ON A NIGHT LIKE THIS
On a night like this
So glad you came around
Hold on to me so tight
And heat up some coffee grounds
We got much to talk about
And much to reminisce
It sure is right
On a night like this
On a night like this
So glad you’re here to stay
Hold on to me, pretty miss
Say you’ll never go away to stray
Run your fingers down my spine
And bring me a touch of bliss
It sure feels right
On a night like this
On a night like this
I can’t get any sleep
The air is so cold outside
And the snow’s so deep
Build a fire, throw on logs
And listen to it hiss
And let it burn, burn, burn, burn
On a night like this
Put your body next to mine
And keep me company
There is plenty a room for all
So please don’t elbow me
Let the four winds blow
Around this old cabin door
If I’m not too far off
I think we did this once before
There’s more frost on the window glass
With each new tender kiss
But it sure feels right
On a night like this
The song is not at all cryptic, which makes Dylan’s comment on it doubly so: “I think this comes off as sort of like a drunk man who’s temporarily sober. This is not my type of song. I think I just did it to do it” (Biograph). Assuredly tentative, this, with “I think” and “I think” and “as sort of like”.
If I’m not too far off
I think we did this once before
But maybe I am too far off. Anyway (since I just did it to do it) I think I’ll not do this again. Not my type? Not my type of song.
Is he questioning the song, to take part in some kind of quiz? He clearly catches the heady unclear mixture of inebriation and sobriety that is in the vinous air of On a Night Like This, as well as what this does to one’s sense of time (“temporarily”?). What we wait for all through the song is the rhyme for which the opening line yearns, “On a night like this”, this line that both opens and closes the first three verses, though not the last verse, which, throwing open a window, throws the refrain-line to the winds (instead: “Let the four winds blow”). “On a night like this” can’t wait – except that it can, since it just has to – for the word “kiss”, the rhyme that is then enfolded within all the playful foreplay (“Run your fingers down my spine / And bring me a touch of bliss”: a nice touch, that) rising to the last verse:
Let the four winds blow
Around this old cabin door
If I’m not too far off
I think we did this once before
There’s more frost on the window glass
With each new tender kiss
But it sure feels right
On a night like this
At the start it looked likely that the rhyming would establish the title-refrain within a particular setting. “On a night like this” opens and closes the first verse, where it rhymes with the sixth line, “And much to reminisce”. (Entirely at ease, this use of “reminisce”, not as an intransitive verb – which is how it operates these days– but as transitive, as in the old days that we now reminisce, or reminisce about.) The rhyme-pattern, though, then comes to enjoy its freedom, especially when it comes to expanding and contracting. The triple rhyme of the first verse, this / reminisce / this, is followed by an expansion as though to the four winds: this / miss / bliss / this, a pretty stroke that is the consequence of the newly arrived further rhyme, “Hold on to me, pretty miss”. The third verse reverts to the triple rhyme (this / hiss / this), only to be followed again by a change, though this time in the opposite direction: not an expansion but a contraction in the last verse, twofold only, kiss / this. Finis. A contraction, were it not that “kiss” is a consummation devoutly to be wished, and the more so as one fertile figure of speech for a rhyme is a kiss.180 Furthermore, like expansion, contraction is of the nature of love and of this song. Take, for instance, the penultimate line of the refrain. In the first verse, “It sure is right”. In the second verse, “It sure feels right”, which both expands (feeling right is a larger truth than being right, right?) and contracts (come on, being right is a larger truth than feeling right – am I right or am I right?). The song stands by the claim for feelings, and then has – in the final verse – one word to add: “But it sure feels right”. Intriguing, this final “But”, in the lover’s train of thought or rather of feeling:
There’s more frost on the window glass
With each new tender kiss
But it sure feels right
On a night like this
“But”, not “So” it sure feels right? Anyway, we are yielding to our passions all right, but that feels right. Just this once? “I think we did this once before”: a jovial insult (can you really not remember that, reminisce that?) that reminds me of how Shakespeare’s lovers ribbed one another. Lorenzo and Jessica not only have much to talk about, they talk to one another. The song, though, is the sound of one man clapping (“So glad you came around”, in both senses of came around), and it needed to do what it very well does: that is, build in a good many recognitions of the person spoken to, the person he’s grateful to, the person who will not take amiss the jaunty joshing. The warmth within the room is thanks to all the logs but also thanks to our heat in love – yet nothing steamy or misty. (There is pure heat playing against the crisp clarity of the frost on the panes.) And why is there no “It sure feels right” in the third verse? Because what takes its place is such a solid core of heat, such delight as stands in need of no validation or certification:
On a night like this
I can’t get any sleep
The air is so cold outside
And the snow’s so deep
Build a fire, throw on logs
And listen to it hiss
And let it burn, burn, burn, burn
On a night like this
“I can’t get any sleep”: we quite understand, and yet the claim is up to the same tricks as the one in If You Gotta Go, Go Now, opposite direction though it might seem to suggest:
It’s just that I’ll be sleepin’ soon
An’ it’ll be too dark for you to find the door
But then one of the qualities that may distinguish desire from lust is that lust has no time for humour, whereas On a Night Like This likes fooling around, whether it be “heat up some coffee grounds”, or
There is plenty a room for all
So please don’t elbow me
“Don’t crowd me, lady” (Please, Mrs. Henry), but don’t misunderstand me, pretty miss:
Put your body next to mine
And keep me company
There is plenty a room for all
So please don’t elbow me
Good company, he is, well worth keeping. And the humour is the vivacious evidence that there is someone else in the room, someone who is complimented by the spirited jokes and complemented by the trustworthy body.
Anger
Only a Pawn in Their Game
It need not take much courage to take a life. “A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers’ blood”. That the killer was a skulker is enough to make your blood boil.
Medgar Evers (1925–63) was Mississippi’s first African-American field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He was an active organizer of voter-registration drives until he was murdered by a sniper.181
But the word “sniper”, with its possibility of solitary courage in military combat,182 is in danger of flattering the lurker. Evers’ killer was no soldier. A pawn is a foot-soldier (this is what the word means), but a foot-sold
ier might find himself called upon to show courage in open warfare.
It took courage in Dylan, back in the summer of 1963 only a month after the murder of Medgar Evers, to say of the white killer – to sing of the white killer, there in front of a Mississippi audience that was mostly black – “But he can’t be blamed”. Dylan understood the anger that he might invite by not sounding angry enough. He was aware of how he might himself be blamed for not blaming. A society is indicted, and with an anger that is all the more forcefully contained, because the killer, “he can’t be blamed”. And then this is averred again, in the second, third, and fourth verses; in these, the wording changes to something that is in its way uneducated and so might be heard as sympathizing with the poor white (not condescending, because elsewhere in quite different Dylan songs there are similar moments when the demotic meets the democratic): “But it ain’t him to blame”. It is not until the final verse that there is no longer any talk of blaming or of not blaming. But then at this conclusive stage the scene is set in the imagined future, with the killer himself duly in his grave, and with the words that have constituted the climax of every verse becoming – in the final end – not only his epitome but his epitaph:
His epitaph plain:
Only a pawn in their game
A pawn is pressed to believe that the game is his, too, not just their game, and in a way he is right since it isn’t for him to pretend that a pawn is no piece of the action. But it may be for someone else – in the spirit of Robert Lowell’s cry “Pity the monsters!”183 – to grant him the chilling charity “But it ain’t him to blame”. He being a dupe an’ all.
A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers’ blood
A finger fired the trigger to his name
A handle hid out in the dark
A hand set the spark
Two eyes took the aim
Behind a man’s brain
But he can’t be blamed
He’s only a pawn in their game
“A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers’ blood”. The act is furtive but the line’s arc is direct. Yet the force is forked, two turns of phrase at once doubly dealing death.
– A bullet took Medgar Evers’ life
– A bullet shed Medgar Evers’ blood
“A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers’ blood”: this compounds the guilt. And the sequence looks to the tracks that are traces of blood: bullet . . . back . . . bush . . . blood. Of these four words that alliterate, it is the first that fells: “bullet”, with its two syllables (as though double-barrelled) as against the others’ one.
Anonymity is furtive, and the killer is reduced to body-parts as indifferently as a bullet reduces a body: a finger, a handle, a hand, two eyes, a man’s brain. Dashed out, these.
From the back of a bush. From behind his back. The words “back” and “behind” can be heard to pound in the song, compounding the disease that rages in the killer – and that the song itself will need vigilant prophylaxis to escape infection from.184 This first verse, a moment later, eyes the murderous moment:
Two eyes took the aim
Behind a man’s brain
– the back of his head, behind a man’s back. The more forceful, these lines, because they are unobtrusively paradoxical: the brain is behind the eyes, not the other way round – except that the eyes are behind the brain in the grim sense that they carry out the brain’s decision, they back the brain: behind, “supporting, backing up”, “at the back of (any one) as a support; backing (one up)”, with the earliest Oxford English Dictionary citation being honourably military, “The remainder of the regiment . . . being behind Captain Lucy”.
From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks
And the hoof beats pound in his brain
This seethes. A bloodshot gaze can be felt to tack from “shacks” (“the poverty shacks”, a stricken phrase) to “cracks” to “tracks”, joining the “pack” en route to the word that comes back from the back of a bush: “back”.
From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks
And the hoof beats pound in his brain
And he’s taught how to walk in a pack
Shoot in the back
With his fist in a clinch
To hang and to lynch
To hide ’neath the hood
To kill with no pain
Like a dog on a chain
He ain’t got no name
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game
Poverty . . . pound . . . pack / beats . . . brain . . . back: the persistent insistence might remind us what kind of consonant a p or a b is. A plosive. Plosion and explosion. His head was exploding.
Dylan’s head knows how to contain such explosions. His exposure of them makes us hear what it is for something to pound in a brain. The throbbing pounding rhythms of the song are in time with its alliterations, rhymes, and assonances, so as to make audible the insanity of a raging obsession, an insanity that is cause and consequence of killing. A hundred and fifty years ago, Tennyson took the sick pulsations of a man who had killed and who was now in the living death that is madness:
Dead, long dead,
Long dead!
And my heart is a handful of dust,
And the wheels go over my head,
And my bones are shaken with pain,
For into a shallow grave they are thrust,
Only a yard beneath the street,
And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat,
The hoofs of the horses beat,
Beat into my scalp and my brain,
With never an end to the stream of passing feet185
“A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers’ blood”: this opening shot is taken up, caught up, in the opening line of the final verse: “Today, Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caught”. Here is the return not only to the name that is to be honoured but to the dishonour of the bullet (which now alliterates anew). The first line of the song had the death-scene in its sights. The second line sounded the unrelenting note that commands the song, there in “name” as it will be in “game”.
A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers’ blood
A finger fired the trigger to his name
His name: Medgar Evers. A bullet had his name on it – but not because of divine destiny, only because of human hatred. As to the killer’s name: it means nothing, it means nothingness.186 “There be of them that have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported. And some there be, which have no memorial” (Ecclesiasticus 44: 8–9). Medgar Evers left a name behind him. His praises are reported. He has a memorial. His name is there in the first line of the first verse (as it will be in the first line of the last verse), and it remains the only name in the fifty-two lines of the song, a song in which the word “name” is sounded four times. In another Dylan song about the brutal killing of someone black by someone white (The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll), the killer enjoys a certain infamy: William Zanzinger, immortalized for that mortal blow of his. But Only a Pawn in Their Game accords its killer no name. “He ain’t got no name”. The last words of the song, the killer’s laconic epitaph, get their dour force from the vacuity of “Carved next to his name”:
He’ll see by his grave
On the stone that remains
Carved next to his name
His epitaph plain:
Only a pawn in their game
Medgar Evers is named. Twice. As for the rest of those who are set upon by – and are set against – the poor whites, back in the sixties there was the word that had not yet become opprobrious to those who have since chosen to be known as African-Americans: the word “negro”, or rather (in this song) “Negro”. The n-word that is not Negro is never heard in this song, but you are incited to imagine it, to acknowledge that it, not “Negro”, is the word that “the South politician” (not quite the same, darkly, as a Sout
hern politician or even a politician from the South), the marshals, the cops, and the poor whites will all be most pleased to use most unpleasantly. Dylan doesn’t flinch from using the word, dramatized, in Hurricane:
And to the black folks he was just a crazy nigger
No one doubted that he pulled the trigger187
Those two lines (a dozen years later, admittedly, and in collaboration with Jacques Levy) make me wonder whether I am imagining things – as against Dylan’s imagining how to get us to do so – when I sense that the word “nigger” lurks or skulks in the vicinity. Juxtapose with that couplet from Hurricane these two evocations in Only a Pawn in Their Game:
A finger fired the trigger to his name188
And the Negro’s name
Is used it is plain
For the politician’s gain
The word “name” links these two moments in the song, and the alliteration in “finger fired” plays along with the off-rhyme of finger / trigger, an off-rhyme (Medgar . . . finger . . . trigger) that was to become the true rhyme – truly dramatized and dismaying (“the black folks” use the word themselves) – in Hurricane: nigger / trigger. For there should be no ducking the fact that, whereas Only a Pawn in Their Game rightly observes the decencies, it manages to intimate to us that the racists in the South didn’t observe them. It is not “the Negro’s name” that “Is used it is plain / For the politician’s gain”, but the slur-name, contemptuous and contemptible. The song doesn’t utter the word, doesn’t even mutter the word, but does not let us forget it.
A South politician preaches to the poor white man
“You got more than the blacks, don’t complain
You’re better than them, you been born with white skin” they explain
And the Negro’s name
Is used it is plain
For the politician’s gain
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 18