Dylan's Visions of Sin

by Christopher Ricks

  Matthew Arnold heard the truth, long ago, far away:

  The superior character of truth and seriousness, in the matter and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority of diction and movement marking its style and manner. The Study of Poetry. The same would go for the study of song, the study of how song goes. Especially when a song’s concern is a going one.

  Two idioms were the parents of this Sugar Baby, parents who – despite not exactly getting on with one another – were determined to make a go of it. They are the idioms to go without (“You went years without me”) and to keep going (“Might as well keep going now”). Their child would be keep going without. Meanwhile, lurking in the brains behind pa and ma is the thought of getting going, which is why the words “get” and “got” get to usher in “went without” and “keep going”:

  Sugar Baby get on down the road

  You ain’t got no brains, no how

  You went years without me

  Might as well keep going now

  Might as well keep going? Or might as well keep going without me? Might as well keep going, without any mention of “me”.

  When something is sung, a vocal fluctuation can make it impossible even to imagine what the counterpart would be in a poem, let alone what an equivalent would be. Sugar Baby depends upon the way in which (outside the refrain that furnishes the contrast) the music and the voice, from the beginning, are reluctant to accommodate themselves to the shaping that the words’ sense-units would demand, were the words not in a song but in a poem. A poem may play one system of punctuation (the usual marks) against another (the line-ending that has no terminal punctuation), and to this, a song may add the unexpected tilt or pause, the hesitation or edge, that the voice and the music can express and impress.

  Metre, prosody, lineation, rhythm: time for a crèche course. Accent, or stress, is what we are to hear – and listen for – in poetry, particularly poetry in the English tradition. This might take the line that no poet ever quite perpetrates: ti tum, ti tum, ti tum, ti tum, ti tum. That is, an unstressed syllable and then a stressed one, all the way to “Detroit Detroit Detroit Detroit Detroit”. Or, with the stress the other way round, the vast vista in King Lear, never to be forgotten:

  Thou’lt come no more,

  Never, never, never, never, never.

  But then the complication, as we all know, is that there are degrees of stress, so that in conversation as well as in poetry, the life in any utterance is not disposed to have its sounds be simply either stressed or unstressed, either the one or the other. For life and verse like to touch upon matters diversely, with gradations, taking the measure of things.

  In music, the principle of measurement (for that is what metre means) will subordinate accent or stress to quantity or length: how long it takes to utter something. Bars come in lengths. Quantity or length, it is true, was also in some classical poetry the ground rule (Greek more than Latin),322 and there have been intermittent attempts in English poetry to imitate this classical precedent. More memorably, there have been poems (for instance, by William Cowper and by Thomas Hardy) that sound as though they are setting the one principle and practice against the other, quantity or length against stress or accent.

  How long it takes to utter something is not the same as how much stress you put on it, for there may be a word that takes little emphasis but has a clutch of consonants and vowels reluctant to slip along. An effect of stress versus quantity, then, can act as an embodiment of a human contrariety: fate versus resolution, say, or stoicism versus pain, or grief versus relief. Of a particular motion of mind that you are brought to hear, you may feel that it is somehow not natural to move in this way or in these contrarious ways. But art, naturally, cannot afford to limit itself to movements that are natural. For it may be under strain that a truth will be found to reveal itself, brought to light’s intensity from the hiding places of its power. “Plenty of places to hide things here if you wanna hide ’em bad enough”.

  We feel a strain in the strains of Sugar Baby. “You got a way of tearing the world apart. Love, see what you’ve done”. What, on the face of it, could be simpler than the words “a way of”? But the simplicity is torn. For in terms of accent or stress (poetry’s terms), the words would run equably from the stressed into the unstressed: “wáy of ”. But in terms of length or quantity, the two words are granted, by the music and the voice, and by the bleak break after the word “of ”, a plain equality: “wáy óf”.

  You got a way of

  tearing the world apart

  Love

  see what you’ve done

  The effect has something of the off-rhyme about it. For the unmistakable rhyme love / of, see or rather hear City of Gold, a song that he performed in 1980, now covered by the Dixie Hummingbirds on the CD of Masked and Anonymous:

  There is a city of love

  Far from this world

  And the stuff dreams are made of

  Beyond the sunset

  Stars high above

  There is a city of love

  “And the stuff dreams are made of”: good Shakespearean stuff, benign enough, unlike the growl of Philip Larkin:

  Ah, were I courageous enough

  To shout Stuff your pension!

  But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff

  That dreams are made of.

  (Toads)

  “Love rhymes with of ”. Such is the title of a generously revelatory essay by Anne Ferry.323

  There is “a wáy of”, and there is “a wáy óf ”. The one way of apprehending those words is pitched against another. There is a dual possibility in the very word “stress”. Sugar Baby deals in stress, deals with it.

  Prudence and temperance set themselves to engage stress, responsibly anticipating all such movements as may prove incautious or immoderate. Sugar Baby opens with open eyes, thanks to a prudent decision as to where to place oneself:

  I got my back to the sun ’cause the light is too intense

  I can see what everybody in the world is up against

  You can’t turn back – you can’t come back, sometimes we push too far

  One day you’ll open up your eyes and you’ll see where we are

  Prudence and temperance do not shrink from giving advice or from issuing admonitions such as these. For instance, don’t be too intense. Prudence and temperance concur in such a turn of phrase as “Might as well . . .”, which is at once prudential and temperate, careful not to be precipitate or to overdo things, careful not to insist Easily the best thing would be to . . . or Much better to . . . Settle for “Might as well keep going now”: this, as the conclusion of the refrain, both precedes and succeeds another recommending of prudence, “Try to make things better for someone, sometimes, you just end up making it a thousand times worse” – a serpentine line that warns against the danger of spilling and flooding.

  Look before you leap, but first of all, station yourself, not where you look best but where you can best look.

  I got my back to the sun ’cause the light is too intense

  I can see what everybody in the world is up against

  Position yourself where you can best see (and can least be seen back?), where you can see not only what everybody in the world is up against but what everybody in the world is up to. Bear in mind, and not only there, that – in the harsher terms from Foot of Pride –

  There ain’t no goin’ back

  When your foot of pride comes down

  Ain’t no goin’ back324

  “You can’t turn back – you can’t come back”: two halves of truths, these, and saved from being virtue-ridden only by the touches of comedy. First, that even if you can’tcome back, the word “back” can, since hereitis,coming back – after just a couple of lines – from “I got my back to the sun”: back as “You can’t turn back”, and then, not only coming back but coming back again, as “you can’t come back”. Second, by a memory that comes back, the memory of Mississippi earlier on
“Love And Theft”, which had been happy to qualify what, for its part, it felt obliged to say on the matter: “You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way”.

  In Sugar Baby the succeeding thought that opens ominously with “One day you’ll . . .” is out to lace a warning with a threat. Prudence and temperance, who need to watch their propensity to italicize their wisdom (mark my words), do well to remember that they have the duty not only of offering good advice but of offering advice well. That is, in such a way as to maximize the chances of people’s being willing to take it. “Sometimes we push too far”, not just go too far. And this goes even for the high-minded virtues themselves, for here, too, we must not go too far. T. S. Eliot cautioned against too much prudence and temperance:

  Of course one can “go too far” and except in directions in which we can go too far there is no interest in going at all; and only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out just how far one can go.325

  “One day you’ll open up your eyes and you’ll see where we are”. But on this particular day, listening to this song, we have to open up not our eyes but our ears, since Sugar Baby is not verse-lines on a page but a sound-sequence on the waves. Which means that the things that might be said about the song’s movements will be more than usually useless to anyone who does not have the song in the head.

  As printed in the lyrics, the song’s opening is cast as four lines, two couplets that rhyme intense / against and far / are. But as voiced there are twelve units. You might think of these as constituting a twelve-line verse, or as taking care to register within the location of those four long lines several edged divisions, but, either way, such is Dylan’s way with these sub-units of his devising. This is not only where the song goes but how it goes. Get on down the lines when the lineation is set as sung:

  I got my back

  to the sun ’cause

  the light is too intense

  I can see what

  everybody

  in the world is up against

  You can’t turn back –

  you can’t come back,

  sometimes we push too far

  One day

  you’ll open up your eyes and

  you’ll see where we are

  The instrumental bass-line that has opened the song, and that precedes any of the words, may be heard as one sequence that is divided:

  dark dark Darktown dark dark Darktown dark dark Darktown dark . . .

  Immediately following the instrumental opening there are the opening words. Looking down the line:

  I got my backto the sun ’cause the light is too intense

  But, heard and not seen, it goes like this:

  I got my back

  to the sun ’cause

  the light is too intense

  Not “to the sun / ’cause the light . . .”, but “to the sun ’cause / the light is too intense”. As a friend of mine once turned it, comedy is the secret of timing. But then so is tragedy.

  The song’s beat is fourfold, and the rhythm of the instrumental opening is immediately confirmed by there being four syllables in each of the first two units. But the words that provide the title and that later open the refrain, “Sugar Baby”,326 have their four syllables two by two, 2 x 2. The rhythm of the words “Sugar Baby” is a dual rhythm, fourfold and twofold. And in pacing the song, Dylan pauses at certain points so as to make two syllables occupy the time and space that in the basic scheme of things will be expected to be occupied by four syllables. It is this movement in the voicing, with its pauses (contemplative, disconcerted, riven, chary, sardonic, shifting its grounds), that gives to the song its unique gait. The song does proceed down the road, down the line, but it never puts only its best foot forward and it never marches. More, the song always plays the slow troubled subdivisions of the verse-lines against the single-minded momentum of the speedy refrain (wishing her God speed?), the lines of which always get on with it, without a break, getting on down the road and down the line.

  A shape in space for the song’s shaping in time might look like this.

  SUGAR BABY

  I got my back

  to the sun ’cause

  the light is too intense

  I can see what

  everybody

  in the world is up against

  You can’t turn back –

  you can’t come back,

  sometimes we push too far

  One day

  you’ll open up your eyes and

  you’ll see where we are

  Sugar Baby get on down the road, you ain’t got no brains, no how You went years without me, might as well keep going now

  Some of

  these bootleggers,

  they make pretty good stuff

  Plenty of places

  to hide things here if

  you wanna hide ’em bad enough

  I’m staying

  with Aunt Sally,

  but you know, she’s not really my aunt

  Some of these memories

  you can learn to live with

  and some of ’em you can’t

  Sugar Baby get on down the line, you ain’t got no brains, no how You went years without me, you might as well keep going now

  The ladies down in

  Darktown

  they’re doing the Darktown Strut

  Y’ always got to

  be prepared but

  you never know for what

  There ain’t no limit

  to the amount of trouble

  women bring

  Love is pleasing,

  love is teasing,

  love not an evil thing

  Sugar Baby get on down the road, you ain’t got no brains, no how You went years without me, might as well keep going now

  Every moment of

  existence seems

  like some dirty trick

  Happiness can

  come suddenly and

  leave just as quick

  Any minute

  of the day

  the bubble could burst

  Try to make things better327

  for someone, sometimes, you just end up

  making it a thousand times worse

  Sugar Baby get on down the road, you ain’t got no brains, no how You went years without me, might as well keep going now

  Your charms have

  broken many a heart

  and mine is surely one

  You got a way of

  tearing the world apart

  Love, see what you’ve done

  Just as

  sure as we’re living,

  just as sure as you’re born

  Look up, look up –

  seek your Maker –

  ’fore Gabriel blows his horn

  Sugar Baby get on down the line, you ain’t got no sense, no how You went years without me, might as well keep going now

  All the pauses are designed to give us pause. Attentive to the mobility of the heart and head, which are often at odds with one another (and neither of them simply of one mind), the pauses repay attention.

  One day

  You’ll open up your eyes and

  you’ll see where we are

  With the doubled weight not of four syllables but of two, “One day” is dilated so as to occupy – while speaking of time – the time that on all the six previous occasions in this opening verse has been occupied by the expected count of four syllables that confirms the fourfold beat of the song:

  I got my back

  to the sun ’cause

  and

  I can see what

  everybody

  and

  You can’t turn back –

  you can’t come back

  Instead of those foursomes, a twosome: “One day”. This vocal dwelling upon “One day”328 is then succeeded at once by the local housing within the next line, this time not of two syllables instead of four, but of seven syllables instead of four:

  One da
y

  you’ll open up your eyes and

  Opening up, yes indeed. Especially when this expanded syllabification is then compounded by the reach of the open “and”, out on the end of the arm of the line. This is a line that does not run, as it does on the page,

  One day you’ll open up your eyes and you’ll see where we are

  – or, as the sense-units would have it,

  One day you’ll open up your eyes

  And you’ll see where we are

  – but is audible as the footfalls of this:

  One day

  you’ll open up your eyes and

  you’ll see where we are

  At the brink, “and”. In The Waste Land T. S. Eliot transformed Oliver Goldsmith’s song by a tiny unsettling re-settling, re-setting on the page Goldsmith’s conjunction “and” in an inspired disjunction. Goldsmith:

  When lovely woman stoops to folly,

  And finds too late that men betray,

  What charm can soothe her melancholy,

  What art can wash her guilt away?

  Eliot:

  When lovely woman stoops to folly and

  Paces about her room again, alone,

  She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,

  And puts a record on the gramophone.

  The record could not, except in Back to the Future, have been “Love And Theft”, but love and theft are in evidence there in Goldsmith – and in Eliot, whose lines pace about the room with a different view of these matters.

  A road may have cracks where you had better step with caution. The movement from one verse of Sugar Baby to another is not a train of thought that moves on metalled ways but is firmly footing. What is it, for instance, that grounds the move from “you’ll see where we are”, via the refrain (“get on down the road”), to “Some of these bootleggers”?

  Some of

  these bootleggers,

  they make pretty good stuff

  Plenty of places

  to hide things here if

  you wanna hide ’em bad enough

  “Some of”: these well-judged words stay with their thought (taking the time of four syllables, not of only two). Only some of these bootleggers, don’t forget. The bootleggers are the fire-water ones of Prohibition, not the cassetteers to whom Dylan in concert mostly turns a blind eye. It is blind, not just blind drunk, that the bootleggers’ concoctions may make you if the bootleggers have made not good but bad stuff. (“I can see”, “open up your eyes”: no harm done, as yet.) But this prospect is tinged with a characteristic comedy when the rhyme is of “good stuff” with “bad enough”.