in a word for Swinburne’s ways with words, his ways with all those words. (Surprise, because Eliot said of his own choice of creative direction, as “a beginner in 1908”: “The question was still: where do we go from Swinburne? and the answer appeared to be, nowhere.”127) Eliot retained his sense of humour within his puzzled respect for Swinburne. I cannot imagine a better evocation than Eliot’s of the kind of art that Dylan exercises in this song (itself unmistakably his and yet nothing like any other achievement of his), a kind that has moved some people to condemnation, Michael Gray for more than one. Gray brands the song “a failure”.
The camera shots, the perspectives: do they create more than wistful but nebulous fragments? Do they add up to any kind of vision, as the whole presentation, duration and solemnity of the song imply that they should? No. Dylan is resting, and cooing nonsense in our ears (very beguilingly, of course).
The only thing that unites the fragments is the mechanical device of the return to the chorus and thus to the title . . . It is, in the end, not a whole song at all but unconnected chippings, and only the poor cement of an empty chorus and a regularity of tune give the illusion that things are otherwise.
In the end, whatever the song’s attractions and clever touches, they have been bundled together, and perhaps a bit complacently, without the unity either of a clear and real theme or of cohesive artistic discipline.
In a footnote added later, Gray tried to square the circle, tried to square his readers by rounding on himself:
When I read this assessment now, I simply feel embarrassed at what a little snob I was when I wrote it. In contrast (and paradoxically), when I go back and listen, after a long gap, to Dylan’s recording, every ardent, true feeling I ever had comes back to me. Decades of detritus drop away and I feel back in communion with my best self and my soul. Whatever the shortcomings of the lyric, the recording itself, capturing at its absolute peak Dylan’s incomparable capacity for intensity of communication, is a masterpiece if ever there was one.128
No one would begrudge Gray his feeling back in communion with his best self and his soul, or want him to be crippled by detritus, but there is something hollow about this claim that an ill-worded song prompted a masterpiece of voicing. For it is only at a very low level of craft that any such distinction – between what the words can do and what the singer can do with them – could operate. A masterpiece of singing needs to be precipitated by an answering masterliness or masterfulness in what is sung. Matthew Arnold repudiated, unanswerably, an inordinate praise of Joseph Addison:
to say of Addison’s style, that “in its varied cadence and subtle ease it has never been surpassed”, seems to me to be going a little too far. One could not say more of Plato’s. Whatever his services to his time, Addison is for us now a writer whose range and force of thought are not considerable enough to make him interesting; and his style cannot equal in varied cadence and subtle ease the style of a man like Plato, because without range and force of thought all the resources of style, whether in cadence or in subtlety, are not and cannot be brought out.
(A Guide to English Literature)
By the same token, all the resources of Dylan’s voice, in varied cadence and subtle ease and much else, are not and cannot be brought out except by (say) range and force of thought – and it is such qualities that are, in Gray’s judgement, missing from a song that shows such “shortcomings” in the writing. I don’t believe that the recording could be “capturing at its absolute peak Dylan’s incomparable capacity for intensity of communication” if what were communicated were compounded of “nonsense” and of “fragments” held t
ogether by “the mechanical device of the return to the chorus”, and if “only the poor cement of an empty chorus and a regularity of tune give the illusion that things are otherwise”. If Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands really is “not a whole song at all but unconnected chippings”, then it could never have been the occasion for an absolute peak of Dylan’s intensity of communication, any more than an ill-written speech in a play could be the occasion for an absolute peak (as against, at best, quite a tour de force) of an actor’s genius.
For it cannot be just a matter of how Dylan sings such a moment as this, however exquisite its timing –
With your silhouette when the sunlight dims
Into your eyes where the moonlight swims
– but of what had swum into his mind and his eyes and his ears by way of wording, wording of an inspiration that is commensurate with the voice. Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands is a masterpiece, but of a kind that Gray – trained as a literary critic in the bracing but narrow convictions of Dr Leavis – was sure to disparage: the Swinburnean. Eliot knew better:
The words of condemnation are words which express his qualities. You may say “diffuse”. But the diffuseness is essential; had Swinburne practised greater concentration his verse would be, not better in the same kind, but a different thing. His diffuseness is one of his glories. That so little material as appears to be employed in The Triumph of Time should release such an amazing number of words, requires what there is no reason to call anything but genius.
What he gives is not images and ideas and music, it is one thing with a curious mixture of suggestions of all three.129
Thy life shall not cease though thou doff it;
Thou shalt live until evil be slain,
And good shall die first, said thy prophet,
Our Lady of Pain.
Did he lie? did he laugh? does he know it,
Now he lies out of reach, out of breath,
Thy prophet, thy preacher, thy poet,
Sin’s child by incestuous Death?
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums
Should I leave them by your gate
Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?
The possessions of the song, irrespective of where exactly they should be left, were retrieved from the warehouse that stores all such evocations – whether by Swinburne or by Keats – of La Belle Dame sans Merci:
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried – “La Belle Dame sans Merci
Thee hath in thrall!”
To a tune that enthrals and entices.
Keats does not tell you where his “pale kings” reigned. Dylan does: “The kings of Tyrus”. Why that particular city? But this can be answered only by first identifying “the sad-eyed prophet” who is held in a dance of tension, throughout the song, with the sad-eyed lady of the lowlands.
And the word of the Lord came unto me, saying Son of man, prophesy against the prophets of Israel that prophesy.
(Ezekiel 13:1)
Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands prophesies against the prophets that prophesy. Ezekiel is sad at what he sees before his eyes:
Because with lies ye have made the heart of the righteous sad, whom I have not made sad; and strengthened the hands of the wicked . . . therefore ye shall see no more vanity.
(Ezekiel 13:22)
Ezekiel is sad-eyed, and the more so because of being forbidden to weep:
And the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Son of man, behold, I take away from thee the desire of thine eyes with a stroke: yet neither shalt thou mourn nor weep, neither shall thy tears run down. Forbear to cry.
(Ezekiel 24:16)
Moved by a poem of mourning and forbearance, Thomas Carlyle said of Tennyson’s Ulysses: “These lines do not make me weep, but there is in me what would fill whole lachrymatories as I read.”130 A lachrymatory is a “vase intended to hold tears; applied by archaeologists to those small phials of glass, alabaster, etc., which are found in ancient Roman tombs” (The Oxford English Dictionary). “Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?”
“Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes”: the phrase “no man” comes more than once in the Book of Ezekiel, and there is a gate nearby. Ezekiel 44:2: “This gate shall be shut, it shall not be opened, and no man shall enter in by it.” (Similarly, 14:15: “that no man may pass through”.) “No man” is heard again and again in the Bible. Isaiah 24:10: “Every house is shut up, that no man may come in. There is a crying for wine in the streets; all joy is darkened, the mirth of the land is gone. In the city is left desolation, and the gate is smitten with destruction.” Isaiah is another of the prophets who toll the words “no man”. As printed in Lyrics 1962–1985, the refrain is always “the sad-eyed prophet says”; in singing, Dylan moves from this to “the sad-eyed prophets say”.
“The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me,” William Blake recorded, straightforwardly, “and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell).
“Moreover the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Son of man, take up a lamentation upon the king of Tyrus” (Ezekiel 28:12). In chapter 26 of Ezekiel, the pride of Tyrus is brought low, for Tyrus will be set “in the low parts of the earth” (26:20), the low lands. A king of kings “shall enter into thy gates” (26:10). And the city’s music will have a dying fall. “I will cause the noise of thy songs to cease; and the sound of thy harps shall be no more heard” (26:13).
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands
Where the sad-eyed prophets say that no man comes
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums
Should I leave them by your gate
Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?
– and then, scarcely waiting:
The kings of Tyrus with their convict list
Are waiting in line for their geranium kiss
Should I wait? At which point we wait only a moment to hear (two lines later) that they are waiting in line, “The kings of Tyrus with their convict list” – Tyrus, the city of Tyre, having been found guilty by the judgement of the Lord (convict: proved or pronounced guilty, as in “convict to eternal damnation”).131
Guilty of what? Of being not only covetous but the cause of covetousness in others, of gratifying the covetous and of profiting from their covetousness. “With your pockets well protected at last”: glad to hear it, but their pockets are in need of protection.
Guilty of what would now be called conspicuous consumption or consumerism, a fast-fed greed that supposes that it can float free of the terrible ancient verb “consume”, a verb that utters its fierce condemnation throughout Ezekiel.
Guilty of such a commodification as exults in its wealth of modifications. Tyrus is “a merchant of the people for many isles” (27:3). This one chapter includes among Tyrus’s world trade splendours its shipboards of fir trees of Senir; cedars of Lebanon to make masts; oaks of Bashan for oars; ivory from Chittim for benches; and fine linen from Egypt for sails. (Where are the Arabian drums?) It deals in silver, iron, tin, lead, and brass; ivory and ebony; emeralds, and fine linen, and coral, and agate; honey, and oil, and balm; wine and wool; iron, cassia, and calamus; precious clothes; lambs, and rams, and goats; all spices, and all precious stones, and gold; blue clothes, and broidered work, and chests of rich apparel. (Rich apparel, precious clothes, blue clothes, a cut above our modern world and “your basement clothes”.) The recurrent tribute in this chapter of Ezekiel, a tribute full of peril, is “. . . were thy merchants”. All this, with a sense that we haven’t even started yet. With your, and with your, and with your.
These chapters of Ezekiel, with an unmisgiving redundancy that apes the extravagance that it sets down, marvel repeatedly at t
he city’s “merchandise” and its “merchants”. Tyrus is “thy merchant by reason of the multitude of all kind of riches; with silver, iron, tin, and lead, they traded in thy fairs” (27:12). But wait, there is a force that can outwait the kings of Tyrus: the Lord, he who speaks, through his prophet Ezekiel, of the doom to come: “And they shall make a spoil of thy riches, and make a prey of thy merchandise” (26:12). The prophet speaks unto the prince of Tyrus, a warning delivered (should I leave it by your gate?) against covetousness and this sin’s compact with its fellow-sin, pride:
with thy wisdom and with thine understanding hast thou gotten thee riches, and hast gotten gold and silver into thy treasures: by thy great wisdom and by thy traffick hast thou increased thy riches, and thine heart is lifted up because of thy riches: therefore thus saith the Lord God; Because thou hast set thine heart as the heart of God; behold, therefore will I bring strangers upon thee, the terrible of the nations. (28:4–7)
With thy wisdom and with thine understanding were these riches gained, whereupon wisdom and understanding forgot the Lord God, and so precipitated their own folly and destruction.
What is Tyrus but one huge warehouse of hubris? Its wares are of every kind. Tyrus is “thy merchant by reason of the multitude of the wares of thy making” (27:16), a lavish phrase that is repeated two verses later, as though itself a gesture of conspicuously luxurious consumption. Thy wares, and the multitude of the wares of thy making: where better to see them all than by looking deep in my eyes, “My warehouse eyes”? Warehouse eyes, taking a turn for the worse, can become whorehouse eyes. “Thou hast opened thy feet to every one that passed by, and multiplied thy whoredoms” (Ezekiel 16:25).
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums
Should I leave them by your gate
I can see how someone can leave his drums by your gate, and I can sense the pulse that throbs from “eyes” to “drums” via the disconcertingly different drums that are eardrums.132 But his eyes? Forget about should he leave them by your gate, how could he? The surrealistic glimpse is of body-parts and parcels.