Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
II
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provenc¸al song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth,
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim –
III
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
IV
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards.
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
V
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild –
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
VI
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain –
To thy high requiem become a sod.
VII
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
VIII
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self !
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music – Do I wake or sleep?
NOT DARK YET
I
Shadows are falling and I’ve been here all day
It’s too hot to sleep, time is running away
Feel like my soul has turned into steel
I’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal
There’s not even room enough to be anywhere
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there
Dylan’s Verse 1
first line:
Dylan and Keats, shadows
Dylan, day / Keats, days
second line:
Dylan, too hot / Keats, too happy
Dylan and Keats, sleep
Dylan and Keats, time
Dylan, running away / Keats, fade away; fade far away; Away! away!
third line:
Dylan, my soul / Keats, thy soul; my sole self
fourth line:
Dylan, sun / Keats, sunburnt
six line:
Dylan, dark / Keats, Darkling; darkness [this, in the closing line of each Dylan verse]
So there is only one line from Dylan’s first verse that has no Keatsian parallels: “There’s not even room enough to be anywhere”, and even this might be thought to be touched by Keats’s words “But here there”. Here, there, and everywhere. Or anywhere. Beckett, The End: “I didn’t pay attention. Strictly speaking I wasn’t there. Strictly speaking I believe I’ve never been anywhere.” Beckett, For to End Yet Again: “And dream of a way in a space with neither here nor there where all the footsteps ever fell can never fare nearer to anywhere nor from anywhere further away.”372
2
Well my sense of humanity has gone down the drain
Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain
She wrote me a letter and she wrote it so kind
She put down in writing what was in her mind
I just don’t see why I should even care
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there
Verse 2
first line:
Dylan, Well my sense / Keats, so well; My sense
Dylan, the drain / Keats, the drains
second line:
Dylan, pain / Keats, pains [with the same rhyme]
third line:
Dylan, so kind / Keats, so well
3
Well, I’ve been to London and
I’ve been to gay Paree
I’ve followed the river and I got to the sea
I’ve been down on the bottom of a world full of lies
I ain’t looking for nothing in anyone’s eyes
Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there
Verse 3
first line:
Dylan and Keats, well
second line:
Dylan, the river / Keats, the still stream [and Lethe, the river that in Too Much of Nothing flows into Dylan’s “waters of oblivion”]
Dylan, the sea / Keats, seas
third line:
Dylan, been down / Keats, tread thee down
Dylan, world full of lies / Keats, world; full [five times, of which four are full of, one being full of the true]
fourth line:
Dylan and Keats, eyes
fifth line:
Dylan, Sometimes / Keats, oft-times; many a time
4
I was born here and I’ll die here against my will
I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still
Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb
I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from
Don’t even hear a murmur of a prayer
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there
Verse 4
first line:
Dylan, was born / Keats, wast not born
Dylan and Keats, die [and Keats, dies, death]
second line:
Dylan, standing still / Keats, stood; still stream; Still
third line:
Dylan, numb / Keats, numbness
fourth line:
Dylan, can’t even remember / Keats, I cannot; quite forget
Dylan, get away from / Keats, fade away; fade far away; Away! away
fourth into fifth line:
Dylan, I came here > Don’t even hear [this verse of Dylan has here . . . here . . . here . . . hear > there] / Keats, Here where men sit and hear each other groan
fifth line:
Dylan, a murmur / Keats, murmurous [and this on summer eves, too]
Enough.
No such parallels ever amount to proof (literary judgements don’t admit of proof, only of evidence), but there are too many likenesses for it to be likely that they are coincidences. T. S. Eliot said, about the “borrowings” of the Elizabethan dramatist George Chapman, that the scholar’s “accumulation of probabilities, powerful and concurrent, leads to conviction”; and Eliot wrote similarly on another occasion, of “many other parallels, each slight in itself but having a cumulative plausibil-ity”.373
It adds a further dimension to these affinities that Not Dark Yet stands to Keats’s Ode very much as Keats’s Ode, in its turn, stood to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold”. The continuity and community of the poets constitute a success that is a succession. And even as Dylan doesn’t exactly allude to Keats, but has a different, a diffused, gratitude to his art (more than a source, a resource), so Keats doesn’t allude to the Shakespeare sonnet – and yet just about every word of the sonnet takes its place and its turn within the Ode to a Nightingale. What in Shakespeare at first is a “time of year”, and then becomes a time of day, is all along a time of day for Keats – as it was to prove, in due course, for Dylan. Sonnet 73 has its own way of saying and of singing “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there”.
That time of year thou mayst in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death bed, whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nourisht by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.
Shakespeare speaks explicitly of night, “black night”. Keats is explicit, too; his Ode to a Nightingale has “tender is the night”, “this passing night”, “the midnight”. But it is one of Dylan’s dark forbearances that “night” is never once brought into the light of day in Not Dark Yet. Oh, night casts its shadow throughout but is best left unsaid. And you can feel this whether or not the song brings the sonnet or the Ode to your mind. I’m not offering the absence of the word “night” as evidence of the presence of Shakespeare and Keats, for in terms of an argument this would be having it both ways. But there is a strong affinity with Keats in the way that in the song night colours, darkens, the whole atmosphere while never being spoken of. For winter colours and darkens Keats’s To Autumn, being the only one of the four seasons not mentioned in this profound poem to a season.
When you say that It’s not such-and-such yet, but it’s getting there, the such-and-such could be many a different word. But think how much thinner Dylan’s refrain would have been as “It’s not night yet, but it’s getting there”. And this is a matter not only of understanding why night should be an intimation of mortality, not an announcement, but also of sensing how much the refrain gets from the fact that we don’t speak of getting night but we do speak of getting dark. So that when we hear, and hear again and again, “but it’s getting there”, the word “getting” is getting its full due, a simple inexorable compacting of the two things that it is up to: getting there and getting dark.
Keats said, with touching modesty and confidence in the face of the personal extinction that he knew would soon be his, “I think I shall be among the English poets after my death”. To set Dylan among the poets, there with Keats, is to give both poets their due. Not as a matter of the culture wars.374 But because gratitude to Dylan is at one with his gratitude to Keats. Gratitude disowns envy. “’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot”.
Perhaps the Ode to a Nightingale came particularly to mind for Dylan’s song because the Ode is a poem couched always in song: “singest of summer in full-throated ease”, “Provenc¸al song”, “Still wouldst thou sing”, “self-same song”. When Dylan sings “Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear”, he may want us to recall that a burden may be a refrain, one that singers were said to bear. Keats, elsewhere: “Bearing the burden of a shepherd song” (Endymion, I, 136).
Dylan’s refrain or burden is “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there”. He bears it and bares it beautifully, with exquisite precision of voice, dry humour, and resilience, all these in the cause of fortitude at life’s going to be brought to an end by death. And the word “burden” itself carries for Dylan, though not only for him, a sense of sin: in Dear Landlord, “Please don’t put a price on my soul / My burden is heavy”; in Yonder Comes Sin, “The old evil burden that’s been dragging you down”; and in Foot of Pride, “how to carry a burden too heavy to be yours”.375 There was a characteristically memorable mixture of the direct and the circuitous in Dylan’s remark in an interview: “I sure would like to be spared of the burden to muse about what my fans think about me or my songs.”376 Not just spared the burden but spared of it, compacting “spared” and “relieved of”, and with “muse” perhaps in touch with those presiding forces without which we wouldn’t be inspired into the arts at all. (Keats mused in the Ode about “many a musèd rhyme”.) Some burdens Dylan is spared (how right he is about the artist’s at least having the right not to have to muse about his art), but not the burden that he has taken it on himself to sing. From refrains he cannot refrain.
Not Dark Yet seeks – in the great phrase from Freud – to make friends with the necessity of dying. This is fortitude not only as the subject of the song but as its element, its air. Like Keats in the Ode, Dylan understands what it is to go even beyond making friends with this necessity, and he is willing to be – as human beings sometimes should be – half in love with easeful death. Keats:
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
– and yet a painful thought. “Half in love with easeful Death”: but only half.
There’s much more to Not Dark Yet than time – its subject and its element – permits of. Oh, its being a song that starts with “Shadows are falling and I’ve been here all day” – and then its having twenty-four lines, one for each hour of all day.377 And the rapt beauty of the long instrumental patience – a full minute – both before the final verse, and, of the same length, after it: not . . . yet, not . . . yet.
Or there are the felicities of rhyming, including the rhyming that is included within lines. Say, those that open and close upon the same sound. This may feel like pincers or forceps: “Feel like my soul has turned into steel”. Yet even this is about making friends with something (again, it feels to me, friends with the necessity of dying), since “The friends thou hast”, we are urged in Hamlet, “Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel” (“soul” again steeled into “steel”). And I can’t imagine a tauter evocation of hoops of steel than this having the line itself be hooped: “Feel like my soul has turned into steel”. (Dylan voices a pause after “has�
��, the caesura there, so that “turned” is the turning point.) And with “steel” turned into “still” two words later (“into steel / I’ve still got”) – and then with “still” still there in the last verse: “I’m standing still”.
To start and end the line upon the same sound may be to fold the room of the line (“There’s not even room enough to be anywhere”). Or – in assonance, this time – to fold the world of the line or (fourfold) of two successive lines:
I’ve been down on the bottom of a world full of lies
I ain’t looking for nothing in anyone’s eyes
And it is especially by assonance, at once massive and as though passive, that the song brings home the impossibility of escaping the self that is I:
I just don’t see why I should even care
I was born here and I’ll die here against my will
I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still
I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from
At which point (the point of a line that is elongated into the drolly dramatic, given its meaning) we would do well to register the way in which “away” turns out to be what you can’t get away from, with the first verse’s “It’s too hot to sleep, time is running away” returning in this final verse (via that excursion to “gay Paree”) as “I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from” – an extensively protracted line, with scarcely a caesura at all in the length of it, as if, despite everything, the singer can still remember having world enough and time. “Away” as what there’s no getting away from (Keats’s “Away! away!”), and with “from” rhyming with “numb” (“so vacant and numb”) as the first and last imperfect rhyme in the entire song, a rhyme that numbs and that turns slightly away from our hope of rhyme’s satisfactions.
“There is a singer everyone has heard”. So says, or sings, Robert Frost. The song is that of The Oven Bird, and Frost’s sonnet comes in the end to paradox and pathos:
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 38