There is no complacent assent, then, after the movement from guessing to knowing, for in no time “I know” is followed by the idiomatically quizzical “I would have thought” – or rather, by “I’d have thought” – or rather, by “I’d a-thought”:
By this time I’d a-thought that I would be sleeping
In a pine box for all eternity
My faith keeps me alive, but I still be weeping
For the saving grace that’s over me
“I’d a-thought” refuses to stand on ceremony. “I still be weeping”, going beyond this, refuses to stand by the rules of grammar. The Gospel songs are where Dylan most feels free to do such a thing, as though celebrating a freedom gained. Yet there must still be a sense of responsibility. For “but I still weep” or “but I still am weeping” would not come to quite the same thing as “but I still be weeping”. What the shift in the grammar does (over and above giving a hint of Gospel English)404 is create “I still be weeping” by sliding together “I still am weeping” and “I’ll still be weeping”. And why slide together the present and the future? Because of “for all eternity”. In eternity, and in the eyes of God, there can be no distinction of past, present, and future. True, we will still need to speak in such terms (“My faith keeps me alive”), but we should do so with intimations that the terms – in the more than long run that is eternity – will not ever do.
Well, the death of life, then come the resurrection
Wherever I am welcome is where I will be
What a pregnant phrase “the death of life” is, at once simple-minded and ghostly. And “then come the resurrection”: its central sense is the one that we hear in “come Christmas, I shall have retired”,405 but the idiom has feelers out to some variations: then comes the resurrection? then will come the resurrection? then may there come the resurrection? (Till kingdom come, His kingdom.) Again there is the merging of present and future, further blended with the trust and the prayer that constitute faith in the future, not only in the words “then come” but “where I will be”. How unerringly the coming to the final point is conducted: “Wherever I am” is both contracted and expanded as “where I will be” (“Wherever” contracted to “where”, “I am” expanded to “where I will be”). And this is interleaved with the more ample contraction and expansion (contraction of seven words down to one, expansion into eternal hope) that brings “Well, the death of life, then come the resurrection” down to the sheer succinctness of the one word “welcome”. “Wherever I am welcome is where I will be”. Humility (I am happy to leave it to Him), and assurance (for in His will is not only my peace but my happiness).
The fourth word of the song is “it”: “If You find it in your heart, can I be forgiven?” Tiny and indispensable, it – or rather, “it” – does not recur until the final verse, four times there:406
The wicked know no peace and you just can’t fake it
There’s only one road and it leads to Calvary
It gets discouraging at times, but I know I’ll make it
By the saving grace that’s over me
Very capacious, the atom of the word “it”. Its irreducibility is at one with its richness of suggestion. “There’s only one road and it leads to Calvary / It gets discouraging at times”: oh, not just the road gets discouraging, but the whole thing. And “I know I’ll make it / By the saving grace that’s over me”: how are we to take “By” there? Is “By” the means by which I come to know this truth? (By the saving grace that’s over me, I know I’ll make it.) Or is “By” the means by which I’ll make it? (I’ll make it by the saving grace that’s over me.) “By” is bifold here, but faith rightly refuses to make the distinction. “I’ll make it”: nothing could be more unspecified and yet nothing could be more assured – by the grace of grace. Yet even at this height of the song there needs to be something low-key. Which is how and where the rhyme fake it / make it comes in. It is different not only in tone (its slangy “fake it”) from all the previous such rhymes but also in its constitution, being the song’s only rhyme that is comprised of two words.407
The song itself, by its nature, is words and music and a voice. The voice enters immediately (less common than you might think in a Dylan song), with the words of admission, “If You . . .”, immediately, a beat or so ahead of the music, as though not wishing to miss a beat when it comes to expressing contrition, gratitude, and faith. Self-attention, self-absorption, must be acknowledged as inescapable: the last word of each verse is “me”. But the voicing of “me”, and of its rhyming precedent in each verse,408 changes as the song moves and moves us. There is an ever increasing elongation in “over me”, the word being brief and to the point in the first verse and then gradually straining and strained as the stations of the Cross (“it leads to Calvary”) proceed. It is with the fourth verse that the strain tells, in the racked or throttled throating: “vanity” becoming a drowning gurgling. And so to the final verse, where “times” pleads for mercy as though tortured (“Time is the mercy of eternity”, said Blake), and where the last “it” – “make it” – wrests the two-letter word into becoming a several-syllable word. Of Dylan’s first album, Robert Shelton wrote unforgettably: “Elasticized phrases are drawn out until you think they may snap.”409 But the phrasing of Saving Grace is not elastic, it is taut wire.
All roads lead to Rome. The Romans were good at roads, and good at making sure where they led in the end. But the Roman Empire, in the person of Pontius Pilate, was not able to destroy Christian revelation and the Cross. “There’s only one road and it leads to Calvary”. The song puts unbelievers on the spot (a good place to be, actually), though Kurt Loder in Rolling Stone410 preferred to feel otherwise:
Saving Grace is so persuasive on its own terms that one can disregard the lyrical lapses (“There’s only one road and it leads to Calvary”) and accept the track as a genuinely moving paean to some non-specific Providence.
I beg your pardon? Or his pardon? Or His pardon? I guess you owe both him and Him some kind of apology. Loder is a listener who is not among those who have ears to hear. The Road Not Taken, in Robert Frost’s phrase. Even the road (Loder maintains) that nobody chooses to take. Or, with the belated creative negation in which “Wayne’s World” specialized, The Road Taken – Not.
“Some non-specific Providence”? Of course if the listener “can disregard” the line about Calvary, and fall into pretending that it is a “lyrical lapse” (no, it isn’t, it is a lyrical redemption of the Fall of Man), then he may deign to accept the track, etc. But this amounts to not accepting the track or the road down which it beckons you. “There’s only one road and it leads to Calvary”, which is where the song leads. But let us at least acknowledge that the song puts the road to Calvary before us and takes it for all that it is worth.
You Angel You
In the emporium of the empyrean, there are many orders for angels, for archangels, cherubim, seraphim, thrones, dominations, virtues, princedoms, powers . . . In the Dylan spheres, too, there are varieties of angel. The one who is hailed as “precious angel” is human but heavenly, mediating between the singer and the Mediator. The one in You Angel You, on the other wing, is human and earthly. Not that it would be right of us to set sacred love against profane love, for she is not what you’d call profane, she is simply down to earth. About faith in her there can be no doubt.
You angel you
You got me under your wing
The way you walk and the way you talk
I feel I could almost sing
The song is lithe and blithe. It flies lightly, takes wing, but is happy to settle down to her human touches, her walking and talking. So let us not be heavy-footed.411
Yet sheer simplicity always has its reserves of power. “The way you walk and the way you talk”: we can wonder about, as well as at, the way the song talks and the way it walks. (Very different from the cynical political cut, He can talk the talk, but can he walk the walk?) The song is on the balls of its feet, t
rippingly (again not tripping), the music dancing with the words, the music doing the leading. The whole thing is as modest, as fine, as can be, endearingly slight (as against slightly endearing), light-hearted, and enterprising.
Dylan is modest about the song but doesn’t slight it: “I might have written this at one of the sessions probably, you know, on the spot, standing in front of the mike . . . it sounds to me like dummy lyrics” (Biograph). But what may begin as dummy lyrics, filling in a melody with the first words that come to mind (and to heart and to tongue), can then grow wings.412
“You got me under your wing”: not your thumb, agreed? And what is then so buoyant in the song is its freedom from the thought that anybody (the singer, the sung-to, anybody in its carefree zone) stands in need of shelter. The Oxford English Dictionary, “under the wing of”: under the protection, care, or patronage of. But here there is no need for protection, and there is no patronage and no patronizing – or matronizing, since men don’t have the monopoly of condescension. Two lines that Dylan printed in Lyrics 1962–1985 but didn’t sing had risked condescension, very sweetly it is true: “The way you smile like a sweet baby child / It just falls all over me”. Seeing her as a child might run athwart the childlike sweetness of the song itself. He sings instead “The way you walk and the way you talk / Is the way it ought to be”. Way way way better.
“They say ev’ry man needs protection / They say ev’ry man must fall”413– but not the man in You Angel You. For he has a guardian angel. He may say that he can’t sleep, but this then takes the form of having him sound brimmingly wide awake. He may say that at night he gets up and walks the floor, but he makes even this feel as exuberantly tireless as her way of walking.
You know I can’t sleep at night for trying
Yes I never did feel this way before
Never did get up and walk the floor
If this is love then gimme more
And more and more and more and more414
The glee with which this is sung must mischievously counteract any uneasy sense of the words. Whatever the feeling may be (“Yes I never did feel this way before”: what way, exactly?), then – as to love – gimme more and more and more and more. He says that he used to have no such churning (“Never did get up and walk the floor”) but it comes out sounding just the opposite: as though “Never did” (in the old days) “get up and walk the floor” really wants to convey “Never do” (in these good new days) “get up and walk the floor” – at least never do those things in any way that would have me bowed down and bent.
The effect is exactly the reverse of that in the song whose gravity of expiration is the opposite of the inspired levity of You Angel You: Mama, You Been on My Mind, where he assures the woman in whom he misplaced his faith, “I do not walk the floor bowed down an’ bent, but yet / Mama, you been on my mind”. So you say – but, in the singing, every single syllable of all those one-syllable words (“Mama” making the only twofold impression) does feel bowed down and bent, burdened by those damnable bs and ds. “Mama, you been on my mind”: nothing could be more distant from the turning of this phrase in You Angel You:
I just want to watch you talk
With your memory on my mind415
We expect “I just want to watch you walk”. Not only because we’ve already heard “The way you walk”, and not only because of what would be the claims of alliteration: want . . . watch . . . walk / With (into memory . . . my mind). For the happiness of watching a beautiful woman walk is clear enough. Dylan, as the creator of a song called On the Road Again (not the first song to bear such a title), might like the company of the man who wrote the poem On the Road, William Barnes, who ends it with a sequence of ways of walking, all observed with affection and the last of them with immensely more than affection:
There the horse would prance by, with his neck a high bow,
And would toss up his nose over outspringing knees;
And the ox, with sleek hide, and with low-swimming head;
And the sheep, little kneed, with a quickdipping nod;
And a girl, with her head carried on in a proud
Gait of walking, as smooth as an air-swimming cloud.
But “watch you talk”? Yet it is an evocatively lovely and humorous moment; he doesn’t need to hear what she is saying, he just loves the sight of her talking, maybe to him (his mind and heart on her, not, I’m afraid, on what she is saying, but she will forgive that), or the sight of her in conversation. And even while watching her (with good pride in her) in the present, he can fuse this with his sense of what she has been in the past and continues to be: “With your memory on my mind”. One tribute to Dylan in concert would be to murmur “I just want to watch you sing with your memory on my mind”.416
“The way you walk”: do angels walk? They can, as birds can, and Heaven has been known to witness a ceremony:
Now walk the angels on the walls of Heaven
To entertain divine Zenocrate.
(Marlowe, Tamburlaine, Part 2, Act II)
Sometimes angels deign down to our level, to our element. Very good of them. But again a comic glimpse nestles before gliding from the wing to walking. Edward FitzGerald birdwatched:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly – and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.
Time duly brought the notorious retort: The bird is on the wing? No, the wing is on the bird.
The discreet slide from “wing” to “walk” is given salience by the alliteration, helped on its way by “way” and then walking on its way with that word again:
You got me under your wing
The way you walk and the way you talk
– whereupon the next rhyme comes winging in: “I feel I could almost sing”. This, which is all the more winning because it is itself being sung to us (not being read by us), has many facets to catch a twinkling light, but at this moment in the song it is offered so as to be suspended, patiently awaiting its comical confirmation in the very last line of the song. Later.
Meanwhile:
The way you walk and the way you talk
I feel I could almost sing
The first line of that sequence does not walk straightforwardly into the second line. For “The way you walk and the way you talk” proceeds to proceed nowhere in a way – which is where the subdued exclamatory excitement comes from. The effect is of an awed musing happiness blossoming then and there: “The way you walk and the way you talk / I feel I could almost sing”. It is quietly jumping for joy from the one line to the next, a dawning joy.
One of the things that makes the song feel so simple, so trusting, is its being happy just to repeat those few things it has to say, giving them again without any misgivings. Not just “You angel you”, rejoicing, and not only the bridge crossed over again, but “The way you walk and the way you talk” three times relished. What I tell you three times is true.
But then again it is of the nature of love to continue to be the same without being exactly the same or being merely the same again. We thrill to “You’re as fine as anything’s fine”, which is fine but which, when it returns, is heard to make even more of a claim: “You’re as fine as can be”. Not just as fine as what is but as what can be. Or there is “feel” feeling its way on within the song, from “I feel I could almost sing” into “Yes I never did feel this way before”. This is a song in which a man’s feeling for a paramour is paramount. And how effortlessly “feel this way before” has some feeling for our having so heard the word “way” before, way before: “The way you walk and the way you talk”.
“Seems like I been down this way before” (Sen˜or). Dolefully, there. Delightfully, here.
Some such things escalate in the song, but one imaginative thing does the opposite. The first time, the exultation goes like this:
Yes I never did feel this way before
Never did get up and walk the floor
If this is love then gimme more
And more and more and more an
d more
“If this is love . . .”. So how about “If music be the food of love, play on, / Give me excess of it” (the opening words of Twelfth Night). Give me, the swell of the Duke, gets informally urgent as gimme: “then gimme more / And more . . .”. In Dylan’s song, as in the Duke’s speech, there is homage to love, and the Duke’s words would catch the spirit of the love in You Angel You: “O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou”. But the Duke himself, unlike the spirited singer, does not stay quick and fresh. No, everything quickly turns blah-blah-blasé:
Enough, no more,
’Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
In Dylan’s song, “more” likewise rhymes with “before”, but “Enough, no more” is the very last thing that it would want to say. Moreover, we are not over with “more”; the reiteration of “more and more” does itself come back for more. But the second time, it goes like this:
Never did feel this way before
Never did get up and walk the floor
If this is love then gimme more
And more and more and more
Not five but four, one fewer “more”, or less more.
There is more to come, though: the final verse.
You angel you
You got me under your wing
The way you walk and the way you talk
I swear it would make me sing417
The earlier bemused gratitude, “I feel I could almost sing”, has become an amused gratification, “I swear it would make me sing”. This goes singing on its way, but does not (dear auditor) issue any vaunt along the lines of “I swear it has made me sing”. This, because whether Dylan sings is the comic backupdrop to the song. I feel he could almost sing. I swear it has made him sing!
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 41