There are some words of his that don’t get printed in the lyrics, when the women in New Pony sing in chorus, many a time, “How much longer?” This may be mostly a question about how much longer you will be satisfied with your new pony-woman and not have to shoot her to put her out of her misery so that you can get some other new pony, but soon the words do come to mean, as well, how much longer is the song itself going to go on.
“Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?”
Either she will accede, or the moon will set and in due course the day will dawn, truth then dawning.
MOONLIGHT
The seasons they are turnin’ and my sad heart is yearnin’
To hear again the songbird’s sweet melodious tone
Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?
The dusky light, the day is losing, orchids, poppies, black-eyed Susan
The earth and sky that melts with flesh and bone
Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?
The air is thick and heavy all along the levee
Where the geese into the countryside have flown
Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?
Well, I’m preachin’ peace and harmony
The blessings of tranquility
Yet I know when the time is right to strike
I’ll take you ’cross the river dear
You’ve no need to linger here
I know the kinds of things you like
The clouds are turnin’ crimson – the leaves fall from the limbs an’
The branches cast their shadows over stone
Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?
The boulevards of cypress trees, the masquerade of birds and bees
The petals, pink and white, the wind has blown
Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?
The trailing moss and mystic glow
The purple blossoms soft as snow
My tears keep flowing to the sea
Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief
It takes a thief to catch a thief
For whom does the bell toll for, love? It tolls for you and me
My pulse is runnin’ through my palm – the sharp hills are rising from
The yellow fields with twisted oaks that groan
Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?
There can be no doubting the melodious buoyancy of Moonlight, but how is it that this buoyancy comes out to play? For the song, on the face of it, makes much of things that suggest, as against levity, gravity. A groan, and tears, and a funeral bell, for a start. But then the song achieves its sense of relief and release by incorporating within itself reminders of all those things in life that cast shadows, those weights that make us seek relief and release in the first place and in the last place. Moonlight achieves light-heartedness not in spite of but because of the many intimations of mortality, of sadness and loss, that it touches upon or that touch it.
The opening words may be, in their manner and movement, altogether unafflicted, but they do speak – with whatever stylization – of affliction. “The seasons they are turnin’ and my sad heart is yearnin’”. True, the yearning – as soon as Dylan turns the corner of the line – turns out not to be the deepest kind of heartache (not actually, or not yet, yearning to meet you, my dear):
The seasons they are turnin’ and my sad heart is yearnin’
To hear again the songbird’s sweet melodious tone
– for it is the songbird, the cooperative little competitor, for whom my heart is yearning and whose tone I want to hear and to emulate. But anyway, there is an endearing continuity,inthe melodious slide from “sweet” to “meet”, of the one hope into the other:
To hear again the songbird’s sweet melodious tone
Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?
But you won’t BE alone if I meet you. True, but you know what I mean, and one of the things that I most mean is that “alone” is at its best when it means just you and me.461 Added to which, there is the comic effect of a refrain that keeps on ending with a rhyme on the word “alone”. Which cannot leave it alone.
What happens is that a loss is spoken of, while exactly not being felt, even as an apocalyptic vision is then spoken of, but exactly not felt. We are being relieved of these.
The dusky light, the day is losing, orchids, poppies, black-eyed Susan
The earth and sky that melts with flesh and bone
Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?
Simple yet cryptic wording, “the day is losing”: does it mean the dusky light [that] the day is losing? This would be a retrospective touch. Or is the word-order prospective? The day is losing [sight of] the orchids, poppies, black-eyed Susan.462 Or is the thought more final than that, destined for the melting of earth and sky?463 The day is losing: losing the fight; losing, period. What the song seizes is the indispensable truth that a light-hearted song will end up being light to the point of weightlessness or emptiness unless it calls to mind – but in such a way as not to call mournfully to heart – the dark heavy aspects of life. “Black-eyed”, as the dictionary knows, is amenable to romantic feelings, but not to those feelings alone. So although it would be morbid to yield to the thought of a bruise in the black-eyed Susan, or to wince from the knowledge that a black-eyed Susan is slang for a revolver,464 we shouldn’t avert our eyes, whether black or blue or brown, from the presence throughout the song of these darker possibilities, possibilities that are certainly not meant to be actualized into painful realities but are not meant to be naively inconceivable, either; are meant, rather, to be glimpsed as everything that the song so blessedly floats free of.
Floats free of, or ushers us free of. It had been in I Shall Be Free that Dylan first played with and worked with the rhyme heavy / levee:
Oh, there ain’t no use in me workin’ so heavy
I got a woman who works on the levee
What raises a smile is the way in which “levee”, of all words, gravitates to the heavy, instead of levitating.
The air is thick and heavy all along the levee
Where the geese into the countryside have flown
Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?
The air is thick and heavy? Not this musical air. It flies, lighter than those geese, even – as light as goose feathers. And yet this very effect depends upon the light-hearted feeling that issues from the thought of the thick and heavy having been raised only to be dissolved, solved.
It is the bridge of the song that is then, naturally, the perfect place for the assurance “I’ll take you ’cross the river dear”.
Well, I’m preachin’ peace and harmony
The blessings of tranquility
– and, rest assured, I practise what I’m preaching. But peace and harmony and blessings and tranquillity are meaningless in the absence, not so much of war and cacophony and curses and rage in themselves, as of any conceiving even of such ugly realities. Which is why those two reassuring lines about peace and tranquillity are immediately succeeded by a kindly thought that would need only the slightest turn to become threatening:
Well, I’m preachin’ peace and harmony
The blessings of tranquility
Yet I know when the time is right to strike
We feel no danger from that last line, but then that’s what’s so sweetly secure about it. The tone is right to strike. Likewise, there is melting and melting: that of earth and sky in the day of the Lord, as against that of music-making in our day or in the good old days – as when Herrick played melodiously Upon Julia’s Voice:
So smooth, so sweet, so silv’ry is thy voice . . .
Melting melodious words, to lutes of amber.
To hear again his songbird’s sweet melodious tone.
What befalls is happily casual, a casualness without fear of casualty. The rhyme is free to fall where it feels like.
The clouds are turnin’ crimson – the
leaves fall from the limbs an’
The branches cast their shadows over stone
Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?
How relaxed, crimson / limbs an’. And how relaxing, this confidence that the phrase “cast their shadows” won’t cast any shadow over the scene, and that “cast” won’t fix things with “stone” to harden the heart as though it’s all cast in stone.
The boulevards of cypress trees, the masquerade of birds and bees
The petals, pink and white, the wind has blown
Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?
It is an exclamatory scene of delight, and the more delightful because cypress is usually associated not with gaiety but with funerals, with mourning.465 Wordsworth steered clear of the cypress when he wanted a heartening scene (with many of the same properties: the birds, the trees, the wind and water, the moon and all). But Wordsworth’s settling so securely into the scene then conveys less of authentic freedom because his lines have only a narrowly social sense of what such a night is freed from:
The sun has long been set,
The stars are out by twos and threes,
The little birds are piping yet
Among the bushes and trees;
There’s a cuckoo, and one or two thrushes,
And a far-off wind that rushes,
And a sound of water that gushes,
And the cuckoo’s sovereign cry
Fills all the hollow of the sky.
Who would go “parading”
In London, and “masquerading”,
On such a night of June
With that beautiful half-moon,
And all these innocent blisses?
On such a night as this is!
On a night like this . . .
The bliss in Moonlight, with its anticipated further bliss (do meet me on this), is never shattered but it is suddenly pierced with the entirely unexpected welling of tears:
The trailing moss and mystic glow
The purple blossoms soft as snow
My tears keep flowing to the sea
Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief
It takes a thief to catch a thief
For whom does the bell toll for, love? It tolls for you and me
Suddenly, from nowhere, “My tears . . .”. They are flowing to the sea, but where are they flowing from? They don’t sound like tears of joy; rather, as if they might be mildly luxuriating in their love-lorn grief. Inexplicable. In Tennyson’s terms:
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
Tennyson’s poem – which is moved to puzzle its head and its heart, “So sad, so fresh”, “Ah, sad and strange” – evokes a consciousness that loves to stay with its mysterious grief; Dylan’s song, a consciousness that at once pulls itself together, flowing on to something quite other: “Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief”. Out you go. But who’s counting?
Anyway, just accept the rueful realities, such as “It takes a thief to catch a thief ”, especially if you are yourself in the light-fingered business – here within “Love And Theft” – of snatching up an unconsidered trifle here (from a nursery rhyme, or a book about a Japanese gangster), and a trifle there, from Donne and Hemingway. “For whom does the bell toll for, love? It tolls for you and me”. For whom does it toll for? For sure, it doesn’t toll only for thee (Donne: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”), so we might as well have a “for” each. It was a funeral bell, no doubt about that, but how unfunereal it all feels on this occasion, how much more like marriage bells for you and me. A bit like those cypress trees, freed from their dark associations. And then the same goes for – goes from – the song’s last lines, where the pulse is healthy (as it might not always be), and where what is sharp is not going to hurt anybody, and where what is twisted is given to us straight, and where a groan doesn’t sound remotely like a groan, given how blithely it is all sung:
My pulse is runnin’ through my palm – the sharp hills are rising from
The yellow fields with twisted oaks that groan
Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?
Nothing is here for groans. The words that are dark find themselves lightened, and the heavy words lightened. Dylan, like Shakespeare,466 loves the range that the word “light” can command in English, from an effect of the light, the moonlight, to an effect of not being weighted upon by anything heavy.
How long, still, will the question persist, “Won’t you meet me out in the moonlight alone?”? At what point might even the most hopeful of lovers yield to hopelessness? There was a moment of ominous jealousy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (II, i):
Enter the King of Fairies at one door with his train, and the Queen at another with hers
OBERON: Ill met by Moonlight, proud Titania.
But the song lives in hope: Well met by Moonlight.
Forever Young
First things first. The First Cause is the Creator of the Universe. So: “May God bless and keep you always”. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. At once, in the first words of a song that constitutes a prayer, the Word is of God. “May God bless and keep you always”. The Lord bless thee and keep thee.467 The Father comes to the mind of a father. “I wrote it thinking about one of my boys” (Biograph).
May God bless and keep you always
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
And may you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young
The entrance is all the more forceful for its being gentle. This, and the way in which the initiating May . . . is set to distinguish itself from one distinctive opening to a Dylan song: an injunction crouched in the imperative. Imperious, sometimes, whether in dismissal, “Go ’way from my window”, or in enrolment: “Look out your window, baby, there’s a scene you’d like to catch”. But often inviting: “Come gather ’round people”.468
Such imperative openings are admittedly only one of the instantly embroiled ways in which a Dylan song may hit the fan running,469 but they are assuredly characteristic, from “Lay down your weary tune” and “Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me”, to “Don’t ya tell Henry” and “Look out across the fields, see me returning”. But Forever Young is in no position to command (it kneels and it bows its head), and anyway God is not to be commanded, and so the opening is rightly a prayer’s hope: “May God bless and keep you always”.
God, first, then, and then there is an intermediate step that has to be taken before the prayer can arrive at what it most or mostly calls upon as its ritual wording (May you . . .). The song has passed at once from God to you (“May God bless and keep you always”), but now it moves on to a stepping stone that it never leaves behind: your wishes, which are not you exactly, or are exactly not you. “May your wishes all come true”. The singer puts those first, or all but first, but he lets it be understood that the hope is not only that your wishes may all come true but that so may all his wishes for you. Your wishes are granted pride of place, but it is clear that this rests upon a further act of trust: that your wishes are and will be wise ones. Just think of all the wish-stories where the wish-fulfilment is the worst thing that could have happened, issuing in farce or tragedy. Be careful what you wish for, lest your wish be granted. But as to your wishes, may they all come true, for I trust your judgement, as I trust in God’s. “Trust ye in the Lord for ever”.
So now the prayer can return to you – but be patient just a m
oment longer, for its first thought, now that it has returned, is of others. “May you always do for others”. Put others first, within this veritable series of things that are to come first. And, first and last, may you be granted an understanding of human reciprocities:
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
A mistaken pride might have put yourself before others. We have put that behind us, and yet an equally mistaken pride may sometimes stand between us and being ministered to by others. It may be no less blessèd to receive than to give. So there is a pressure, mild but firm, given to the word upon which this ensuing thought turns, the word “And”:
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
And – no less important – let others do for you.
The prepositional phrase “do for”, in this positive sense,470 does well: “to act for or in behalf of; to manage or provide for”. The Oxford English Dictionary brings home the age-old association of “do for” with what Providence provides, with God’s wishes on our behalf. “God did for them” (1523). “When God does for man,heexpects that man should do for God” (1658). “If ye do for them which do for you, what thank are ye worthy of?”: a question asked by the Son of God (Luke 6:33).471 The turn of phrase that we might expect at this moment in Forever Young is not “do for others” but “do unto others”, and this not just because it is more often heard but because Dylan later has it within the refrain of Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others):
But if you do right to me, baby
I’ll do right to you, too
Ya got to do unto others
Like you’d have them, like you’d have them, do unto you
The archaic joins the demotic in “Ya got to do unto others / Like you’d have them do unto you” (Do unto others as . . ., right?) to establish a jaunty jocularity, whereas Forever Young needed something at once more simple and less familiar:
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
Anyway, the usual way of putting it can open a whole other can of worms that turn. George Bernard Shaw: “Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.”
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 46