When ev’rything I’m a-sayin’
You can say it just as good
You’re right from your side
I’m right from mine
We’re both just one too many mornings
An’ a thousand miles behind
The deserted street has desertion in the air. The Deserted Village stayed with the author of The Waste Land:
In Goldsmith’s poem, the art of transition is exemplified in perfection. If you examine it paragraph by paragraph, you will find always a shift just at the right moment, from the descriptive to the meditative, to the personal, to the meditative again, to the landscape with figures . . .446
One Too Many Mornings (a streetscape without figures) happens to have several of the same shifts. From the descriptive to the meditative to the personal: these are the transitions in its opening verse. A description of the immediate present, “Down the street the dogs are barkin’”, is followed by a description of the present as it is getting to be the immediate future: “And the day is a-gettin’ dark”. (Not dark yet, but it’s getting there.) Then comes a description-prediction of the next future:
As the night comes in a-fallin’
The dogs ’ll lose their bark
Night doesn’t do the usual and fall, it comes in (a tide of darkness), and the two phrasings shade into one another, “As the night comes in a-fallin’”. “The dogs ’ll lose their bark”: this is clear to the ear and to the mind, and yet is not – if you think about it – the same as saying that the dogs ’ll stop barking. Not a lost dog but a lost bark.
At which moment, the shift (into another stage of the ensuing future) continues still from the descriptive to the meditative to the personal:
An’ the silent night will shatter
From the sounds inside my mind
For I’m one too many mornings
An’ a thousand miles behind
City lights: a city twilight of hope was later to drift into Dylan’s mind:
That ethereal twilight light, you know. It’s the sound of the streets with the sunrays, the sun shining down at a particular time on a particular type of building. A particular type of people walking on a particular type of street. It’s an outdoor sound that drifts even into open windows that you can hear.447
But the street in One Too Many Mornings is without people, is darkened and saddened and late.
The art of transition (Eliot’s phrase) may take more than one form, and One Too Many Mornings has – as The Deserted Village has not – movements or moves that intrigue or puzzle. Each line may be clear, but the line of thought? The song is a conjunction of many feelings, and of its parts of speech it is the small, modest ones such as conjunctions that are the necessary hinges. Sometimes the transition may sound, in the best possible way, slightly unhinged.
The articulated elusiveness that it is good to catch can be felt in a poem by Tennyson, this, too, being a song of lost love, lost, though, not by the death of love, but by the death of a loved one. Break, break, break is both a funeral elegy and a love elegy devoted to his friend Arthur Hallam, whom Tennyson believed he would for ever be a thousand miles behind – even in Heaven.448
Break, break, break opens to sounds from the outside world, and then it moves to the sounds inside my mind (“And the sound of a voice that is still!”), the thoughts that arise in me.
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
O well for the fisherman’s boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
In Break, break, break there is – as in One Too Many Mornings – a transparency that is matched with a puzzling obliqueness of reasoning or argument. In a sense, the poem’s sense is plain enough; yet it has a riddling quality, too. For it escapes us, the thread of thought by which we are to swing across the gulf from the injunction “Break, break, break” to the “And” of “And I would that my tongue could utter”; from the fisherman’s boy and the sailor lad and the stately ships to the “But” of “But O for the touch of a vanished hand”; or from the returning injunction “Break, break, break” to the ultimate “But” of the poignant close:
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
The poem’s juxtapositions and conjunctions tantalizingly suggest a progression of thought that yet remains elusive. The heartbreak of which the poem knows (when the poem begins, we do not know what it is that is being urged to “Break, break, break”: the heart is heard as a flickering suggestion) is not something of which it can bring itself openly to speak. The dissociative gulf between the outer scene and the inner pain is one that such sturdy words of reason as “And” and “But” can ultimately only pretend to bridge.449 The same might be said of the scene and the pain in Dylan’s song, and of his “An’” and “For”:
The dogs ’ll lose their bark
An’ the silent night will shatter
From the sounds inside my mind
For I’m one too many mornings
An’ a thousand miles behind
The transition from the dogs’ falling silent to the silent night is lastingly perplexing. The sound of the dogs is outdoors (“an outdoor sound”, in the words of that vignette by Dylan) and outside the mind, yes. But why “And”, as against “But”? And why “For”, exactly? Why do the last two lines suppose (do they?) that they give the grounds for the previous two, the night lines?
It all has something of a dream’s contrariety, a dream’s secure unfounded air of reasoning. The vista of the street, with its doorstep, its room, its sidewalk, and its sign, feels dream-lit. Here, as elsewhere, the song (like a painting by Edward Hopper) is at once overt and covert, lucid and opaque. And so is the thought that variously brings each verse to an end, a rephrased refrain:
For I’m one too many mornings
An’ a thousand miles behind
And I’m one too many mornings
An’ a thousand miles behind
We’re both just one too many mornings
An’ a thousand miles behind
The Oxford English Dictionary, under too (“more than enough”), finds a grim pleasure in displaying all the sad variety of hell to which “too” is happy to minister (as One Too Many Mornings is only too aware): “Expressing, sorrowfully or indignantly, regret or disapproval: To a lamentable, reprehensible, painful, or intolerable extent.” Moreover, the phrase “one too many”, with its whitened knuckles and its clenched self-control (one too many, but who’s counting?), is granted its own entry: “of something not wanted or of something that is repeated to excess”.
It cannot be more than a coincidence (but gather from coincidence while ye may?) that the very first Oxford English Dictionary citation for one too many (it is from Shakespeare) should include, within an exchange of a mere four and a half lines, “down”, “the street”, “get” [gettin’], “came” [comes], “in”, “from”, “my”, “door”, “for”, “whence” [where], “walk”, “one”, “when”, and “one too many”. Is this, on second thoughts, one too many to be coincidental?
“Either get thee from the door, or sit down at the hatch.
Dost thou conjure for wenches, that thou callst for such store,
When one is one too many? Go, get thee from the door.”
“What patch is made our porter? My master stays in the street.”
“Let him walk from whence he came.”
&n
bsp; (The Comedy of Errors, III, i)
Dylan’s tragedy of errors feels nothing remotely like that. Far from conjuring for wenches, the song is abjuring one.
As to being behind (“in the rear of anything moving”, quoting Dryden, “to lag behind, with truant pace”), this, too, has its own doubling up, for there is a twinge of the other sense, “in reference to the fulfilment of an obligation, esp. of paying money due: in arrear”. Each of the lovers is behind with the debt of love. The first citation in The Oxford English Dictionary for such a sense (the fulfilment of an obligation) happens to be this from a sermon by Wyclif: “So many men in this world ben [be] behind of debt of love.”
It may be remembered that Arthur Hallam, to whom Tennyson paid his debt of love in Break, break, break, wrote that “Rhyme has been said to contain in itself a constant appeal to Memory and Hope.”450 Hope is abandoned in One Too Many Mornings, a song that may be thought to contain in itself a memory of an Australian ballad beginning:
Oh hark the dogs are barking, love,
I can no longer stay.
The men are all gone mustering
And it is nearly day.
And I must off by the morning light
Before the sun doth shine,
To meet the Sydney shearers
On the banks of the Condamine.451
It is not only “hark the dogs are barking” and “morning” that suggest Dylan (or that may have suggested something to Dylan), it is the line-ending on -ing (“mustering”) as well as the strong assonance in light / shine / Condamine, an assonance that might be in mind and behind Dylan’s mind / behind, sign / behind, side / mine / behind. These, and the thought uttered to his love, a thought more sombre in Dylan, “I can no longer stay”.
Dylan’s rhyme-scheme is on the face of it both simple and minimal. As in the Australian ballad, the second and fourth lines rhyme, and then, differently, the sixth and eighth. So the first verse proffers dark / bark and mind / behind. But there are immediate cross-currents, soundwaves:
Down the street the dogs are barkin’
And the day is a-gettin’ dark
As the night comes in a-fallin’
The dogs ’ll lose their bark
An’ the silent night will shatter
From the sounds inside my mind
For I’m one too many mornings
An’ a thousand miles behind
For “barkin’” offers something of a rhyme to the next line’s “dark”, and the -in’ ending both to this first line and to the third line (“a-fallin’”) will not only send an echo down the street of rhyming but will continue half heard in “one too many mornings”. So that of the eight line-endings in this first verse, the only one that offers nothing of a rhyme is the fifth: “An’ the silent night will shatter”.
An’ the silent night will shatter
From the sounds inside my mind
Praising “shatter” there as “an interesting example of poetic transference”, Michael Gray said: “The prose equivalent, stripped of this transference, would be that the silence (of the night) will be shattered; as Dylan has it, the night will shatter.”452 Gray is right to think that Dylan’s phrasing turns upon the commonplace that the silence of the night will be shattered. But what is so well judged in “shatter” is not anything about “poetic transference” (prejudicial and nebulous, any such differentiation of poetry from prose), but that Dylan is seizing from the inside a standard oddity about the verb “shatter”: that it can equally and equably mean both “to dash into fragments” and “to be dashed into fragments”. The same is true of “break”, and of a verb in the next verse, “fade”, which would elsewhere be perfectly content to mean either “to lose colour or strength” or “to cause to lose colour or strength”.
Hopes shatter. They both break things (hearts, for instance) and are broken. “And the silent night will shatter”: the line gets trenchancy from the two-edged “shatter”, but it gains its unobtrusive force, which is to be dramatic without being melodramatic, from Dylan’s decision simply to have it be the sole unrhyming line.
I want to pass over for a while the second verse (which puzzles me, or has me puzzled as to my own responses), and to feel through the third, the final verse, where there are further turns of the thumbscrew, rhyme-wise.
It’s a restless hungry feeling
That don’t mean no one no good
When ev’rything I’m a-sayin’
You can say it just as good
You’re right from your side
I’m right from mine
We’re both just one too many mornings
An’ a thousand miles behind
The closing rhyme of this final verse, as of the second verse (sign / behind), is assonance more than rhyme, mine / behind, but this is tightened by the urgencies and exigencies of the assonantal accessaries before the fact:
You’re right from your side
I’m right from mine
Oh, this concedes a good deal (unlike the good old condescension of “We are all doing God’s work, you in your way, and we in His”), but the fivefold assonance (right / side / I’m / right / mine) has its obduracy, with just two chimes in the line that is yours, but with one more (one too many?), three, in the line that just happens to be mine. At least there is an effort at fair play, at landscaping the playing-field (you know, the level one) that is so often invoked these days.453 At least the effect is not what it would have been, far more one-sidedly, if the lines had gone like this:
I’m right from my side
You’re right from yours
– where instead of being assonantally three of mine to two of yours, it would have been four to one.
At the start of this last verse it had been its first entire rhyme that created the dead sound, the dead accurate sound, that tolled finality:
It’s a restless hungry feeling
That don’t mean no one no good
When ev’rything I’m a-sayin’
You can say it just as good
No good / as good: it feels and is as good as nothing. A rhyme to nullify a state of affairs or a marriage, it is blankness itself.
In The Lotos-Eaters, Tennyson’s first rhyme was likewise no rhyme at all, offering not the combination of likeness with unlikeness that is a rhyme but an “always” that is eternally the same:
“Courage!” he said, and pointed toward the land,
“This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon.”
In the afternoon they came unto a land
In which it seemèd always afternoon.
Or, One Too Many Afternoons. In the afternoon . . . it seemèd always afternoon: this, from start to finish, or rather, with no way of telling start from finish. Tennyson himself commented on the effect when a “land” comes unto a “land”: “‘The strand’ was, I think, my first reading, but the no rhyme of ‘land’ and ‘land’ was lazier.”454 Lazier as being in static sympathy with those who are soon to enjoy the fixity of the drug that is the lotos; for the poet, less lazy than the first-draft rhyme, strand / land. It is an apt effect, stagnant the while.
Stagnation is the consequence when the best that “no good” can do turns out to be “as good”:
It’s a restless hungry feeling
That don’t mean no one no good
When ev’rything I’m a-sayin’
You can say it just as good
This is paralysis. You might think that nothing could be a more perfect rhyme, a more full rhyme, than rhyming a word with itself – but then nothing could be less of a rhyme, either, since there is no plurality, simply a single impasse, no chance to advance. We have the term rime riche when rhyme-words sound the same but have a different sense: say, glasses against glasses, with the one being spectacles and the other to drink from. Or the word “well” in Subterranean Homesick Blues, where Dylan rhymes “get well” with or against “ink well”. An odd kind of rhyme, this, yet with its own nature. But the rhyme-word coming up against the same wo
rd in obdurately the same sense? This is not a rich rhyme, but a stricken one in its poverty of spirit, a rhyme that is no good except as conveying that all this is no good. One too many mornings but one too few rhyme-words.
A rhyme can be seen under the aspect of a kiss. Keats has in Isabella an exquisite pair of lines, incorporating a rhyme upon “rhyme” that takes up the preceding word “time”:
“And I must taste the blossoms that unfold
In its ripe warmth this gracious morning time.”
So said, his erewhile timid lips grew bold,
And poesied with hers in dewy rhyme.
But “good” against “good”? Or, worse, “no good” against “as good”? This is like kissing yourself in the mirror, full on the lips, the only place you can kiss yourself in the mirror, and yet somehow not as satisfying as one had hoped, don’t you find?
It’s a restless hungry feeling, all right, or not at all all right. But one of the things that saves these lines of Dylan from the comforts of despair is their burly refusal to get grammar, to turn King’s English evidence, to run any risk of sounding like a prissy sissy. Try this:
It’s a restless hungry feeling
That means no one any good
– not good. For the song is positively right to feel so negatively about what has come to pass. “That don’t mean no one no good”: this isn’t a double negative, it’s a triple whammy. It is true that there are days when “negativity don’t pull you through”(Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues). But there are mornings when it just might.
Or try this:
It’s a restless hungry feeling
That’s such a living hell
When ev’rything I’m a-sayin’
You can say it just as well
– less well said than “You can say it just as good”, no? In the particular circumstances, be it said. “A particular type of people walking on a particular type of street”.
It is true that those of us who founded the Society for the Protection of Parts of Speech feel very strongly about this particular endangered species, the adverb. But just as Nope does not mean the same as No, so “You can say it just as good” does not mean the same as “You can say it just as well”. I still remember the thrill that ran through me in the fifties (I was in my twenties) when I heard that an American poet at Oxford, Donald Hall, fully five years my senior, had said of poetry that “You gotta fake it but you gotta fake it good”. True, the well-educated young Don was kinda faking it, but he knew who he was talking to (to whom he was talking?): even-younger Englishmen and Englishwomen who would all but swoon at the uncowed manliness that knew better than to say “fake it well” when it was so much more democratic, so much less truckling, to say “fake it good”. Agreed, there is truckling and truckling. For an artist to unload his head, he needs not to truckle. Which is why “You can say it just as good” succeeds in splicing two things to say: You can say it just as well / You can say something just as good.
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 44