The first verse begins “How many roads must a man walk down”, and the last begins “How many times must a man look up”.
A man, not because of thoughtlessness or a hidden gender. Or because of misogyny. A man has no monopoly of common humanity or of mankind. But “a man” here because of the forms that a man’s courage may have to take, forms different from those of a brave wise woman up against aggressive swaggering, a woman of the kind honoured in License to Kill:
Man thinks ’cause he rules the earth he can do with it as he please
And if things don’t change soon, he will
Oh, man has invented his doom
First step was touching the moon
Now, there’s a woman on my block
She just sit there as the night grows still
She say who gonna take away his license to kill?
A man, because of particular men on particular roads, men who got themselves killed for the rights that were theirs and others’. And a man, because this can then be held in tacit tension with the “she” of the song, she who had originally been a “he”:335
How many seas must the white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?
Yes, ’n’ how many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they’re forever banned?
“Let the bird sing, let the bird fly” (Under the Red Sky). Let the cannon balls no longer fly. Let all such weapons become as archaic as cannon balls.
But then Dylan has already done something to see the cannon balls off by voicing the words with such soft roundedness as to mollify their military mettle into cotton-wool, or into the feathered texture of a dove.
In March 1962, just a few months before the song was released like a dove, the Broadside lines had been abroad:
How many roads must a man walk down
Before he is called a man?
Revised, the song calls you on this. “Before you call him a man”. This is the only “you” in the song, right there at the start, and it points to you and perhaps at you, even while it isn’t as simply accusatory as it would be if the words “you call him” couldn’t carry, too, the sense “before he is called”. The song addresses someone, or many a one, throughout. “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind”. And we need to be mindful of the equivocal tone of “my friend”. Perhaps you are indeed a friend to me and to this cause, so that before too long the implication of “my friend” will be able to be “my friends” or even “friends”. But what protects the song against credulity (for there are murderous enemies out there, or the song wouldn’t have had to be written) is the other possibility in the words “my friend”, the edge of possible reprimand in it: What you don’t seem to understand, my friend, is that . . . Such an edge is sharpened in another chilling civil-rights song, Oxford Town:
He come to the door, he couldn’t get in
All because of the color of his skin
What do you think about that, my frien’?
In Blowin’ in the Wind, the words “my friend” are not the threat that they constitute in Desolation Row (“And someone says, ‘You’re in the wrong place, my friend / You better leave’”). But they are salty, too, not just sweet.
Roads and seas and times are plurals set against a man or a mountain, a man or one man. One particular resourcefulness not only turns to the sound of words (“can a mountain” / “can a man turn”) but does so with the help of the very word “turn”: “How many years can a mountain exist” turns into “How many times can a man turn his head”. This is in touch with the ancient good sense that even the prophets must acknowledge: “If the mountain will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet must go to the mountain.” This is good sense that Dylan in an interview brought down from the mountain to the plains or the plain:
“Just getting on a Greyhound bus for three days; and going some place”.
Can you do that now?
“I can’t do that any more. It’s up to . . . y’know, get the Greyhound bus to come to me.”336
The man and the mountain meet in Blowin’ in the Wind, in tune with Blake’s political scale:
Great things are done when men and mountains meet;
This is not done by jostling in the street.
The song is itself one of these great things, one that then – like Blake’s poems – conduced to the great things of social conscience:
How many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free?
The tone of the phrase “some people” is not casual or perfunctory (for the history of a people may be a justifiably proud one, and in this sense a people is not merely some people), but “How many years can some people exist” is designed to bring home, very simply, in common humanity, that a people is people – you know, people. A people is, or are? For the word “people” is a singular that constitutes a plural, too.337
What does it ask? It asks fortitude. The song is determined to keep asking its searching questions, indeflectibly. But it is sensitive to the difference between pressing a point and nagging, so the voicing has its concessive gentleness. A phrase like “How many times must” could very easily have found itself hardened into aggression (How many times must I tell you . . .) – Dylan wants the hint of steel but only the hint. And the same goes for another reiterated turn: “Yes, ’n’”. Dylan has it once in the first verse, and three times in each of the other two verses,338 culminating in the question that is asked of “a man”, of everyman:
Yes, ’n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
Like “How many times”, “Yes, ’n’” could easily manifest too much negativity. And another thing . . .: such is the proclivity of “Yes, ’n’” to lean in for a quick jab. But Dylan doesn’t let this happen; his tone of voice is Let me put this to you, not Let me tell you.
The song has entire singleness of purpose and of tone, but it would not be as supple (and as fertile of new performances) were it not for the modulations of the patterns that it establishes. Take the word “must” again. “How many roads must a man walk down”. In the first verse, this is the insistence, twice more (“how many seas must a white dove sail”, “how many times must the cannon balls fly”). The second verse weaves around, as though seeking a different point of entry into consciences, and the crux becomes a different form of necessity and contingency, not “must” but “can”: “how many years can a mountain exist”, “how many years can some people exist”, “how many times can a man turn his head”. And then the final verse reverts to “must” (“. . . must a man look up”, “must one man have”), only to change the whole timbre of the questioning by having the last instance of all be neither “must” nor “can” but the poignant ordinary cry, “will it take”: “how many deaths will it take till he knows / That too many people have died?”. And this thought, which is simple enough (God knows), has its recesses, being not only about how many deaths it will take but about how many lives will they take. Yet fortitude has what it takes.
But the word for which “must” and “can” and “will it take”, each in its turn, stands by is the obdurately waiting word “Before”.
How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
And “Before” is soon compounded by the sounding sequence: “Before they’re forever banned”. Before . . . forever: yet let us not have to wait forever. Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. Even fortitude has its limits. But how many times does a man have to maintain that Blowin’ in the Wind is at once simplicity and multiplicity? “Man, it’s in the wind – and it’s blowing in the wind.” You don’t need to make heavy weather, man, to know which way the wind blows.
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
But when I came to man’s estate,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
’Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.
Sha
kespeare’s Song, its refrain to be adapted as that of Percy’s Song: “Turn, turn to the rain / And the wind”. Blowin’ in the Wind – Freewheelin’ along – turns to rain, to A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.
It’s a hard song to befall the critic. (Tempted to take a hard rain check.) For one thing, it declines to be an allegory. If someone were to ask, “What does it mean, I saw a white ladder all covered with water?”, might you reply “It means what it says”? T. S. Eliot was once asked what a line of Ash-Wednesday meant, “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree”. The answer: “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree”.339 And there is another thing: that (as with Blowin’ in the Wind) we may well know the song too well, which can easily mean too easily. “I’ll know my song well before I start singin’”: that’s for him to say, or rather to sing, as he does at the end of A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, in the instant before drawing to a close the curtains of his cosmic stage. Alexander Pope drew The Dunciad to an end with an apocalyptic vision:
Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All.
In the universe of Dylan, there is the final rain to come.
And I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard,
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
He knows his song well. But as for us: instead of being kept on our toes, we may find ourselves resting on his laurels when we know his song well before he starts singing. Similarly with what it means for a prodigious performer to sing “I heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’”. We’ve all been at Dylan concerts when this was infuriatingly the case, except that the ten thousand weren’t whispering, they were talking or shouting. Or singing along . . . They know his song well before he starts singing. Know it backwards. Would that they would just let the song surge forwards.
He will not have forgotten what it was like to be out in front of a dozen dead audiences. Bad trips. To be on the road is to be on a quest. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall tells of a quest, which spells the opening of a question. So each verse will open with some variation of the initiating inquiry:
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
And where have you been, my darling young one?
The immediate question about this question is “And you, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?” Dylan knows, and trusts us to know, just where this question has been, has come from. Sure enough, this particular source and resource we are all soberly aware of.340
O where ha you been, Lord Randal, my son?
And where ha you been, my handsom young man?
Not a source only, but an allusion, calling something into play – as will happen with the opening of Highlands,341 where if you fail to recognize that you are in Robert Burns country you must be a pad-eared laddy of the lowlands.
The sinewy ballad Lord Randal prompted a structure within A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall: its having for each verse both an inaugurative question and the concluding refrain. The song, like the predecessor ballad, takes poison, and it knows what impends: hell.
But the ways in which Dylan then chooses to depart so wide-rangingly from the original song of sin are one source of the achievement that is A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall. The ballad’s questions and answers ask the justice of being here in full.
LORD RANDAL
“O where ha you been, Lord Randal, my son?
And where ha you been, my handsom young man?”
“I ha been at the greenwood; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie down.”
“An wha met you there, Lord Randal, my son?
An wha met you there, my handsom young man?”
“O I met wi my true-love; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie down.”
“And what did she give you, Lord Randal, my son?
And what did she give you, my handsom young man?”
“Eels fried in a pan; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie down.”
“An wha gat your leavins, Lord Randal, my son?
And wha gat your leavins, my handsom young man?”
“My hawks and my houns; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie down.”
“An what becam of them, Lord Randal, my son?
And what becam of them, my handsom young man?”
“They stretched their legs out and died; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie down.”
“O I fear you are poisoned, Lord Randal, my son!
I fear you are poisoned, my handsom young man?”
“O yes, I am poisoned; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie down.”
“What d’ye leave to your mother, Lord Randal, my son?
What d’ye leave to your mother, my handsom young man?”
“Four and twenty milk kye; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie down.”
“What d’ye leave to your sister, Lord Randal, my son?
What d’ye leave to your sister, my handsom young man?”
“My gold and my silver; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie down.”
“What d’ye leave to your brother, Lord Randal, my son?
What d’ye leave to your brother, my handsom young man?”
“My houses and my lands; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie down.”
“What d’ye leave to your true-love, Lord Randal, my son?
What d’ye leave to your true-love, my handsom young man?”
“I leave her hell and fire; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie down.”
Throughout, a question is at once asked twice; there is vouchsafed the briefest of answers; and then there is heard an exhausted plea on the verge of death.
Dylan’s creative departure from the shaping spirit of Lord Randal establishes his territory immediately.
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
And where have you been, my darling young one?
I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways
I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
Where have I been? Where fortitude and powers of endurance were called for. There, where I stumbled and walked and crawled. There, where I was the only human being – more, the only sentient being. There, where there was no bed for me to lie down upon, and no succumbing to weariness. The travelling: travail. The landscapes: lethal. This first verse establishes the impulse of the song, a willingness if need be (not a masochistic wish) to take the path of most resistance. Hard going. Thorough going. “I fain wad lie down”. But I’m pressing on.
What Lord Randal may help us to grasp, by taking the force of the contrasts, is the form that Dylan has given to fortitude.
The lineaments of Lord Randal are these. First, that every verse is divided equally between mother and son, between question and answer: two lines apiece. Second, that every verse is therefore of identical size, a quatrain that asks and gives no quarter. Third, that every verse is possessed by not just the same rhyme-scheme but the same rhyming words: son / man [Sc
ottish mon]; soon / down [Scottish doun]. Fourth, that because so much of each verse is constituted of a question that will be sealed in due course by the refrain, it follows that pitilessly few of the words ever change from verse to verse, and this means an unremitting indeflectibility and then a ratcheted force exerted by those few words that do change, the words that are tortured into telling all.
Dylan, for all his respectful gratitude to Lord Randal, abides by none of these precedents that it sets. Such is his right. His making his own way may clarify the lines followed by his song – and to what end.
First, Q. and A. to weigh the same? But in Dylan’s song the question is always outweighed by the scale of the answer, and furthermore this scale itself then varies. The first verse consists of the opening couplet that is the question, followed by five lines of narrated endurance, and then by the two-line refrain – or is the refrain all one line really? (The refrain comes as five asseverations: “it’s a hard . . .”, heard five times before being completed.)
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard,
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
There were, at first, five lines of narrative at the centre; this is varied by expanding to seven such lines and then to six, but with the last verse, doubled up but not flinching in pain, encompassing twelve lines of narrative. Conclusively.
For his part, Lord Randal can do no more than urge again his fatal fatigue: “For I’m wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie down”. Will we weary of hearing this? Such is the question that every refrain has to put to itself. But no, we don’t weary, and this partly because here is no ordinary tiredness, “wearied wi hunting”, rather the pangs of what will soon prove a cruelly altered refrain, with a death different from hunting: “For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie down”. All the more sick at the heart, love-sick, because it was she who administered the poison, “my true-love”.
Far from working with the steeled unchanging penetrations of Lord Randal, Dylan needs a different – a widespread – monotony, something like what Dryden evoked as the infernal ruin that fell to Lucifer after the war in heaven:
These regions and this realm my wars have got;
This mournful empire is the loser’s lot:
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 34