You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last
Whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast
For “you better” grabs it even faster than “you’d better”. Every letter, every microsecond, might count now that It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue. Not that it is all over until the fat lady sings instead of the thin man.
“Look out the saints are comin’ through”. Prudence is always on the lookout. The advice that it gives may need to be repeated but will need to be varied, otherwise the hearer stops listening. “Take what you need” / “Take what you have gathered from coincidence”. The taker, meanwhile, must be careful not to be taken.
The lover who just walked out your door
Has taken all his blankets from the floor
His blankets, your door. He’d probably take that too,284 if he could, when taking his leave.
The first verse begins “You must leave now”. The last verse gives notice of closing-time by opening with “Leave your stepping stones behind”. How could you not? Stepping stones are more of a fixture than are Longfellow’s footprints, Longfellow with his shipwrecked sailor (Dylan’s sailors sound shipwrecked, too, seasick and rowing home):
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
(A Psalm of Life)
Take heart, take what you need (it may be heart).
Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you
Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you
In the making of those lines, something may have called to Dylan, don’t forget, something that followed him and that at the same time he followed. For the meeting of stepping stones with the dead happens to resemble a meeting with a dead poet, a poet not forgotten – as is only right when his poem, remember, bears the title In Memoriam, and when we remark the same imaginative associations in the opening lines of section I:
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.
And the more so if you hold in mind the whole opening verse:
I held it truth, with him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.
Dylan might get a rise out of the thought of himself singing to one clear harp in diverse tones, especially as his harp is heard immediately before this final verse of his. “Leave your stepping stones behind”: earlier art may act as a stepping stone, as indeed it had for Tennyson himself, whose lines have as one of their own stepping stones a phrase (“their dead selves”) from a poem that had been written twenty years earlier by a Cambridge friend of Tennyson’s.285 The affinity of Tennyson and Dylan is presumably a coincidence, but it is the kind of coincidence from which Dylan has been known to gather things.
The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense
Take what you have gathered from coincidence
While the phrase “you better” is brisker than “you’d better”, even brusquer is “better”: “better use your sense”.
This cluster does its reminding and its foretelling in every kind of Dylan song. “You better go back to from where you came”, counsels Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues, which has much advice to air. (“Don’t put on any airs”, for instance.) In The Times They Are A-Changin’, “Then you better start swimming”. In Subterranean Homesick Blues, “You better duck down the alley way”, along with three more good betters.
Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose
Better jump down a manhole
You better chew gum
Subterranean Homesick Blues is sardonic but not exactly sarcastic, given that its advice is worth giving for all one’s misgivings. Whether you’d have to be a complete cynic to act on such advice (“Keep a clean nose / Watch the plain clothes”), that is another matter, and almost as tricky as whether one should act on the principle that “Honesty is the best policy” – a principle that has been described as one on which no honest man ever acts. Worldly wisdom teases when it mouthes “Please her, please him”, but this may still be a better use of the mouth than “Don’t wanna be a bum / You better chew gum”. Satire, yes, these Skeltonic raids and forays, but the song is not ready for to fade into its own tirade. It has the wisdom to mock not only the complacencies of Polonius but the inverted (cynical) complacencies of Hamlet, who first mocks and then kills Polonius.
Ophelia she’s ’neath the window
For her I feel so afraid
(Desolation Row)286
The official precepts have a way of being, even if only confusedly, perceptive. To spit at them or spit them out is not really much wiser than swallowing them.
Arthur Hugh Clough has a similar frictive rictus when he looks at the Ten Commandments. The Latest Decalogue refuses ever quite to settle into meaning merely the opposite of what it says:
Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive
Officiously to keep alive.
Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,
When it’s so lucrative to cheat.
Thou shalt not covet; but tradition
Approves all forms of competition.
Subterranean Homesick Blues is likewise to be respected for preserving, however bitterly, some curious respect for the precepts that it owns, that it owns up to, that it won’t altogether disown.
Please her, please him, buy gifts
Don’t steal, don’t lift
Twenty years of schoolin’
And they put you on the day shift
Look out kid, and keep a clean nose, but better not become the Clean-Cut Kid. We know what happened to him, how he was schooled.
He was on the baseball team, he was in the marching band
When he was ten years old he had a watermelon stand
He was a clean-cut kid
But they made a killer out of him
That’s what they did
The Times They Are A-Changin’
When I paint my masterpiece, I had better acknowledge that one day it may need to be restored. According to Visions of Johanna, “Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues”, but the greens that are now highly visible in the painting are viewed with suspicion inside the museums-world. But then every restoration, whether political or painterly (the pristine Sistine?), goes up on trial. For history is like infinity287 with its Louvre doors. “If the doors of perception were cleansed,” William Blake said, “everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
It is in an infinity of ways that The Times They Are A-Changin’ has been restored by Dylan. Not that he has ever been stuck with a song, or stuck inside of one. (Maybe Maggie’s Farm, there for dear life, until the worm farm.) The songs are on the move, although love-life, imagined within a song, may be rather the reverse:
But it’s like I’m stuck inside a painting
That’s hanging in the Louvre
My throat starts to tickle and my nose itches
But I know that I can’t move
(Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight)
Dylan, king of the cats, majestically lets the songs lead their own ninety-nine lives. His transfusion or transmission of the songs is his life’s blood. Yet a problem may attend our reception. For well-known songs can become too well known, may no longer prove as open to our knowing them as they once were when we were all ears. Our having so often heard them may make it hard for us truly to listen to them. Now, if the ears of perception were cleansed . . .
Dylan can issue the songs anew, but can we admit them to ourselves anew? Like Blowin’ in the Wind, The Times They Are A-Changin’ may sometimes seem too muc
h of a success for its own good. Those cards for Subterranean Homesick Blues that Dylan lackadaisically dandles as prologue to the film Don’t Look Back, cards with some of the song’s key-words on them, include one that simply reads SUCKCESS. “Try to be a success”, but there may be too much not only of nothing but of something, too much of a good thing.
One way perhaps of recovering for ourselves the very good thing that is The Times They Are A-Changin’, of having it become fresh to us again, or even fresh with us again, might be to go far back and guess at the process by which it grew to be itself. Not in order to track or trace its creator’s own intuitions, let alone his deliberations as a conscious matter, but so as to glimpse some of the possibilities as to where the effects may be coming from.
Like Blowin’ in the Wind, The Times They Are A-Changin’ is in essence its title-refrain, the title that is again almost, not quite, the refrain.
The waters have grown, and so has the song. Time involves evolution, such as the title-refrain knew. The acorn is presumably a thought from times long past, tempora mutantur. Times change. Then a series of new time began.
Times change
The times change
The times are changin’
The times are a-changin’
The times they are a-changin’
For the times they are a-changin’
The acorn has grown into a royal oak.
“Times change” is dubbed by grammarians the simple present. (The tone of “Times change” is something to come back to.) “The times are changing” offers something of a change, being a different aspect (the grammatical term) of the present tense. This aspect goes under several names. Not that Dylan, in order to be able to create intuitively from what grammar codifies, has any need to know what grammarians have to say. Knowing in a schoolish way about grammar is something other than having an instinct for the ways in which grammar itself is very knowing.
Two things about the “are changing” aspect are crucial to how Dylan wields it. First, that the terms for this aspect of the present tense are themselves intimate with what time is or what the times are, which may compound the thoughts and feelings that live within this title-refrain about time and the times. Second, that the terms are themselves suggestively at odds, which may have prompted some of the choppy energies of the song.
“The times change”: simple present. “The times are changing”: present progressive – a term, as it happens, that might epitomize this song about being progressive at present. The present progressive: “sometimes called the durative or continuous aspect”. These two are epithets close to the heart of The Times They Are A-Changin’ and its urgings. One of the things about such a present tense, whether you call it durative, continuous, or progressive, is its two-edginess. For as the Comprehensive Grammar288 shows, this form of the present tense catches “a happening IN PROGRESS at a given time”. A. E. Housman, exasperated by a dud scholar’s having visited scepticism upon a certain textual principle (“so we should be loth to assume it in a given case”), tartly remarked that “Every case is a given case.”289 Likewise, every time is a given time (the given times they are a-changin’?), with the song powerfully intimating that all times are a-changin’. And continuous as an alternative to progressive present? The “continuous” is admittedly not the same as the “continual”, but the interplay between those siblings might foster some of the creative friction in the song, rather as the durative present (if we were to prefer that term) at once insists upon and curtails duration. The durative must last, endure, but only for a duration. For the duration of the war, or of the battle outside that is raging.
We might see the key-phrase, “The times they are a-changin’”, in the light of what the Comprehensive Grammar comprehends: “The meaning of the progressive can be separated into three components, not all of which need be present”:
(a) the happening has DURATION
(b) the happening has LIMITED duration
(c) the happening is NOT NECESSARILY COMPLETE
The first two components add up to the concept of TEMPORARINESS.
It is timely that the words “The times they are a-changin’” add up to the concept of TEMPORARINESS,
As the present now
Will later be past
But then, just as nothing proves more permanent than a temporary solution, so temporariness is itself a permanent condition.
The Times They Are A-Changin’ expresses its termination by means of -ing, or rather of the pliant -in’. The title-refrain commands the other such endings in the song, almost all of which are in the present progressive.
That it’s namin’
Ragin’
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’
The order is
Rapidly fadin’
But of the many progressive presents that the song gives us, only one has its nature reinforced by the prefix that in itself emphasizes process:“a-changin’”. The title-refrain enjoys the monopoly of this tiny touch within the song, a touch of which Dylan well understands the effect,290 and one that, because it has weathered into archaism, is well adapted to times and their changing.
Bye, baby bunting,
Daddy’s gone a-hunting
– nursery rhymes and songs apart, it is mostly time to say bye to the prefix a- in this sense, the prefix that denotes “in process of, in course of”. 1 Peter 3:20, “in the days of Noah, while the ark was a-preparing”.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
You better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’
Or, “while the ark was a-preparing wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved”.
Times change. And one exercise in which an imaginative writer takes delight is to change some time-worn thought about the times. Take the wit that Dickens brings to holy writ. Ecclesiastes, opening chapter 3: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die . . .”291 Dickens, opening chapter 1 of A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness . . .” Times have changed, and so have the things that need to be said about the times. The same goes for the relation between the ways in which things stay the same and the ways in which they do not, within the world evoked by The Times They Are A-Changin’.
Back to the ancient adage. Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis. “Times change, and we change with them.” Or, in words from long ago that invoke a longer ago: “The times are changed as Ovid sayeth, and we are changed in the times” (1578). It has been crucial to the saying, whether in Latin or in English, that “we” be in it. But “we” is a word and a thought strikingly absent from The Times They Are A-Changin’. Strikingly, as having been struck out of it.
But then most of the pronouns, having been told “Don’t stand in the doorway”, have been shown the door. It is you who will apparently get to stay. For this is another of the great Dylan you songs.
Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’
Six times in this first verse, you – plus a your thrown in, en route to the next verse, which may be free of you but does need what are yours. The song chides but it hopes not to nag, which is one reason why you is used more sparingly after the first verse, even while the word your keeps the thought of you unremittingly in play, twice in the second verse (“your pen”, “your eyes”), twice in the third (“your windows”, “your walls”), and five times in the fourth verse (“Your sons and your d
aughters”, “your command”, “Your old road”, “your hand”). As for the shorter sharper word, although you is off convalescing during the second and third verses, yous return with certain values in the fourth verse: “What you can’t understand”, rhyming with (and parallel to) “If you can’t lend your hand”.
The pronunciamento is willing to acknowledge, for a brief moment, the word “he”, provided that this pronoun identifies no one in particular (“For he that gets hurt / Will be he who has stalled”). There are plenty of occasions for “they” – but only on condition that the word refer not to people, solely to the times: “For the times they are a-changin’”. The alignment of the song is the human “you” and the larger-than-human “they” of the times. And of these two, only the latter is left in the last verse, a verse that has no other pronoun except, be it noted, “it”, the forgettable pronoun that at last comes into its own, the little “it” that has figured four times earlier but only now finds its opening, an opening that – with an emphatic syntactical redundancy of “it” – draws its two lines tightly parallel:
The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin’
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’
Not just “now”, and not just the admonitory “now, now”, but three times the urgency of “now” at the line-ending. All the verses until this last one have launched an imperative address: “Come gather ’round people”, “Come writers and critics”, “Come senators, congressmen”, “Come mothers and fathers”. But when the last verse comes, it is too late for any such injunctions. The line is drawn under all that.
This final verse, rising exhilaratedly above any accusatory “you”, might invite us once more to set the refrain, “For the times they are a-changin’”, against its forebear: “Times change”. And then to feel the transformation of tone that Dylan effects. “Well, times change, I guess”: this remark from 1949 is quoted in Bartlett Jere Whiting’s Modern Proverbs and Proverbial Sayings (1989), and although “Times change” wouldn’t have to carry this tone of concessive reluctant acquiescence, this is a tone that comes naturally to it. “Times change”: granted, it does lend itself to shrugging (I guess) more than to shouldering. But “The times they are a-changin’”: this squares its shoulders while it rounds on people.
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