Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
Dylan once said “I’ve never written any song that begins with the words ‘I’ve gathered you here tonight . . .’”292 True, literally, but it is an unexpected thing for him to say, given that he has written “Come gather ’round people”, to say nothing of “Come gather ’round friends / And I’ll tell you a tale”; “Come around you rovin’ gamblers and a story I will tell”; “Come you ladies and you gentlemen, a-listen to my song”; or “Come you masters of war”.293 What can Dylan have been thinking of, then, with this claim, “I’ve never written any song that begins . . .”?
Yet there are differences in the air. The Times They Are A-Changin’ is unlike North Country Blues, or Rambling, Gambling Willie, or Hard Times in New York Town, each of which tells a story. Nor is it like Masters of War, which foretells a story. The Times They Are A-Changin’ admonishes, that is for sure, but it doesn’t take the tone of “I’ve gathered you here tonight . . .”. Its imperatives, immediately after the first one (which is simply “Come gather ’round”), put it to you at once that you already know the truth that is being pressed upon you: “And admit that . . .” And the recurrent urging finds its humanity and its decency in its own admission that it is putting to you something that you have already (come on, admit it) put to yourself. Admit it, and accept it.
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’
As so often in Dylan, it is words of scripture that may be the bridge by which one word of his has crossed over to another.
Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Where might we gather that the waters are from? From a biblical gathering together? Perhaps Genesis 1:9, “Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together.” More probably, Exodus 15: “the waters were gathered together”, given that this same chapter gives us a song (“Then sang Moses and the children of Israel this song unto the Lord, and spake, saying, I will sing unto the Lord”), a song that exults in terms that may sound the depths of Dylan’s song:
Pharaoh’s chariot and his host hath he cast into the sea: his chosen captains also are drowned in the Red sea. The depths have covered them: they sank into the bottom as a stone.
“Or you’ll sink like a stone”. “The curse it is cast”. Or, in the very different accents of exuberant word-work from the moment When the Ship Comes In:
And like Pharaoh’s tribe
They’ll be drownded in the tide
Dylan’s words are never quite what you might have expected. “If your time to you / Is worth savin’”: we know perfectly well what it perfectly means, but if this were a crossword clue, given the context of drowning the four-letter word -i-e would probably be filled in, not as time, but as life. (The time of your life, but not with the usual pleasure in the thought.) If your life is worth savin’, you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone: isn’t that a line of thought?
Saving your life is one idiom; saving time is another; and the two mingle fluidly. Is time worth saving, however short? (Is it worth saving a few minutes?) And then there is a third way of putting it that may mingle with the others: “If your time is worth” – not saving but – “anything”. All this, with “your time” set against what immediately ensues, “the times”. And with the words “Or you’ll sink like a stone” sung by Dylan a moment ahead of the music, as though plummeting, “sink” sung out of synch.
The second verse comes in with a word that is both new (not in The Oxford English Dictionary . . .) and true:
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
What’s the matter, Dylan, the verb “to prophesy” not good enough for you?
That’s right, not good enough here because what’s needed is something that will not sound good: to prophesize, which gets and whets its sardonic edge from what the suffix -ize often implies, that the whole thing has become a predictable formula or an empty abstraction, complacently explaining away. You can hear this in the Dylan sleeve-notes for Peter, Paul and Mary,294 from the same year: “At these hours there was no tellin what was bound t happen – Never never could the greatest prophesizor ever guess it –”. No tellin what,
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’
But you’ll know what I mean by “Who prophesize”, you who “criticize / What you can’t understand”, or (elsewhere) “you who philosophize disgrace” (The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll).
The coinage rings true because “prophesize” chimes naturally with “to prophesy” and with “prophesied”: “Who prophesy with your pen”, say, or “Who prophesied with your pen”. “My tongue”, says the singer of Psalm 45, “is the pen of a ready writer.” Dylan’s tongue curls at the thought of the too-ready writers.
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
We may need to keep our wits about us when we hear “And keep your eyes wide”. The Oxford English Dictionary points out that “wide” is in some respects “now superseded in general use by wide open”. But “wide-eyed” has changed with the times. It used to be “having the eyes wide open, gazing intently”, with D. H. Lawrence urging upon the human soul the duty of “wide-eyed responsibility” (Man and Bat). But then it comes to mean naivety, true or simulated: “You ask him all those wide-eyed innocent questions about making profits from cheap labour” (Len Deighton, 1983). It was back in 1894 that the New York Forum praised Madison’s “wide-eyed prudence in counsel”. The virtue that is urged and celebrated in The Times They Are A-Changin’ is prudence. This virtue asks courage and great good sense, and is to be distinguished from petty caution, in the knowledge that few things are more dangerous than playing safe. Tough maxims can be plaited into a rope that is thrown to you.
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
And keep your eyes wide
And don’t speak too soon
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
“Stalled”, as come to a halt and (an altogether different verb) as prevaricated. Very apt to The Times They Are A-Changin’, since to stall is to play for time or temporize. Anyway, be warned. Prudence, though mannerly, demands. Be advised.
Dylan’s writings are happy to give advice, often of a derisory kind. Advice for Geraldine on Her Miscellaneous Birthday, which appears in Lyrics 1962–1985 as the conclusion to the songs from the Times They Are A-Changin’ album, is a formidable sequence of prudential assurances. It begins:
stay in line. stay in step. people
are afraid of someone who is not
in step with them. it makes them
look foolish t’ themselves for
being in step. it might even
cross their mind that they themselves
are in the wrong step. do not run
nor cross the red line.
Stay in line, do not cross the red line. The line it is drawn.
say what he
can understand clearly. say it simple
t’ keep your tongue out of your
cheek.
The Times They Are A-Changin’ says what we can understand clearly, and is determined to say it simple. Not “simply”. Yet in Advice for Geraldine, too, this wasn’t so simple. “Say it . . .” looked likely to be completed with “simply”, righ
t after “understand clearly”. What “say it simple” does is join forces with “keep it simple”, the word “keep” then immediately surfacing: “say it simple / t’ keep your tongue out of your / cheek”.
“This was definitely a song with a purpose,” Dylan said of The Times They Are A-Changin’. “I knew exactly what I wanted to say and for whom I wanted to say it to” (Biograph). A characteristic touch, this, in its throwing in more prepositions than it might seem to need.295 Which do you want to say, sir, “for whom I wanted to say it”, or “whom I wanted to say it to”? Both, because “to whom” is as addressed to, but “for whom” is on behalf of. It may seem surprising that so combative a song could be on behalf of those whom it berates, but salutary words are words on behalf of those who stand in need of them. As will later be realized.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
Again, there is the small but telling divergence from the likely ways of putting it. Will be later the winner? Will be later the one to win? (Will be certain to win?) The word “later” comes early in the song (this second verse) but it is only late in the song, the last verse, that its time comes, its triple time:
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’
Matthew 19:30: “But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first.” This is the last verse of the chapter, even as it is the last admonition of the song.296
The song has its pattern, and – as T. S. Eliot knew – the crucial thing for the artist is the “recognition of the truth that not our feelings, but the pattern which we may make of our feelings, is the centre of value”.297 Dylan: “Anyway it’s not even the experience that counts, it’s the attitude toward the experience” (Biograph). Things not only may but must change, but the refrain at the end of each verse is itself unchanging: “For the times they are a-changin’”. In performance, the song is free to be always changing. Dylan knew better than to heed his own sombre warning in Advice for Geraldine on Her Miscellaneous Birthday:
do Not create anything, it will be
misinterpreted. it will not change.
it will follow you the
rest of your life.
The capital N on “Not” is Notoriously the only capital letter in the hundred-and-more lines of Advice, and Dylan did well Not to obey it but, instead, to be beyond his own command. Children of the sixties still thrill to The Times They Are A-Changin’, kidding themselves that what the song proclaimed was that at last the times were about to cease to change, for the first and last time in history. Was not enlightenment dawning, once and for all?
But the times they are still a-changin’, and for decades now when Dylan sings “Your sons and your daughters / Are beyond your command”, he sings this inescapably with the accents not of a son, no longer perhaps mostly of a parent, but with grandparental amplitude. Once upon a time it may have been a matter of urging square people to steel themselves to accept the fact that their children were, you know, hippies. But the capacious urging could then come to mean that ex-hippie parents had better accept that their children looked like becoming yuppies. And then Repupplicans . . .
The Fourth Times Around Are A-Changin’.
We Better Talk This Over
“We better” is more magnanimous than “You better”, in that anyone who says “We better” doesn’t, on the face of it, exempt himself (or herself) from the advice that is recommended or commended. But magnanimity is well advised to stay sober. The first rhyme of We Better Talk This Over is furrily slurred: over / sober.
I think we better talk this over
Maybe when we both get sober
It matters that the song is not called, cumbrously and with a touch of the pretend-tentative, I Think We Better Talk This Over. This would have been the wrong first line to take. The words “I think” are decent of him (don’t want to press the point) but are not about to weaken into any doubt on the matter. The same goes for “Maybe”, which amounts to “really” really. “It really would be prudent of us to leave it till we both get sober”. (Both? The hint may be that one of us is already sober. Me, I take it.) And the run of the words and of the voice is prudently precise about where to place that “Maybe”. Not “We better talk this over, maybe” – no, that we’d better talk this over is a sure thing, for all the courtesy of “I think” – but “Maybe when we both get sober”. It is only the “when” that is in question. Delicately done, again. It would be quite a different story if the song were called, as in those vibrant moments in films, We Need to Talk.
I think we better talk this over
Maybe when we both get sober
You’ll understand I’m only a man
Doin’ the best that I can
“The best that I can” seizes the chance to justify itself, to feel that it really does follow climactically, by following the words “we better”. Meanwhile the pronouns are doing “a downhill dance” of a sort: I we we / You I I. There could easily have been a “he”: “I’m only a man / Doin’ the best that he can”. But this would have been too easy. This man won’t duck. “Only a man”, which is engendered by the sexual situation, both is and is not gendered (someone, this particular someone, then, speaking from a man’s eye view all right). “Only a man” is not asking for a fight, it is on this occasion gender-pacific. And the phrase both concedes and intercedes: come on, there’s a limit to the best you should hope from a man, given the run of men, to say nothing of original sin. Anyway, maybe you’re only a woman, doing the best that you can.
Twos and threes: these are set before us in this first shaping of pronouns and in the verse-form itself. It looks as though it is constituted of twos, pairs, couplets or couples whether happy or not. The song is about coupling, “the bed where we slept”, and about uncoupling:
The vows that we kept are now broken and swept
’Neath the bed where we slept
Couplets, then, from the start: over / sober, man / can. And this isn’t only a matter of the look on the page but of the weight in time and in speed in the singing. But the verse-form could be lineated on the page as a supple couplet followed by a tripping triplet:
I think we better talk this over
Maybe when we both get sober
You’ll understand
I’m only a man
Doin’ the best that I can
Or, in verse 2, there can be felt both this shaping spirit of imagination:
This situation can only get rougher
Why should we needlessly suffer?
Let’s call it a day, go our own different ways
Before we decay
and this different unauthorized lineation:
This situation can only get rougher
Why should we needlessly suffer?
Let’s call it a day
Go our own different ways
Before we decay
The one verse-form goes its own different ways.
The bridge then takes the form of a duly undulating couplet:
You don’t have to be afraid of looking into my face
We’ve done nothing to each other time will not erase
Yet even here, two and three are heard to interplay, for laced with the rhyme face / erase there is the strong assonance afraid / face / erase. And this sound, too, is followed up in the downhill momentum of the song, in the very next phrase, “I feel displaced”.
We’ve done nothing to each other time will not erase
I feel displaced, I got a low-down feeling
You been two-faced, you been double-dealing
I took a chance, got caught in the trance
Of a downhill dance
The “
low-down feeling” (he is feeling low, his spirits are down, because she has behaved in a low-down way) will be felt to be warranted when he gets down to “a downhill dance”, but on the way he will let her know that he knows, letting us in on a fact: “You been two-faced, you been double-dealing”. Two-faced, so maybe it isn’t altogether true that “You don’t have to be afraid of looking into my face”. My one face. My integrity, your duplicity, your double-dealing. You and I have ceased to be a twosome. Two and four, now, perhaps, since the verse’s opening couplet might now take the lineated shape of a foursome:
I feel displaced
I got a low-down feeling
You been two-faced
You been double-dealing
And from such a two-cum-four to three again: chance / trance / dance.
It is immediately following this accusatory verse that there comes the only other one that sets itself to the two-cum-four rhyming of the opening couplet. A sudden pang is felt, a wish that there had been no need to accuse, a longing for what had been fantasized but could not be realized:
Oh, child, why you wanna hurt me?
I’m exiled, you can’t convert me
I’m lost in the haze of your delicate ways
With both eyes glazed
Or:
Oh, child
Why you wanna hurt me?
I’m exiled
You can’t convert me
This is cryptic, as though unable to bring itself to declare all that it is feeling. There is no difficulty in understanding “I’m exiled” – she has done this to him, has banished him, even though she may not have known that this would be the upshot of the downhill dance. And there is no difficulty with “You can’t convert me”. A lost soul, “I’m lost in the haze”. Lost time is not found again, nor is lost faith. But what is the relation between “I’m exiled” and “You can’t convert me”? Exiled afar to another country, another continent? Beyond the reach of conversion, beyond the reach of even the best-positioned missionary? The elusiveness fascinates.
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 28