When ev’rything I’m a-sayin’
You can say it just as good
This is the moment in the song, late in the song, when there arrives a real you at last, someone addressed, not respectably dressed as in the “my love and I” of the middle verse. Just as good: the word “just”, with its low-key cold charity, comes twice in this last verse, and just in this verse.
We’re both just one too many mornings
An’ a thousand miles behind
We’re both just hopeless. We’re both a great way behind, and so neither of us has fallen behind the other – which is how it had sounded when it was just a matter of saying
And I’m one too many mornings
An’ a thousand miles behind
The first verse of One Too Many Mornings had left unrhymed a single line. The hopes in the mind of the last verse are even more shattered. There is an appeal to Hope that is launched by rhyme and assonance, but it falls on deaf ears: no good / as good, side / mine / behind, feeling / a-sayin’ / mornings. That all eight lines, not just the founding four, are held together: this might have been heartening. But not here. Held together: here it feels like a vice, thanks (no thanks) to the metal plates aligned as no good / as good.
Which leaves the verse that I left behind, the middle verse.
From the crossroads of my doorstep
My eyes they start to fade
As I turn my head back to the room
Where my love and I have laid
An’ I gaze back to the street
The sidewalk and the sign
And I’m one too many mornings
An’ a thousand miles behind
I have vacillated about this verse, and still do. In the days when I was brief and stern, the principle invoked was the one so imaginatively marked by Gerard M. Hopkins:
Great men, poets I mean, have each their own dialect as it were of Parnassian, formed generally as they go on writing, and at last, – this is the point to be marked, – they can see things in this Parnassian way and describe them in this Parnassian tongue, without further effort of inspiration. In a poet’s particular kind of Parnassian lies most of his style, of his manner, of his mannerism if you like . . . Now it is a mark of Parnassian that one could conceive oneself writing it if one were the poet. Do not say that if you were Shakespeare you can conceive yourself writing Hamlet, because that is just what I think you cannot conceive.455
Hopkins’s principle is itself an inspiration,456 and I hold to it. But I have become more than uneasy about holding it to this particular moment in One Too Many Mornings. Not that it would be possible for Dylan to have escaped Parnassian – one of the best things about the way in which Hopkins puts his point is his understanding of the naturalness, the inevitability, the commonalty of it all (“Great men, poets I mean”, all of them), along with the sincere admiration that the poetry of Tennyson excited in him. Enoch Arden, published the previous month in 1864, was what prompted Hopkins in this letter of his.
I think one had got into the way of thinking, or had not got out of the way of thinking, that Tennyson was always new, touching beyond other poets, not pressed with human ailments, never using Parnassian. So at least I used to think. Now one sees he uses Parnassian; he is, one must see it, what we used to call Tennysonian. But the discovery of this must not make too much difference. When puzzled by one’s doubts it is well to turn to a passage like this. Surely your maturest judgment will never be fooled out of saying that this is divine, terribly beautiful – the stanza of In Memoriam beginning with the quatrain
O Hesper o’er the buried sun,
And ready thou to die with him,
Thou watchest all things ever dim
And dimmer, and a glory done.
I think one had got into the way of thinking, or had not got out of the way of thinking, that Dylan was always new, touching beyond other poets. Now one sees he uses Parnassian. But the discovery of this must not make too much difference. When puzzled by one’s doubts it is well to turn to a passage like this. Surely your maturest judgement will never be fooled out of saying that this is beautiful:
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
But as to my judgement that the second verse of One Too Many Mornings is Parnassian: I am no longer sure that I was right, even from my side.
From the crossroads of my doorstep
My eyes they start to fade
This, unlike the first and last verses which are inspired, is Parnassian, and – like most Parnassian – it is, in its complaisance, vulnerable to humour, such a worse than unwanted suggestion as “From the crossroads of my doorstep / My eyes they start to cross”. I can conceive myself writing “the crossroads of my doorstep” if I were Dylan – and I do not say to myself that if I were Dylan I can imagine myself writing the inspired no-rhyme of “good” and “good” in the song’s last stanza . . . This, in its pained numbness, is something quite other than “From the crossroads of my doorstep”, which I can conceive myself writing if I were the artist who wrote, elsewhere, “through the smoke rings of my mind”. Do not say that if you were Shakespeare you can imagine yourself writing Hamlet; come to that, do not say that if you were Dylan you can imagine yourself writing “Ophelia, she’s ’neath the window, / For her I feel so afraid”.457
It used to go like that. Now it goes like this, or might go on like this.
Just a minute, you’re using the phrase “through the smoke rings of my mind” as a smokescreen. It is really nothing like “From the crossroads of my doorstep”. The line from Mr. Tambourine Man (or rather, half-line) floats free, and knows it: “Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind”. It is up and away. The line – full line, this one – from One Too Many Mornings is quite a different story, and it tells a different story. For one thing, it is two things.
“The smoke rings of my mind” is a figure of speech that makes amiable relaxed sense by an airy movement of mind. (The impassive smoking might have been a vaporous lounging in a brown study.) The figure is evanescent, a bright exhalation. The prepositional movement (“of my mind”) conjures up a settled inwardness altogether different from “the sounds inside my mind” that mount the untoward pressure within One Too Many Mornings. By contrast with those drifting smoke rings, the line “From the crossroads of my doorstep” is not airy at all. It is a stumbling block, blocked and blockish, scowling as though set to thwart any attempt to make sense, relaxed or otherwise. A doorstep, yes, and a crossroads, yes, especially in the figurative application that The Oxford English Dictionary defines as “a point at which two or more courses of action diverge; a critical turning-point”. But “the crossroads of my doorstep”? Can a doorstep be a crossroads?
Yes it can, when you put your mind (that smoke-free zone) to it, given the dictionary’s “a critical turning-point”.
As I turn my head back to the room
Where my love and I have laid
You can set off from the doorstep to left, or to right, or straight ahead. From the T-junction of my doorstep? But don’t forget the fourth dimension, for there may be nothing to stop you from turning not only your head but your whole self back to the room where your love and you have laid (or lain, if you prefer) – and where perhaps she lies still wondering whether you will come back. The word “back” comes back again in two lines’ time, its simple longing unappeased:
From the crossroads of my doorstep
My eyes they start to fade
As I turn my head back to the room
Where my love and I have laid
An’ I gaze back to the street
The sidewalk and the sign
And I’m one too many mornings
An’ a thousand miles behind
Just how unpredictable, how free from Parnassian mannerism, is the line “From the crossroads of my doorstep” may be seen from a
differently pained Dylan song that brings together the crossroads and my mind, Mama, You Been on My Mind:
Perhaps it’s the color of the sun cut flat
An’ cov’rin’ the crossroads I’m standing at
Or maybe it’s the weather or something like that
But mama, you been on my mind
No risk of stumbling at those crossroads, straightforward even if the decision may now have to be to go other than straight forward. The impassive calm of mind in “the crossroads I’m standing at” is completely different from the impasse “From the crossroads of my doorstep”.
From the crossroads of my doorstep
My eyes they start to fade
Light fades, and has been felt to do so at the start of the song. Memories will fade, not only precious memories but bankrupt ones too – this being a hope glimpsed off the end of the song. “My eyes they start to fade”. Though a sight may fade from one’s eyes, one doesn’t usually think of eyes as fading, but there is a sad scene in Keats (“As when, upon a trancèd summer-night . . .”) that arrives at a glimpse of something divine, terribly beautiful:
Until at length old Saturn lifted up
His faded eyes, and saw his kingdom gone,
And all the gloom and sorrow of the place
(Hyperion, I, 89–91)
One aspect of the gloom and sorrow of One Too Many Mornings is the self-saturation of this middle verse. The crux is this: that whereas the first verse speaks only twice in such terms (“my”, “I’m”), and the final verse three times (“I’m”, “I’m”, “mine”), this middle verse eight times fixes its I’s upon itself: “my doorstep”, “My eyes”, “I”, “my head”, “my love”, “I”, “I”, “I’m”.
Is this a self-absorption succumbed to by the song? So I used to think (or feel). But why should it not be a succumbing that is dramatized, “placed”, within the song?458 The lapse would then be not a lapse by the song but one within the song’s setting, a sinking into self, moreover, that recovers its better self as the song moves on. One hesitates to say move on these days, so often have the words been glibbed. But the voice, the consciousness within the song, does move its attention, so as to do right not only by the word “I” but by “you” and “we”:
You’re right from your side
I’m right from mine
We’re both just one too many mornings
An’ a thousand miles behind
If I am right in having come to believe that in due course One Too Many Mornings rescinds the state of mind that dominated the middle verse, then I need to rescind my adverse judgement on what I took to be a lack of judgement. The same may go for my having taken against the interplay of “crossroads” and “my eyes”:
From the crossroads of my doorstep
My eyes they start to fade
My eyes they start to cross? I still see the sequence as inviting this grotesque squinny, but does this disconcerting glimpse of crossed eyes have to be a “worse than unwanted suggestion”? Couldn’t it be an insight at a tangent? For what is so hoped for is a brave gaze at their plight, but this falters:
An’ I gaze back to the street
The sidewalk and the sign
And I’m one too many mornings
An’ a thousand miles behind
Things are crossed, thwarted, must be seen simultaneously from two angles, two sides (your side and mine). His head is on straight, but in the circumstances he can’t always see straight. He may be forced to squint. Of love, it was said long ago that it is a mistake to draw Cupid as a blind boy, “for his real character is a little thief that squints”.459
And it looks as though I may have been squinting at (glancing at with dislike or disapproval)460 the rhyming in the middle verse. Just as this verse is different from the others in the matter of “I”, so it is in its rhyming. My restless hungry feeling went like this: something slips out of Dylan’s hands here, instead of escaping from his lips. The rhyme-scheme is no more than the rhyme-skeleton, fade / laid, sign / behind. Unimaginative: “fade” against “laid” has nothing wrong with it, but nothing particularly right, either, and the other words at the line-endings, setting aside the refrain (with which the others have no contact, whereas in the first and third verses there are tendrils twining from the refrain), are nothing more than the topography of the song: doorstep / room / street. Painfully faithful, perhaps, but sadly flat.
But what if the painful, the faithful, the sad and the flat, are the truth that is levelled? The lines, then, would be an evocation of a flattened emotional world, in which an “I” does this and does that and does the other, all as though mechanically, ineffectually, and affectlessly.
From the crossroads of my doorstep
My eyes they start to fade
As I turn my head back to the room
Where my love and I have laid
An’ I gaze back to the street
The sidewalk and the sign
And I’m one too many mornings
An’ a thousand miles behind
That there is at the line-endings no “constant appeal to Memory and Hope”, only the flattened hopelessness of the locations, doorstep / room / street: such is one of the uses of adversity. Adversity is not simply triumphed over in the final verse, not put in its place. But it is placed, and held in place:
You’re right from your side
I’m right from mine
We’re both just one too many mornings
An’ a thousand miles behind
I am not the only one, and you are not the only one. Come to that, we are not the only ones. For this song of memory rings a bell with thousands.
Moonlight
Never send to know for whom the bell tolls. “For whom does the bell toll for, love? It tolls for you and me”. It is a mercy that, long after One Too Many Mornings, there proves to be a world elsewhere, in which Moonlight is attuned in love to an air so light.
“Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?”
One answer to this pleaful refrain, especially once its plea has been entered six times, might be a counter-question: Are you, for your part, ever going to refrain? How long are you going to go on asking me this? Hope springs eternal in the human breast, yes, but songs, or lovers’ wishful wistfulnesses, do not have all the eternity in the world.
A nineteenth-century song along the same lines, by Joseph Augustine Wade, gained an entry in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: Meet me by moonlight, alone. But this reiterated request was cast as an enjoining, not as a question.
How much longer? Dylan has always been fascinated with the question of how you may intimate that something is, or soon will be, all over, or how you bring something to an end: a song or a song-book, an interview or an album, a concert or the first half of a concert or even the pretend-conclusion of a concert, when a staged pause (for a wile), a finale known to be unfinal, is calculated to prompt our imploring an encore, beseeching “bis bis!”
There is a moment near the beginning of the unapologetically extensive film Renaldo and Clara when the man on the radio warns drivers about the wet road: “Hydroplaning can seriously impair your stopping-ability.” At which moment, something unseriously impairs the music in the background. Dylan has always been on the qui vive when it comes to stopping-ability. Ninety miles an hour (down a dead end street). Brake, brake, brake.
How long can you go on saying the same thing? Say, assuring someone:
All I really want to do
Is, baby, be friends with you
You can issue this assurance a few times, but there’s a point at which it wears out or thin. How long can you go on urging, “Don’t think twice, it’s all right”? More than twice, agreed, but seventy-times-seven? Or there is pretending to urge:
But if you gotta go, go now
Or else you gotta stay all night
How much longer, the shuddering in Desolation Row. The needling, in Ballad of a Thin Man. The exulting, in Like a Rolling Stone. The steeling, in Posit
ively 4th Street. The consoling, in To Ramona. The shaking the dust off – off of – your feet (don’t look back), in My Back Pages. The jeering, in Down in the Flood. The prosecuting, in Hurricane. The avenging, in Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? The begging: “Please, Missus Henry, Missus Henry, please! / I’m down on my knees”. (Till you have calluses?) The quidding pro quo, in Cry A While: “Well, I cried for you, now it’s your turn, you can cry awhile”. Or the nagging about being nagged, in Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35.
“I keep asking myself how long it can go on like this” (Million Miles). “And I don’t know how much longer I can wait” (Can’t Wait).
Then there is Silvio, up and away, “I gotta go” – but just hear how reluctant the song is to end, repeating over and over again that it’s gotta go, a tearaway song that just can’t tear itself away. “Looks like tomorrow is a-comin’ on fast” – brisk, at risk. “One of these days and it won’t be long”. Days aren’t. And the last prophecy before the last chorus? “Going down to the valley and sing my song”. And? “Let the echo decide if I was right or wrong”. Just like that, right or wrong. Listen to the difference between the last lines of Silvio and those of Ring Them Bells:
Oh the lines are long
And the fighting is strong
And they’re breaking down the distance
Between right and wrong
Breaking down the distance, not (as you might have expected) the difference between right and wrong. This makes all the difference in the world and in the other world. Observe the distance that Dylan puts here, in the singing, between right and wrong, by his clasping his breath for part of a second, a second that is split between the two words.
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 45