“People carry roses”: “carry” there suggests a certain gait, and something of an errand, and even perhaps weapons in the war between the sexes, a war that may entail winning women over. But it isn’t because people carry roses (to her or in the wider world of their amorous solicitations) that she’s faithful. It doesn’t turn on that. Anyway, people in life often carry roses because they have been – or have been tempted to be – unfaithful. The bouquet bought on the way home. Nothing in her has any wish that roses should rhyme, or that faithful should, either. An end in itself, in herself, being faithful. People carry roses. She carries it off.
My love she laughs like the flowers
Valentines can’t buy her
Flowers laugh in the classical application of such words as “laugh” or “smile”, in that they not only make you happy but look happy themselves.
All three pairs of rhymes in the first verse have something in common, an undulation, a hesitation as to exactly how many syllables they ask. There is a play of the two syllables of “silence” against the two or three of “violence”, and of the two syllables of “buy her” against the one or two of “fire” – with then a variation on this with “hours” and “flowers”, hoverers both.313 There is another kind of hovering here, too, in the unobtrusive word “by”: “Make promises by the hours”. What begins as the “by” of “in terms of swearing or adjuration” – “make promises by . . .” – becomes in time the “by” of time: “by the hours”.
But it is time for the second verse. Whereas in the first verse, lines one and two had rhymed:
My love she speaks like silence
Without ideals or violence
the next verse varies this, so that the third line maintains the initiating rhyme, with “repeat” to make sure that although this may surprise us, it will not startle us:
In the dime stores and bus stations
People talk of situations
Read books, repeat quotations
Draw conclusions on the wall
But it is not only that the double rhyme becomes a triple one (stations / situations / quotations), and not only that “situations” so completely engrosses or swallows up “stations”, but that the abstract suffix, -ions, keeps pressing on, until it reaches “conclusions”. People (again this faintly dismissive locution: people carry roses, people talk of situations) read the writing on the wall, and among the quotations that they repeat there is one that is itself a conclusion that speaks of the future.
Draw conclusions on the wall
Some speak of the future
Conclusions on, not conclusions from, though the latter will be drawn soon enough. The Book of Daniel, chapter 5:
In the same hour came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace.
And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.
Later in the song, “the candlestick” furnishes Dylan not only with “the candles” but with “matchsticks” to light the candles, and the word “numbered” may have its relation to Minus Zero. This same chapter of Daniel has “people”, “tremble”, “wise men”, and “gifts”; also “spake” (“speaks”), “said” (“say”), and “that night” (“the night” and “at midnight”). “The king” is reduced to “the pawn”.314
“Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting”. Who, in the end, in the song, will be weighed in the balances and found wanting?
In this verse, the rhyme-scheme – since “wall” and “all” rhyme, and so in their hollow way, disconcertingly, do “future” and “failure” – leaves only the fifth line not rhyming: “My love she speaks softly”. It is a lovely touch, this not rhyming (so hushedly) on “softly”, and yet the line in other respects rhymes with, pairs with, something elsewhere, since it picks up “My love she speaks like silence”, and “softly” is after all both more and less hushed than is silence. The sequence of thought remains elusive, or even illusory:
Some speak of the future
My love she speaks softly
“Some speak of the future”: this does not proceed to usher in any anticipated contrast by way of what my love speaks of. Of the future as against what, exactly? “My love she speaks” – wait for it – “softly”. Is it that people who speak of the future speak with hardness and with loudness? Yes, actually, they often do, in the self-gratifying heat not just of prophesying but of prophesizing. So my love, she speaks not of the future but – softly.
Her voice was ever soft,
Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman.
(King Lear, V, iii)
No limit to the amount of trouble generalizations about women bring. Lear, in his recovered love as he stands over the body of Cordelia, speaks of the past. She, who at the beginning of the play, could say “Nothing”, can now say nothing.
“My love she speaks softly”: softly, because the past and the present may have some power to hush us into speaking more quietly, more temperately. The future, on the other hand, is up for grabs, and grabs can be noisy. A friend of mine, Mark Halliday, once proposed, a quarter jokingly, a sequence of thought that might have met one’s expectations:
Some speak of the future
My love she’s into Now
– a burlesque that does bring out how powerfully inconsequential these alignments may be.
The third verse of Love Minus Zero / No Limit has always baffled and delighted me. One of Dylan’s most suggestive surrealist sequences, it eludes paraphrase and translation, and it teases us into and out of thought – and back into thought again.
The cloak and dagger dangles
Madams light the candles
In ceremonies of the horsemen
Even the pawn must hold a grudge
Statues made of matchsticks
Crumble into one another
My love winks, she does not bother
She knows too much to argue or to judge
My love winks, and an equivocal wink it is, too, and an equivocal thing a wink is, too. Like the lines themselves, with all their secretive nudges, she seems to be sharing a joke with us while not actually letting us in on the joke. Could it be that she is conniving? Powerfully attractive women sometimes are. “Connive”: from the Latin, “to wink”. The Oxford English Dictionary brings out the disconcerting shifts and shiftiness of the word “connive”, from
To shut one’s eyes to a thing that one dislikes but cannot help, to pretend ignorance, to take no notice
(“My love winks, she does not bother”) – through to a really rather different sense of what is going on:
To shut one’s eyes to an action that one ought to oppose, but which one covertly sympathizes with; to wink at.
This verse of the song winks, tipping us the wink and advising us likewise to know too much to argue or to judge, or perhaps reminding us that we know too little to be able to do either. The rhyme dangles / candles has the melting touch of Salvador Dali; the rhyme grudge / judge returns us promptly to the real world of solid sullenness; and the other rhyme, another / bother, very appropriately does not bother and should not bother us. Imperfect, but what’s so good about being perfect? Such is the rhyme’s air. Which leaves, as the only line-endings that are left unrhymed, “horsemen” and “matchsticks”. I have no idea what to make of the teeming and the provocation here, or what Dylan made of them except mischief and glee and shadows. The “ceremonies of the horsemen” suggest the chessboard knights (lording it over the pawn) as well as the Changing of the Guards, but what game or ceremony is going on here? “The cloak and dagger” is transformed by “dangles”, as though by a conjuror, into a medal or decoration, like the Star and Garter (he was awarded the Cloak and Dagger; there it is, dangling or daggling from his breast). At a leap, the world of the song has become �
�espionage, secrecy, intrigue, etc.” (a good dark etc.), a world – The Oxford English Dictionary reminds us – of “drama or stories of intrigue and romantic or melodramatic adventure, in which the principal characters are taken from that class of society which formerly wore cloak and dagger or sword”.315 And which formerly frequented brothels: “Madams light the candles”. A sinister business.
Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
Shifting the candles.316
It is all a dreamscape in which there is much to be felt and little to be learnt.
At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means
(Gates of Eden)
The interpretation of dreams? Again the Book of Daniel, chapter 5:
And the king spake, and said to the wise men of Babylon, Whosoever shall read this writing, and shew me the interpretation thereof, shall be clothed with scarlet, and have a chain of gold about his neck, and shall be the third ruler in the kingdom.
These wise men, unlike the Christmas ones, do not bring gifts, yet the successful interpreter is promised a gift of gold, though not of frankincense or myrrh.
Visions and dreams are among the limitlessnesses, and the final dream-vistas of the song are at once continuous with the previous glimpses and newly disturbingly disjointed:
The bridge at midnight trembles
The country doctor rambles
Bankers’ nieces seek perfection
Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring
The wind howls like a hammer
The night blows cold and rainy
My love she’s like some raven
At my window with a broken wing
This is exquisitely evoked, both line by line and in its mounting. The rhyme trembles / rambles engages auditorily in those two activities, and “bring” duly brings in “wing”, or rather, “bring” spreads its wing to become broken wing. The off-rhyme rainy / raven thinks better than to seek perfection, and yet the laminations of the lines are perfect in their way. “The bridge at midnight trembles”: who (it may be wondered with a slight tremble) can be out there at this time of night? “The country doctor rambles”: rambling in his mind, is it? or a house call,at this hour? “Bankers’ nieces seek perfection”: where have they impertinently arrived from? Not who do they think they are, but who do we think they are? And what kind of perfection, exactly? “Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring”: but the wise men were bringing gifts to the infant Christ, a very different perfection from any that is likely to figure in the calculations of bankers’ nieces.
But then again (for the suggestions twist and turn) perhaps the Three Wise Men are not in fact the wise men in question, not because they are shadows of their former selves but because they are later selves. For is it not the earlier wise men, the wise men of the Book of Daniel, who take precedence? “The wise men of Babylon”, “Then came in all the king’s wise men”, “the wise men, the astrologers”. Far wiser than the wise men, the prophet Daniel went without gifts: “Then Daniel answered and said before the king, Let thy gifts be to thyself, and give thy rewards to another.”
The riches of the song, of its instigations and recesses, constitute in themselves a range of gifts. Yet there remains something deeply dark about the song’s ending. The crucial decision by Dylan can be felt in his leaving unrhymed in this last verse the words “perfection” and “hammer”. What is perfection up against? A hammer.317 And this involves the question of how it is, and of why it is, and of whether it believably is, that
My love she’s like some raven
At my window with a broken wing
This is another of the occasions in my experience of Dylan, my experience moreover of his greatest songs (for the other instances of my perturbation are One Too Many Mornings and Positively 4th Street), when I don’t know what to think, or what to feel, or quite how to argue and to judge. For there is at the end of the song what feels like a curious rounding on the woman. She has been evoked throughout the song in a way that is on the face of it incompatible with her being like some raven with a broken wing. Why is she like some raven with a broken wing? Because she has now been hit with a hammer?
The end of the song should be felt as something of a surprise, to put it mildly. The beautiful equanimity of Dylan’s voicing and of the tune itself should not disguise this from us, although clearly to speak of disguise may do the enterprise less than justice: not, perhaps, an attempt to evade the contrariety, but to bring home an evasiveness or a self-deception that threatens all such laudatory lovings. The song seems to me to turn out to be saying something along these lines: “What I like about her is that she is so wonderfully independent of me, she doesn’t really need me, other people do this, that, and the other, and she deliciously doesn’t, she, she, she – actually, come to think of it, far from being what I like about her, it’s why . . .” – exit, muttering darkly something about going to get a hammer, and maybe breaking more than her wing, her spirit . . . She had been valued for not needing to need him, yet now there is felt a need to be needed by her, a need that she not be so strong.
A fascinating situation, if I read it aright (and no doubt if I don’t), but one that raises – as so often do the love poems of Donne – the question of whether the situation is being dramatized or not. Dramatized or inadvertently advertised? Are the feelings in the song realized as to their true nature, as inevitably tinged with falsity, their wresting of feelings from what is true like ice, like fire? Does the doctor ramble, or can he be trusted to diagnose truly?
The song had begun with a simple haunting asseveration:
My love she speaks like silence
Without ideals or violence
It ends no less simply but now differently haunted:
My love she’s like some raven
At my window with a broken wing
The violence that had been disavowed in the beginning has come to constitute the end. For violence is just below the surface of the lines:
The wind howls like a hammer
The night blows rainy
All but silently (that is, tacitly), this invokes the raining of blows on somebody with a hammer.318 When “rain” and “blows” and “hammer” go together, “perfection” is set to meet “hammer”, without rhyme but with reason. (So different from the unrhyming relationship of “faithful” to “roses”, or from the unique and delicate unrhymedness of “softly”.) Is her perfection to be broken by some phantom hammer? Or was she never as perfect as we – going along with her, going out with her – had supposed?
Dylan has had lots of shots at that line “The night blows rainy.” You can hear him sing in a 1965 out-take “The rain blows cold”. But then “cold” has no rhyme at all, with a very chilling effect. On another occasion, you can hear him sing what is printed in Lyrics 1962–1985, “The night blows cold and rainy” – which separates the word “blows” from rain / rainy, and so does something to mitigate the incipient violence. “Even the pawn must hold a grudge”. Even the king? Even Dylan, whom I ungrudgingly admire?
The choice is, in my judgement, stark. If it is granted that the end must be allowed to retain its surprise, its shock even, then the question (when it comes not to valuing the song, but to valuing it at its true worth) is whether the end is apprehended in the course of the song. And apprehended has to mean understood, or – to invoke Henry James’s term – “placed”.319 So from the wing of a raven to The Wings of the Dove. The elaborations are those of love and resentment:
He was walking in short on a high ridge, steep down on either side, where the proprieties – once he could face at all remaining there – reduced themselves to his keeping his head. It was Kate who had so perched him, and there came up for him at moments, as he found himself planting one foot exactly before another, a sensible sharpness of irony as to her management of him. It wasn’t that she had put him in danger �
�� to be in real danger with her would have had another quality. There glowed for him in fact a kind of rage at what he wasn’t having; an exasperation, a resentment, begotten truly by the very impatience of desire, in respect to his postponed and relegated, his so extremely manipulated state. It was beautifully done of her, but what was the real meaning of it unless that he was perpetually bent to her will?
All he had originally felt in her came back to him, was indeed actually as present as ever – how he had admired and envied what he called to himself her direct talent for life, as distinguished from his own, a poor weak thing of the occasion, amateurishly patched up; only it irritated him the more that this was now, ever so characteristically, standing out in her.320
There she is, there they are, in Henry James’s imagining. And, if we allow for this and that, in Dylan’s imagining.
Every time I write a song, it’s like writing a novel. Just takes me a lot less time, and I can get it down . . . down to where I can re-read it in my head a lot.321
Read books, repeat quotations, draw conclusions.
Sugar Baby
When it comes to the way they walk, there are songs that stroll and songs that stride, those that prance and those that saunter. Amble or gambol, meander and maunder. Foxtrot, lope, and pace. How a song moves those who hear it, this will be intimate with how it does itself move, particularly when it is of movement that it sings. Just imagine all the ways there are to talk the walk. Indefatigable: Pressing On. Pricked: If You Gotta Go, Go Now. Hobbling: “My toes too numb to step”. (I don’t believe you, thought Mr. Tambourine Man.) Hobbled: Cold Irons Bound. Or following a direction: “Sugar Baby get on down the road”.
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 31