In liquid burnings, or on dry to dwell,
Is all the sad variety of Hell.342
As to rhyme-scheme, A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall doesn’t have one. Or much rhyming, come to that. This, despite its starting with a rhyming couplet that will be varied crucially but never relinquished at any verse’s head:
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
And where have you been, my darling young one?
The moment that it moves from this rhyming couplet (immediately, that is), the song sets itself at a great distance from how the ballad had enforced its sombre cross-examination. The song proceeds to work upon us – after every opening question – not by rhyme but through an insistent cadence, the unstressed final syllable that is the feminine ending: “I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty móuntains”.343
The most common feminine ending in the language, my darling young one, is -ing. Or -in’ in Dylan’s voicin’ – though not invariably. (“I heard many people laughin’”, but “I met a young woman whose body was burning” – “laughin’” is one thing, “burning” is no laughing matter.) Against the future that is a-gonna fall, the present participles from the past in the song are an ominous presence. If we pluck out the endings of the lines, we see or hear that the first verse (surprising, in retrospect) has no truck with -ing. What it confronts at the line-endings is a mounting of nouns: “son”, “one”, “mountains”, “highways”, “forests”, “oceans”, and (finally) “graveyard” – the mouth of the graveyard at once closing hard on the rhyme as it swings around:
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
There will later be a variant of this vocal grimace at the end of the fourth verse: “I met another man who was wounded in hatred, / And it’s a hard, it’s a hard . . .” – where “hatred” swallows “hard”.
Only one of the first verse’s noun-endings will return to such a position: “forests”, which (as “forest”) comes to darken the last verse within a sequence of words that – given “deepest” – makes “forest” feel less like a noun than an adjective in the superlative, an extremity: “I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest dark forest”.344
The lines come to an end with fateful nouns, and Dylan’s forests and mountains are in tune with those of Philip Sidney. The double sestina in Arcadia opens:
You goat-herd gods, that love the grassy mountains,
You nymphs that haunt the springs in pleasant vallies,
You satyrs joyed with free and quiet forests,
Vouchsafe your silent ears to plaining music,
Which to my woes gives still an early morning,
And draws the dolour on till weary evening.
William Empson’s eliciting of Sidney’s greatness could be vouchsafed to Dylan’s plaining music:345
The poem beats, however rich its orchestration, with a wailing and immovable monotony, for ever upon the same doors in vain. Mountaines, vallies, forests; musique, evening, morning; it is at these words only that Klaius and Strephon pause in their cries; these words circumscribe their world; these are the bones of their situation; and in tracing their lovelorn pastoral tedium through thirteen repetitions, with something of the aimless multitudinousness of the sea on a rock, we seem to extract all the meaning possible from these notions.
mountains: they suggest being shut in, or banishment; impossibility and impotence, or difficulty and achievement; greatness that may be envied or may be felt as your own (so as to make you feel helpless, or feel powerful); they give you the peace, or the despair, of the grave.
forests: though valuable and accustomed, are desolate and hold danger; there are both nightingales and owls in them; their beasts, though savage, give the strong pleasures of hunting; their burning is either useful or destructive.
music: may express joy or sorrow; is at once more and less direct than talking, and so is connected with one’s permanent feeling about the characters of pastoral that they are at once very rustic and rather over-civilised; it may please or distress the by-standers.
The meaning of Dylan’s music of joy and sorrow? “I would suggest”, T. S. Eliot said, “that none of the plays of Shakespeare has a ‘meaning’, though it would be equally false to say that a play of Shakespeare is meaningless.”346 The first verse of A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, while far from meaningless, is -ingless. The pressure is on in the second and third verses, in both of which there is this present tension in successive lines, first two lines, then three lines (from within which you might add the ten thousand whisperin’):
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’
I heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin’
I heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’
I heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin’347
The fourth verse has, on her own (and on its own as not -in’), “I met a young woman whose body was burning”. And then the last verse insists that there is no escape, that there ain’t no going back. First, there arrive the two participles – a-goin’ and fallin’ – that you have been waiting for ever since you heard that “a hard rain’s a-gonna fall”: “I’m a-goin’ back out ’fore the rain starts a-fallin’”. A-going back out: going to back out? Never. (This will be the last verse all right: no previous one has mentioned rain except as forming part of the refrain.) Next and last, there is the beginning of the final end in the reiteration I start sinkin’ / I start singin’:
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
And the nub of it all? The pearly grit that is “it”. All the way from the specific identifications of “it” in “Oh, what did you see?”:
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it,
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
– through to the unspecified final “it” that is it all:
And I’ll tell it and speak it and think it and breathe it,348
And reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it
The refrain is sequential and torrential:
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
Its oppressive force is built by the repeated withholding of the other four-letter word, so that “It’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard” must leave us waiting for “rain”. “Or else expecting rain”.349 The scale of this protraction will be the clearer if we think of another refrain that works by deferral, not massively amassed but quietly insistent or persistent: “There’s a slow, slow train comin’ up around the bend” (Slow Train).350 Not “There’s a slow, there’s a slow, there’s a slow, there’s a slow, and there’s a slow train comin’ up around the bend”. Things have changed when it becomes a matter of waiting for a train.351
Waiting, because fortitude, like patience, is a relation of the present to both the past and the future. In this, it differs from, say, courage, which may be shown suddenly here and now. Courage need make no claim as to what it was and what it will be. True, the habit of being courageous (“May you always be courageous”, Forever Young) is one to be cultivated, yet courage does not have the habitual built into its very constitution. But patience and fortitude give, in the present, an assurance about what their past has been and what their future has every chance of being; they are constituted of the three tenses, the three dimensions of past, present, and future. The past is summoned by the first four questions: “Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?”, “Oh, what did you see . . .?”, “Oh, what did you hear . . .?”, and “Oh, what did y
ou meet . . .?” But the final verse is spurred into the future:
“And what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son?”
“I’ll tell it and speak it and think it and breathe it”
The final panorama could be seen as a journey into the depths of the word “resolution”. In the words of The Oxford English Dictionary:
Determination; firmness or steadiness of purpose; unyielding temper.
I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest dark forest
A statement upon some matter; a decision or verdict on some point; a formal decision, determination or expression of opinion.
Where black is the color, where none is the number
The process by which a material thing is reduced or separated into its component parts or elements.
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
The act, process, or capability of rendering distinguishable the component parts of an object or closely adjacent optical or photographic images, or of separating measurements of similar magnitude of any quantity in space or time.
And I’ll tell it and speak it and think it and breathe it
And reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it
Fortitude is the supreme virtue of the quest. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall calls up the quests both of the medieval world and of the medievalizing world of later art. “I had so long suffered in this quest”: the poem that in some ways most breathes the pestilential air of Dylan’s song (as against being the ballad that launched his song) is not medieval but Victorian, Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”.352 Like the song, it is a vision of judgement. “’Tis the Last Judgement’s fire must cure this place”. It ends, after a daunting parade of all those who had failed in the quest, with – dauntless all the same – fortitude, fortissime:
in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.”
But when you have a trumpet at your lips (or a harmonica, for that matter), you cannot ask or answer questions, and A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall is built, above all and below all, on its being – as Browning’s poem is not – antiphonal. Like Lord Randal, Q. and A. Unlike Lord Randal, not equally Q. and A. Alternation with alteration. Q.E.D.
But this does itself raise a Q. For while there is no doubt at all as to who asks
O where ha you been, Lord Randal, my son?
And where ha you been, my handsom young man?
– there is doubt as to who opens by asking
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
And where have you been, my darling young one?
Moreover, antiphonal structure is markedly unusual in Dylan. Blowin’ in the Wind has the asker be the answerer. Who Killed Davey Moore? has its question answered one by one by all those around the boxing ring. True, there is one song, alive with questions, that does set out as antiphonal: Boots of Spanish Leather, which alternates the verses until the seventh verse, when the dark truth dawns, with one of the interlocutors now becoming the narrator for the last three verses, verses that no longer have any place for questions. Though Dylan songs often turn upon questions, none of them has any such sequence of exchanges as makes A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall distinctive.
Added to which, “Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?” doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that one asks oneself – unlike, say, Are You Ready? (“I hope I’m ready”). And Dylan will not have failed to register that Lord Randal is not only antiphonal, it is an interrogation, an inquiry that becomes an inquisition. “My son” . . . “Mother”, in every verse. What is so horrible about this murder story is how close the whole scene is to the banality of every mother to every son.
“O where ha you been, Lord Randal, my son?”
“An wha met you there, Lord Randal, my son?”
“And what did she give you, Lord Randal, my son?”
“An wha gat your leavins, Lord Randal, my son?”
“An what becam of them, Lord Randal, my son?”
“What d’ye leave to your mother, Lord Randal, my son?”
“What d’ye leave to your sister, Lord Randal, my son?”
“What d’ye leave to your brother, Lord Randal, my son?”
“What d’ye leave to your true-love, Lord Randal, my son?”
“What was school-lunch like, Lord Randal, my son?”
“What do her parents do, Lord Randal, my son?”
Which is where another unforgettable ballad comes into the grim picture.353 A man with his sword-blade a-bleedin’. Mother and son, antiphonally, her “Edward, Edward” being met always by his “Mither, mither”.
“Why dois your brand sae drap wi bluid,
Edward, Edward,
Why dois your brand sae drap wi bluid,
And why sae sad gang yee O?”
“O I hae killed my hauke sae guid,
Mither, mither,
O I hae killed my hauke sae guid,
And I had nae mair bot hee O.”
Whereupon the mother insists “Your haukis bluid was nevir sae reid” (“My deir son”) – alternating her four lines with his four again, as in all seven of the verses. “O I hae killed my reid-roan steed”. She again refuses to believe him. And he: “O I hae killed my fadir deir, / Mither, mither”.
“And whatten penance wol ye drie for that,
Edward, Edward?
And whatten penance wol ye drie for that,
My deir son, now tell me O.”
He will set sail, journeying into exile.
“And what wul ye doe wi your towirs and your ha’?”
“Ile let thame stand tul they doun fa”
“And what wul ye leive to your bairns and your wife?”
“The warldis room, late them beg thrae life”
And then the devastating desolate end:
“And what wul ye leive to your ain mither deir,
Edward, Edward?
And what wul ye leive to your ain mither deir,
My deir son, now tell me O.”
“The curse of hell frae me sall ye beir,
Mither, mither,
The curse of hell frae me sall ye beir,
Sic counseils ye gave to me O.”
Like Lord Randal, this ends with the curse of hell, levied again upon a woman, this time not a true-love but (even more hideously) no truly loving mother or wife.
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall is a vision of judgement, a scouring vision of hell. Hell on earth. And who is the mother who asks “Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?”? Mother Earth.
Milton has his Paradise Lost, where the fallen angels in hell, “with impious hands, / Rifled the bowels of their mother Earth”. A. E. Housman has his Paradisal Shropshire Lost: “The earth, because my heart was sore, / Sorrowed for the son she bore”. Dylan has his Paradise Lost: “There’s a million dreams gone, there’s a landscape being raped” (Where Are You Tonight?).
Mother Nature. And Mother Earth. If you don’t care for the old girl, you call her “beldam earth”, and leave her to her unlovely landscape of cosmic indigestion:
Diseasèd Nature oftentimes breaks forth
In strange eruptions; and the teeming Earth
Is with a kind of colic pinched and vext
By the imprisoning of unruly wind
Within her womb: which for enlargement striving,
Shakes the old beldam Earth, and tumbles down
Steeples and moss-grown towers.
(I Henry IV, III, i)354
Browning had shown her in a bad light and a bad mood, bitching about what had become of her landscape:
“See
Or shut your eyes,” said Nature peevishly,
“It nothing skills: I cannot help my case:
’Tis the Last Judgement’s fire must cure this place,
Calcine its clods and set my prisoners free.”
(XI)
The damp dirty prisoners. But in A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall Dylan sorrows for the mother who is being lost to all her sons. Mother Earth and Mother Nature are imperilled by the hard rain. And by the pellets of poison. And by so much else that haunts the song. Not just the one Dead Sea, but a dozen dead oceans.
Childe Roland had asked “Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage?”, with the adversaries “Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight”. It might be wondered why my commentary says nothing about the Cuban crisis of October 1962, about the fact that – as Dylan himself said – the song was written when it seemed that Khrushchev and Kennedy were head-to-heading towards the war to end life. What Dylan says about the song – said, one should say, since it was all back then – earns respect and asks thought:
It’s not atomic rain, though. Some people think that. It’s just a hard rain, not the fall out rain, it isn’t that at all. The hard rain that’s gonna fall is in the last verse, where I say the “pellets of poison are flooding us all” [“flooding their waters”], I mean all the lies that people are told on their radios and in the newspapers, trying to take people’s brains away, all the lies I consider poison.355
“Every line of it is actually the start of a whole song.” “Line after line after line, trying to capture the feeling of nothingness. I kept repeating things I feared.” Feared, but imagined facing with fortitude.
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
What precipitated the song was the Cuban crisis. Agreed. But the song, being a work of art, is always going to be larger than and other than what precipitated it. The Oxford English Dictionary: “Hence the frequent precipitation of heavy rain, and the banks and sheets of morning cloud which veil the tree-clad peaks” (1859). The misty mountains. And there remains the solitary man, whose individual suffering asks no less fortitude. “I met one man who was wounded in love”. Next, “I met another man who was wounded in hatred”. In English, you can be in love, and you can say something in hatred, and you can be wounded by or with hatred356 – but “who was wounded in hatred”? Terribly damaged and damaging: in hatred with her or him or them, as if hatred were an ethos and an atmosphere. The man who is left alone may stand in need of fortitude. You can feel it and you can hear it in Most of the Time or (with an alien sense of desertion) in I Believe in You. “They’d like to drive me from this town”.
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 35