Dylan's Visions of Sin

by Christopher Ricks

  Your music is great, but you’d be greater if you could kinda sing a little bit better.

  “I appreciate that . . . a good solid rock-bottom foundational criticism and that just sinks it right in.”

  Not everybody has the courage to tell Bob the truth.

  “Not everybody has the courage to sing like I do.”418

  John Berryman, who had been fond of Dylan Thomas, once exploded: “I can never forgive that young upstart for stealing my friend Dylan’s name.” “Yes, but don’t you agree he’s a poet?” “Yes, if only he’d learn to sing.”419

  Those of us who love to hear him sing may recall Shakespeare’s “I love to hear her speak”. Sonnet 130 brings together a loved woman, music, talking, and walking, always refusing to sentimentalize:

  I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

  That music hath a far more pleasing sound.

  I grant I never saw a goddess go,

  My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.

  Goddesses can fly, as can angels.420 But the way she walks . . . In the unabashedly human words of Keats about mythological loves:

  Let the mad poets say whate’er they please

  Of the sweets of Faeries, Peris, Goddesses,

  There is not such a treat among them all,

  Haunters of cavern, lake, and waterfall,

  As a real woman.421

  “The way you walk and the way you talk”: so what exactly is an angel anyway? An angel is a messenger. Translating the Greek word, and the Hebrew, which was in full “messenger of Jehovah”. And what does a messenger have to be able to do? Deliver. Walk and talk. The song is free to take wing.

  And the difference between words in a song and in a poem? That in song there can be this thing called melisma, where “one word flowers out into a passage of several notes”. Or rather, not one word but one syllable can do so. God Save the Queen: “long to- oo rei- eign over us”, where “to” and “reign” are not just extended through time, not just held longer, but are granted two notes, not left as one note per syllable. Dylan’s imaginative decisions as to when and when not to take this responsible liberty would furnish matter for a whole book.

  Song has a different system of punctuation from those of both poetry and prose, and there is no equivalent outside song to what song does when it separates one syllable to live within more than one note. The human voice can sing this flowering out into several notes, but the human voice cannot say it. (For a voice to change inflection when saying something is not the same thing as having one syllable be extended through more than one note.) So it is a profoundly simple accomplishment that has only one word in the whole of You Angel You be committed to melisma, this aspect of the art of song: the very last word of the song, the word “sing” itself: “I swear it would make me sing”. And this had not been the case with this line’s partner at the end of the first verse, when “I feel I could almost sing” had been happy to have the word “sing” be musically one simple syllable. It is only now, in the final moment of the song, that “sing” differently has the last word, and has it as a word to sing because the one syllable takes to itself more than one note. Unique to singing, this, and a unique moment within this particularizing song. How very many different aspects of art it reconciles.

  Hopkins, who complained about “precious” in the vicinity of “angel”, was adamant. “I can never be reconciled to calling men or women angels; there seems something out of tune in it.”422 But then Hopkins never had the chance to hear Dylan’s tune in it.

  Boots of Spanish Leather

  “Have you ever been”, she asked him, “faithful?” It was meant to give him a turn, this turn at the last moment. The lover in Boots of Spanish Leather, a leather lover it turns out in the end, has misplaced his faith – not in the sense that he can’t for the moment put his hand on it (“Has anybody seen my love?”),423 but in that he placed his faith in someone who no longer has any place for it. Faith, it becomes clear, has been betrayed by infidelity, or by the thought of it, the possibility of losing her now, there in their immediate future.

  In Boots of Spanish Leather, an indestructible song about the destruction of love, the artistic self-discipline is inseparable from the self-control of the one who comes to learn what it is to be let down. Bitterness, which will not yet let up, is tinglingly contained. Here is a song in which alternately a man and a woman exchange words of love.424 The song avails itself of the fact that you are not sure who speaks first. Because it is a song by Dylan sung by Dylan, the natural assumption is that the man does so:

  Oh, I’m sailin’ away my own true love

  I’m sailin’ away in the morning

  Usually, after all, or before all, it was the man (in the old days) who had to leave for work, to set sail. Oh, it’s the opening of Farewell:

  Oh it’s fare thee well my darlin’ true,

  I’m leavin’ in the first hour of the morn

  – where, immediately following those lines in Farewell, and bound for the Spanish place-names of Boots of Spanish Leather, there comes this:

  I’m bound off for the bay of Mexico

  Or maybe the coast of Californ

  So the initial alternation of verses in Boots of Spanish Leather might be heard as a man’s question issuing in a woman’s response. Still, it is clear that whose-voice-is-whose isn’t (or isn’t yet) cleared up. The song holds its cards close to its chest. A treasure chest of silver or of golden.

  The first verse opens with “Oh”; the second, with “No”, though proffering itself positively.

  Oh, I’m sailin’ away my own true love

  I’m sailin’ away in the morning

  Is there something I can send you from across the sea

  From the place that I’ll be landing?

  No, there’s nothin’ you can send me, my own true love

  There’s nothin’ I’m wishin’ to be ownin’

  Just to carry yourself back to me unspoiled

  From across that lonesome ocean

  It is not for another five verses that it becomes unquestionable that it was the woman who asked the opening question, that it is she who is doing the leaving (in more than one sense). You suddenly learn, as if you, too, had received a letter,

  Oh, I got a letter on a lonesome day

  It was from her ship a-sailin’

  Saying I don’t know when I’ll be comin’ back again

  It depends on how I’m a-feelin’

  From this point, there will be no more reciprocity, no more alternation. The man, having been wronged, now has the right to speak without heeding the thought of a response. He has heard her out, and anyway it was she who decided that out it is. The last three verses are his. His alone. His, alone. The final verse, the verse of finality (it is the long-delayed answer to her insistent questioning as to a gift for him), moves on to the offensive, even while being inoffensively couched in the terms not so much of a threat as of a warning, not the terms of any refusal to accept the situation but of finally agreeing – in his way – to accept something to remember her by.

  So take heed, take heed of the western winds

  Take heed of the stormy weather

  And yes, there’s something you can send back to me

  Spanish boots of Spanish leather

  His earlier “No”, positively grateful for her (a much larger thing than being grateful to her), is completed at last by his “yes”, negatively grating.

  This last verse, the ninth, concludes what had begun as alternating exchanges, no longer happily paired off but with an odd number of verses. A way of getting even. A pair of boots, not the odd boot. She is now (except that she isn’t going to do it) asked to give him the boots, having previously given him the boot: “sudden and callous rejection” (The Oxford English Dictionary).

  With the exception of sorrow / tomorrow, to which I’ll return, the final rhyme weather / leather is the only full rhyme and the only predictable rhyme in the song. But it is predictable only
because of the title Boots of Spanish Leather, with the teasing complication that, on the one hand, the title of a song is very seldom uttered by its singer, but, on the other, everybody soon comes to know the title of the song and moreover it is given on the album . . . Anyway, the conclusive final line is a pointed modulation of the song’s title, which had not spelt out the double Spanish requisition: “Spanish boots of Spanish leather”. Spanish boots were an instrument of torture for the Inquisition. They caught on. Germany, Russia . . .425

  The Spanish leather was perhaps imported from Gypsy Davey, a song that Dylan has since recorded.426 In conversation with Studs Terkel in 1963, Dylan sided with this suggestion for a moment but then sidled away. Is there something I can sing you from across the sea?

  “You wanna hear a love-song?”

  Boy meets girl – Bob Dylan, boy meets girl.

  “This is girl leaves boy . . . This is called ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’”

  “Boots of Spanish Leather” – like “Gypsy Davey”, a line from it.

  “Yeah [plays a few chords and then] – no, not because of that but because I’ve always wanted a pair of boots of Spanish leather.”

  A personable personal touch, but not one that we should allow to imperil the impersonality of the song itself. The conjunction of the personal and the impersonal can be heard in Dylan’s pronunciation of “leather”, itself leathery and subtle and supple.

  Clearly, the fact that, upon first hearing, it isn’t clear who speaks first – which means that it will not become clear for quite a while exactly how this gendered song was engendered – must imply that later hearings will be different in kind. But this is a commonplace about works of art. If you have seen Hamlet before, you know what will happen in the story. (Dysfunctional family tries to cope with death of father.) If a story stakes everything on suspense, especially suspense of a tricksy or risky kind, then you may never want to experience it again. At the video store there are thrillers that still thrill and there are those that don’t or won’t. But it characterizes works of art that to experience them again may be to experience them anew, gaining at least as much as one loses. Suspense may be not abolished but polished.

  If we imagine Boots of Spanish Leather sung – as it easily could be – by alternate voices (so that the gendresult would be immediately announced), then we find that we are imagining something much less lastingly worth while than what we hear while the song is in Dylan’s voice throughout. And this, not only because of what Dylan’s voice is. A single voice is called upon to tell this story of how the dual partnership of love met duplicity.427

  This delayed indubitability – as to who is breaking off with whom – has taken up into itself along the way some intimations about these intimacies. These moments are more than tricks; they are to bring out how tricky these things are. Take what happens when two consecutive lines, clearly by alternating speakers, are so phrased as to sound as though they are addressed in the same direction, from him to her. In the second verse, for instance, “Just to carry yourself back to me unspoiled” sounds like – and here is – something that a man says to a woman. For “unspoiled” (not quite the same as “unspoilt”) may have a whiff of condescension, and, because of what it is to despoil or violate, may suggest, too, the dangers that women run.428 But then the reply that at once follows, “Oh, but I just thought you might want something fine”, does rather sound as though (again) it is a woman who is being addressed. (Quite wrong of us, of course, to more associate women with wanting something fine, but you know how it is.) What matters is the way in which the uncertainty as to who / whom, a hesitation as to the sex of the speaker, can become part of why it is not a misogynistic song, this and the fact that it never generalizes about women and about men.

  The seventh verse, the narrative turn, is divided between the man and the woman, but not as an exchange of two passages of direct speech.

  Oh, I got a letter on a lonesome day

  It was from her ship a-sailin’

  Saying I don’t know when I’ll be comin’ back again

  It depends on how I’m a-feelin’

  His two lines directly narrate, but her two are direct speech of calculated indirection: “I don’t know when I’ll be comin’ back again”. “It depends on how I’m a-feelin’” – what an unfeeling way of putting it down, of putting him down.

  The alternation of feminine and masculine voices, that way round (we find), is something that Dylan rightly makes no effort to dramatize. He doesn’t act the song, he sings it, refusing to settle things, unsettlingly. This is in parallel with the alternation of masculine and feminine endings, lines that end with a stressed syllable alternating from the start with lines that end with an unstressed one:

  Oh, I’m sailin’ away my own true lóve

  I’m sailin’ away in the mórning429

  In each quatrain, it is lines 2 and 4, only, that rhyme or half-rhyme or off-rhyme.430 So that the rhymes are all, or all but all, feminine rhymes. For instance:

  Oh, but if I had the stars of the darkest night

  And the diamonds from the deepest ocean

  I’d forsake them all for your sweet kiss

  For that’s all I’m wishin’ to be ownin’

  There Dylan points up the feminine / masculine endings by singing something other than what is printed in Lyrics 1962–1985: the lyrics have “There’s nothing I wish to be ownin’”, but he sings “There’s nothing I’m wishing to be ownin’”, with the triple -ing sounding in our ears, the feminine ending undulating and insistent. Much is offered:

  Oh, but I just thought you might want something fine

  Made of silver or of golden

  Or? Choose one? Sorry, you’re not going to get something made of silver with a golden inlay . . . That isn’t the tone, which is extravagantly (because guiltily already?) eager to bestow:

  Oh, but I just thought you might want something fine

  Made of silver or of golden

  Either from the mountains of Madrid

  Or from the coast of Barcelona

  “Made of silver or of golden”:431 this, too, is largesse (largesse oblige), luxuriously redundant, since we expect either “Made of silver or of gold” or “Made of silver or golden”. “Made of silver or of golden” overflows to the point of overdoing it, affluently and fluently: is she making too much of this wish to give him something, and giving herself away? At the same time the cadence fulfils the pattern of alternating a stressed and an unstressed final syllable (“fine” / “of gólden”) that “of gold” would lack. And rhyming with the line, off-rhyming with it, is the city with the feminine ending, Barcelóna, following upon the previous line and its city with the masculine ending, Madr´ıd.

  Either from the mountains of Madrid

  Or from the coast of Barcelona432

  It is broadly true, then, that only half of the lines rhyme (the even ones). But only broadly true, for many of the unrhyming words at the ends of the odd lines are gathered up from previous rhymes or rhyme-placings, rhyme-plaitings: so “love” may not be rhymed but it does end two lines, and the same is true of “again” and of “day” and of “me”. It is against this interlacing that the rent in the fabric of love is felt.

  For the repetitions, which had at first possessed (despite the imminent parting) something light of heart, gain weight:

  If you, my love, must think that-a-way

  I’m sure your mind is roamin’

  I’m sure your thoughts are not with me433

  But with the country to where you’re goin’

  So take heed, take heed of the western winds

  Take heed of the stormy weather

  And yes . . .

  Take heed: thrice, like a witch’s spell, more like a conjuration than an adjuration.

  Nothing could be simpler, in some ways, than the song’s movements of mind as it contemplates these movements of the heart. But, yet again, the simplicity is alive in “that perpetual slight alteration of language” that
T. S. Eliot valued.434

  Is there something I can send you from across the sea

  From the place that I’ll be landing?

  Not “From the place that I’ll be landing at”. It is not that Dylan just had to have “landing” at the end, since he could have done this by singing “From the place where I’ll be landing”, and it is not that he couldn’t fit “landing at” into the line. He can always fit things into lines if need be or even if wish be. No, the point is that the speaker (she, as it turns out) is not imagining merely where she is going to land, or that she is going to land at a place; oh no, she is going to land a place. It makes it sound ominously like some splendid fish or splendid prize, these things that you gleefully land. Too blithe a spirit at parting.

  The whole song engages with reciprocity and repetition and these then becoming broken. The first verse, “my own true love”, is matched with the second verse, “my own true love”, a loving answer it would seem. But by the eighth verse she is not saying any such thing, and he is no longer saying “my own true love” but the milder bleaker “If you, my love, must think that-a-way”. No longer my own, no longer my own true love. There is an audible finality. This love is over. Differently over, it is true, from that in One Too Many Mornings, with its level dismay (“We’re both just one too many mornings / An’ a thousand miles behind”). And altogether different from those love songs that really put in one last plea, as does Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right. Boots of Spanish Leather asks for nothing. What gives the finality its high shine is the contrast with all those repetitions along the way, all the hope that used to be invested in “again”, a word that embodies the repetitive asking that is an irritant to the lover. “How can, how can you ask me again”: deeply felt, the vexation, in that it does itself perpetrate an “again” (“How can, how can . . .”), and then itself has to say “again” again: