Dylan's Visions of Sin

by Christopher Ricks

  When old Reilly hears of this (immediately, for the song cuts directly from the old judge’s words to old Reilly’s), he doesn’t crawl:

  “And my skin will surely crawl if he touches you at all

  Get on your horse and ride away”

  The vault into the saddle is from the creepily slow-paced “And my skin will surely crawl” into “Get on your horse and ride away”.260

  The horses, as so often in ballads and in Westerns (and in D. H. Lawrence’s St Mawr), suggest energies that include sexual energies, as riding does. “Old Reilly stole a stallion”. “She rode by night and came by morning”.261 “Get on your horse and ride away”. But in the night (“In the night the price was paid”) she submits to being not the rider but the ridden, mounted by her extortioner in his lust. Once again there might come to mind the opening soliloquy of Richard III, with its exacerbated sexuality:

  Grim-visaged War hath smoothed his wrinkled front,

  And now, instead of mounting barbèd steeds

  To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,

  He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber,

  To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

  But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,

  Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass . . .

  One temptation that the song itself successfully resists is the sin of anger. (In The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, the temptation might have been to respond in kind, whereas anger is not what besets the perpetrator in Seven Curses.) More pressing might have been – though there was never any real danger of this, given the character of Dylan’s art – the sin of lust in its turn. For attacks on lust are often in collusion with it. Think of all those films that mount a crusade against pornography in a way that makes it deliciously necessary for them to show us a great deal of pornography.262 Lust does not cease to be lust just because it is ostentatiously deplored. One of the sleaziest forms that lust can take is prurience. So it is greatly to the credit of Seven Curses that the song does not yield to self-righteous anger in the face of the judge’s wrongdoing, and that it offers no combination of the high-minded and the low-bodied. D. H. Lawrence was repelled by such a combination in the eighteenth-century novelist who fascinatedly explored rape, “Richardson with his calico purity and his underclothing excitements”.263 Seven Curses does the decent thing, and this with controlled imagination, averting not only its eyes but its mind from what took place “In the night”. This, as against the act itself, is an act of respect.

  The story in Dylan’s ballad is folklore, sometimes all too true: a judge says that he will refrain from carrying out the death-sentence provided that the woman who is pleading with him for someone’s life will bribe him with her body. This story is at the heart of Measure for Measure.264 Shakespeare’s genius is in eliciting the hideous complexities that ensue when Angelo puts it to the virgin Isabella (pleading for the life of her brother, who has been condemned to death for fornication) that all she has to do is sacrifice her body. In Dylan’s ballad the strength is in the simplicity, in what is not questioned, whereas the very different strength of Measure for Measure is in what is questioned. Yet it is crucial not to forget that both are grounded on the secure belief that what the judge does is heinous.

  The contrasts are many.

  In Measure for Measure, the justice of the sentence passed upon her brother is centrally vexed: death as the punishment for fornication? But that is the old law, there in Vienna, and the absent old Duke had said that he had been remiss in not enforcing the law, and venereal disease is death-dealingly rampant, and and and. And the man who now rules in the Duke’s absence is not someone who is sympathetic to the lusts of the flesh. His lusts are of the spirit – or always had been until Isabella pleads with him on her condemned brother’s behalf.

  By contrast, there is nothing in Seven Curses to suggest that the horse-thief Reilly doesn’t deserve to hang.265

  Old Reilly stole a stallion

  But they caught him and they brought him back

  And they laid him down in the jailhouse ground

  With an iron chain around his neck

  The song simply sets aside the whole question of whether stealing a horse is justly punishable by death. The point is not that the song endorses the punishment; rather, that this never enters at all. All we know is that we are in a world where such a sentence is unmisgivingly passed. As often in such a case, the modern listener (or reader or viewer) is asked to be not a historian but an anthropologist – come on, you can imagine a society in which these severities make sense, however much they may strike you as cruel and unusual punishment. Reilly himself doesn’t say a word about the sentence’s being too severe, and nor does his daughter. And when the judge is judged “so cruel”, this too doesn’t invoke the harshness of the sentence itself, but the judge’s lustful incitement of the sexual bribe and then his ratting on it after he has taken it, taken her.

  But then there is a related impassivity in the face of bribery itself. Shakespeare’s Isabella would never have dreamt of trying to bribe Angelo with gold and silver or with anything. So she could not have been met by any tacky snigger along the lines of “Wrong bribe, darling”. (“The price, my dear, is you instead.”) For Reilly’s daughter, though, and for the chilly realism in such respects that is characteristic of a ballad, there is no question as to whether she should try bribery – the morality of bribery, like the justice (or not) of the sentence, just doesn’t come up. Reilly’s daughter brings gold and silver. Such is the way of the world, and the judge responds to it in his way of the world.

  A further contrast between Shakespeare’s play and Dylan’s ballad would raise another question that the ballad, secure within its due limits, does not raise: is a judge the better for not acting on a bribe? Agreed, a judge should not accept a bribe, and certainly should not solicit one (a sexual solicitation here). But once he has taken the bribe, might it not be better if he went ahead with the sentence that had been passed? At least he would not then have perverted the course of justice. Now, a key difference between the play and the ballad is exactly here: would it be the course of justice, as against that of injustice, if Angelo were to proceed as though he had never incited and secured the bribe? Was the original sentence a just one? (But then might it not be a judge’s duty to proceed with a sentence even if it were an unjust one?) Within the intricately philosophical and jurisprudential world of Shakespeare’s play, a play of which the first sentence circuitously begins “Of government the properties to unfold . . .”, it must be in question, however distastefully, whether a bribed judge does not do better by the world if at least he doesn’t act on the bribe. He may be the worse person, intrinsically – but consequentially, as an officer of the law?

  Such are the knotty complications, ethical and political, characteristic of Measure for Measure. But Seven Curses cuts all such knots. The judge incurs seven curses. His not acting on the bribe, far from being perhaps a mitigating circumstance, compounds his offence. Clean-cut simplicity, and clean lines – however dirty the world.

  Another contrast such as brings out the ballad virtues of limits and of the off-limits: Reilly’s daughter has no doubt at all that she must “take the chance to try”. She knows that it is only a chance, for the judge – as is to be expected in such a case – will almost certainly renege. (As he does in the play, too. The person who acts on a bribe makes any subsequent accusation against him much more credible than if he just carries on in due process.) But she is sure in her own mind. To her father’s protest that she must leave at once (“And my skin will surely crawl if he touches you at all”), she replies with her own surely:

  “Oh father you will surely die

  If I don’t take the chance to try

  And pay the price and not take your advice

  For that reason I will have to stay”

  It is up to her. Her father’s cry is more than advice, but she judges it right not to heed his cry. Yet in Measure for Measure there is an
unending contention both within Isabella and outside her. Is she right to repudiate Angelo’s hateful offer? She is sure of her spiritual duty – her body is not hers to sacrifice, and the more so because she is a novitiate nun. And yet she is agonized by her decision. Her brother at first rises to the high ground and agrees with her – but then breaks down: What is a maidenhead compared to a life? She repudiates him, furiously. But what price will she pay, for the rest of her life, for her refusal to take the chance and try to save his life?

  At which point a further contrast must surface, for Isabella is rescued from having to live with such a decision not to save a life: the Duke returns, and with providential powers he saves the day by now saving the night. Angelo had been betrothed to Mariana, and Mariana is happy to take Isabella’s place by night, so that the bribe can be paid without Isabella’s having to pay it. So far, so good. But not so fast, not far enough, for Angelo does the expected wrong thing, and – having (as he thinks) enjoyed Isabella – means to proceed with the execution of her brother all the same. Once again, the Duke must act fast if he is to prevent tragedy . . .

  The point of retailing all this is to bring out the contrast with Seven Curses. In the play, there is rescue, by the miracle that is providence and that is tragicomedy. In the ballad, there is simply tragedy. Dylan’s voice, entirely without sentimentality, refuses to break or to break down, it simply catches, at the moment when he sings the word “broken”:

  She saw that hangin’ branch a-bendin’

  She saw her father’s body broken

  The proverbial hope behind the antithesis of “bend” and “break” is lost in tragedy. Wittgenstein: “You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.”266 The hanging branch hangs there, and there it hangs people.

  There is no hope that anything but what we know will happen will happen. The daughter will sacrifice herself, to no avail. She and her father are differently lost. And so, in a further different way, is the judge.

  Not that there will be justice here on this earth. Whereas in the play’s world of strained hope, justice returns and the Duke effects a rescue, the ballad has to despair of any trust in justice. Or even in revenge. Measure for Measure has a great many complicated feelings and thoughts about justice, as any Christian play ought to have, while containing Shakespeare’s greatest evocation of Christian mercy:

  ANGELO:

  Your brother is a forfeit of the law,

  And you but waste your words.

  ISABELLA:

  Alas, alas:

  Why all the souls that were, were forfeit once,

  And he that might the vantage best have took

  Found out the remedy. How would you be,

  If he, which is the top of judgement, should

  But judge you as you are? Oh, think on that,

  And mercy then will breathe within your lips

  Like man new made.

  Isabella’s cry to Angelo is in vain, but her cry to the heavens is not, and justice comes. So revenge is not called for, is not called upon. But in Seven Curses there is simultaneously a justified craving for revenge and an unflinching recognition that it will not be forthcoming. There will be no Clint Eastwood armoured in white light. Unfortunately not, since revenge would be the real right thing. The ballad is as obdurate as was A. E. Housman: “Revenge is a valuable passion, and the only sure pillar on which justice rests.”267 Not the only pillar (that would be an exaggeration . . .), but the only sure one. So whereas the play can end with mercy of a kind, the ballad must end with its hopeless seven curses.

  Simplicity is won, hard-won, but this doesn’t mean that our response to it is uncomplicated. And it doesn’t mean that the art of such simplicity is easy. Take the expunging of Reilly. “Old Reilly” opens the first verse, and “When Reilly’s daughter”268 the second. The third opens, “When the judge saw Reilly’s daughter”, and the fourth, “‘Oh I’m as good as dead’, cried Reilly”. So his name has been heard, though differently, as each of the first four verses opens. But with the words “‘Oh I’m as good as dead’, cried Reilly”, he goes, as good as dead, to be unnamed in the succeeding verses, all five of them. All that is left for him, and of him, is to hang there, in the last line of the last verse before the curses begin: “She saw her father’s body broken”. But then he had been as good as dead from the very first verse, where Dylan had made the tiny inspired change of the preposition “on” to “in”. Originally he sang what is printed in Lyrics 1962–1985:

  And they laid him down on the jailhouse ground

  With an iron chain around his neck

  This became, in the performance that Dylan chose to release in his bootleg series, “And they laid him down in the jailhouse ground”. As good as dead, “in the jailhouse ground”. It will not be long before the diggers make actual what had been proleptic, and bury him.

  The chilling effect when the name Reilly disappears is like that in T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney Among the Nightingales, another poem about death expected and unexpected, where the first verse opens, “Apeneck Sweeney”; the second ends, “And Sweeney guards the hornèd gate”; and the third ends, “Tries to sit on Sweeney’s knees” – whereupon Sweeney goes, as good as dead, unnamed in the succeeding verses, all seven of them. Yet it remains Sweeney’s poem (he is in its title, as Reilly is not), since the poem consists of three sentences, and his name is in each of the three. For the first sentence is the first verse, and the second is the second verse, but the third is all the other verses, three to ten.269

  We never learn the name of his daughter (the more strikingly in that Dylan has always loved what you can do with names), but then this is horribly true to her existing in this song, as far as this grim story goes, solely as old Reilly’s daughter. The relation in Measure for Measure had been brother and sister, not father and daughter. But here: “And my skin will surely crawl if he touches you at all”. Her skin is from his. In the play, Isabella had excoriated her brother when he weakened and wanted her to give herself up to Angelo:

  Oh you beast,

  Oh faithless coward, oh dishonest wretch,

  Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice?

  Is’t not a kind of incest, to take life

  From thine own sister’s shame? What should I think,

  Heaven shield my mother played my father fair,

  For such a warpèd slip of wilderness

  Ne’er issued from his blood.

  It would have been no less a kind of incest, in Seven Curses, had Reilly chosen to profit from his own daughter’s shame. Reilly urged her to ride away. She saw that she must defy him. And then, next day, “She saw her father’s body broken” – as hers had, differently, been. The song never says that she is a virgin, but this is how it feels. The song had vaulted into the saddle.

  Old Reilly stole a stallion

  But they caught him and they brought him back

  “Catch” and “bring” do not rhyme, but “caught him” and “brought him” assuredly do, and rhyme is a means by which things are caught and brought. From the beginning, the song seizes and is seized by the life that is in rhyme. It might be a sudden leap of apprehension, as when the last line of the third verse, the judge’s smirk, “The price, my dear, is you instead”, prompts a sickening rhyme within the first line of the next verse: “‘Oh I’m as good as dead’, cried Reilly”. I don’t think that I’m imagining such effects but that Dylan imagined them, whether consciously or not – caught him / brought him, or dead / instead – and to put this weight on the word “instead” may be the more plausible in that this is the first full rhyme in the song. (The first verse, back / neck; the second, hang / hand; but the third, dead / instead.) In the spirit of ballads, there are alliteration and assonance to take and make their chances throughout, hauntingly at such moments as “stole a stallion” and “The gallows shadows shook the evening”. But three verses place their strong internal sounding in the third line, in the ballad manner, and these lines constitute the plot. Verse 1, “And
they laid him down in the jailhouse ground”. Verse 4, “And my skin will surely crawl if he touches you at all”. Verse 5, “And pay the price and not take your advice”.

  There are two verses that rhyme their first, second, and fourth lines: verse 5, which incarnates hope that tries to stay, die / try / stay (on edge as a rhyme), and verse 7, which is hope broken: awoken / spoken / broken.

  The next mornin’ she had awoken

  To find that the judge had never spoken

  There is a surprise to “she had awoken”: could she have slept, you ask yourself, on such a night, a night of rape, her father’s last night on earth? Yet it is not difficult to imagine her exhaustion, and it is proper to hope that she found mercy in oblivious sleep. When she wakes, though, it is to the terrible reality that she had known she would have to suffer. “Oh why did I awake? When shall I sleep again?”270

  As in the very different feat that is Hattie Carroll, there is the sense of what it is to count. The phrase “the price” comes three times. First, the judge: “The price, my dear, is you instead”. Second, the daughter: “And pay the price and not take your advice”. Third, the narrator, in a stanza that then three times tolls the words “In the night”:

  The gallows shadows shook the evening

  In the night a hound dog bayed

  In the night the grounds was groanin’

  In the night the price was paid

  Seven verses precede the seven deadly curses. The final two verses, eight and nine, in their relentless telling and tolling of the curses, one by one, constitute the song’s first – and therefore its one and only – momentum not within a verse but from one verse to the next. No longer is there a rhyme-scheme, which might offer something of a relief or release. Instead, an eternity of curses upon him:

  cannot save him / cannot heal him / cannot see him

  cannot hear him / cannot hide him / cannot bury him / shall never kill him271