Meanwhile, as the song makes its way – at once pressing on and circling back for ever – there can be heard the forward movement of mind and of voice from “for others” through “for you” to “forever”, itself then repeated for what must seem ever.
True, the song is of the simplest. But then these effects are themselves of the simplest. Inspired, they are a matter of order, of ordering things aright, as is true of every ritual and perhaps of every prayer.
“Forever Young, I wrote in Tucson,” Dylan remembered. “I wrote it thinking about one of my boys and not wanting to be too sentimental. The lines came to me, they were done in a minute. I don’t know. Sometimes that’s what you’re given. You’re given something like that. You don’t know what it is exactly that you want but this is what comes. That’s how that song came out. I certainly didn’t intend to write it – I was going for something else, the song wrote itself – naw, you never know what you’re going to write. You never even know if you’re going to make another record, really.”472
“May you always know the truth”: including this truth about such creations, that I don’t know, you don’t know, you never know, you never even know. The simple repetitiveness of all those hovering remarks, their easy brooding and giving (“Sometimes that’s what you’re given. You’re given something like that”), are very endearing and truthful in relation to this song that is likewise so happy to repeat itself forever as it unfolds its wishes (“You don’t know what it is exactly that you want”) for another’s well-being.
In Ode on a Grecian Urn, Keats had been explicit not only with “for ever” but with “happy”:
And, happy melodist, unwearièd,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
Ah, “happy” recurs so often as to feel immitigably sad: four times in those three lines, and this after the sigh “Ah, happy, happy boughs!”
Forever Young may wish “May you be happy”, but this is the wish that is unheard. (Heard wishes are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter?) This is the more telling in that the song lives within a society that knows the truth to be self-evident, that among our inalienable rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The song silently declares its independence of any such claims for, or to, happiness. “May your heart always be joyful”: joy is something else, as is clear if you try thinking of utilitarianism as committed to the greatest joy of the greatest number. Although Forever Young may breathe the wish that its beneficiary be happy, it doesn’t voice this. For the direct pursuit of happiness has a way of leading you astray, away from happiness proper as well as away from all the allegiances owed to values other than happiness. The song settles for the larger hopes:
May you grow up to be righteous
May you grow up to be true
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you
May you always be courageous
Stand upright and be strong
And may you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young
“Forever”: Keats had rung the changes on the word, or rather, words (in his better day, usually two words, for ever):473
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
For ever piping songs for ever new;
For ever warm and still to be enjoyed,
For ever panting, and for ever young –
There is poignancy in Keats’s so ordering things that “for ever young” is the sixth and last “for ever” of his sequence. In Dylan, it is “young” that forever succeeds “forever”, four times in each verse. Its brother, “always”, sounds as though it is always going to lag behind (for ever panting?): “always” only twice in the first verse, and only twice in the second verse . . . But in the end it catches up and matches up: it, too, comes four times in the last verse. The sibling synonyms are finally all-square.
Dylan had at once known the truth about where the danger lay: “too sentimental”. Poets have long been alert to the need to ward off sentimentality in such prayers. Yeats, for instance, in A Prayer for my Daughter, immediately follows his “May . . .” (“May she be granted beauty”) with “and yet”, in a thorough and prompt prophylaxis against being too sentimental:
May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.
Then there is Philip Larkin, no less wary of “the usual stuff / About being beautiful”, who seeks to escape sentimentality in his poem for Sally Amis, first by means of a rueful pun in the title, Born Yesterday (I wasn’t born yesterday, even if she was), and then by jeering relaxedly at the . . . – well, wishers:
Tightly folded bud,
I have wished you something
None of the others would:
Not the usual stuff
About being beautiful,
Or running off a spring
Of innocence and love –
They will all wish you that,
And should it prove possible,
Well, you’re a lucky girl.
But if it shouldn’t, then
May you be ordinary
– at which point Larkin, sensing that this way of putting it was in danger of overestimating how much understatement he could count on, has to spend eight lines getting out from under just about everything that we mean by ordinary, and then has to end his poem by wishing ditchwater on her – only to have to hasten immediately into explaining away this even blunter word of his:
In fact, may you be dull –
If that is what a skilled,
Vigilant, flexible,
Unemphasised, enthralled
Catching of happiness is called.
This is as sentimental as they come, given the fact that by no stretch even of Larkin’s imagination is dull what a skilled, vigilant, flexible, unemphasized, enthralled catching of happiness is called. Larkin’s sally fails, lapsing into what is just one more form that sentimentality may take: a miscalculated risk taken mistakenly and then rescinded.
In Forever Young, on the other hand, Dylan does catch what you might call a skilled, vigilant, flexible, unemphasized, enthralled catching of happiness. And of values other than happiness. His prayer (that he not be too sentimental) is among those answered.
There is a special grace in the song’s resisting the temptations of sentimentality. Sometimes the vigilance is a matter of sensing something dark that is in the air.
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
Dylan’s knowing at least something of the work of Blake474 might mean that this wish (for a child, too) could be seen in contrast to For Children: The Gates of Paradise, where Blake – in a famous caricature – projects a demented demandingness. The shrilling thrilling insistence is both a title and a claim to entitlement: “I want! I want!”475 “A tiny man mounts a ladder propped against a quarter moon, while two others watch him. In the background are seven stars in a dark, cloudless sky.”476 Anything but that, please. May you – in quite the opposite spirit – build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung.
Forever Young is a dedication to hope. Among the poems that Dylan values is one by Rudyard Kipling, and it came to his mind, he says, in the wake of the terrorism of September 11th, 2001. “My mind would go to young people at a time like this.”477 Gentlemen-Rankers imagines hopelessness, so it needs to speak of Hope, and – like Forever Young – it speaks of Truth (rhyming it with “youth”), and it prays for the young – a word that the poem rhymes, as Dylan’s song does, with “rung”. Dylan is in hopes.
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
And may you stay forever young
Kipling, in the four lines that Dylan was later to quote, imagines what it must be to have done with Hope and Honour, and to be lost to Love and Truth:
We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth,
We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung,
And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth,
God help us, for we knew the worst too young!
“And climb on every rung”: but “down the ladder rung by rung”, and not even climbing down, dropping down. “God help us”. “May God bless and keep you always”.
May you grow up to be righteous
May you grow up to be true
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you
May you always be courageous
Plainly it is a simple positive sense that commands this occasion on which “true” and “truth” can calmly succeed one another as the due process for consummating their consecutive lines. It is the occasion for “true” and “you” to rhyme again, as they had done in the first verse. (The final verse, with something of surprise, is to move on from this rhyme true / you, reaching forward with a different movement in the rhyme swift / shift and its meaning.)
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you
May you always see the lights surrounding you. (Some hear “light” in the singular. As printed in Lyrics 1962–1985, it is “lights”, which avails himself of the sibilant succession in “lights surrounding”. More than one light is more generous, less likely to harden into a one-thing-necessary.) First, may such lights always be there. Next, may you always perceive that there are such lights that benignly surround you – and that are close at hand, not distant like the stars. And may you always see to it that there be such lights. Perhaps, without overdoing things and issuing a halo, the lights surrounding you may be lights that you bring with you, no less than those that life may bring to you. To see the lights surrounding you, especially when you know the truth (which is often not a bright thing to be seen with delight), is never to lose sight of hope.
Cease, every joy, to glimmer on my mind,
But leave, oh! leave the light of Hope behind!
(Thomas Campbell, The Pleasures of Hope)
“And see the lights surrounding you”: this breathes a larger air. But there is a touch, too, of something salutarily unsentimental about the sequence in which the line figures. For when the phrase “surrounding you” is at once followed by “May you always be courageous”, we may be reminded that what surrounds us in this life, all too often, is not light but darkness. (So the word “lights” would be touched with an emphasis.) The word “surround” often has its dark side. Dylan has elsewhere “Surrounded by fakery” and “controversy surrounds him”; danger lurks in the line, “Well, he’s surrounded by pacifists who all want peace”, and what might have seemed to be a benign surrounding, “He’s surrounded by God’s angels”, turns to be dark:
Now her vengeance has been satisfied and her possessions have been sold
He’s surrounded by God’s angels and she’s wearin’ a blindfold478
Which leaves “And see the lights surrounding you” as the only unshadowed use of “surround” in Dylan’s songs, so there may be at least the possibility that “surrounding you” contains – or rather, might ill have contained – a threat, such a threat as would make sense of an immediate move to “May you always be courageous”.
The final verse, too, may have a glimpse of a faint threat to our hopes, in the knowledge that such a conceivable shadow may do something to make unsentimentally real the benevolence that is being prayed for.
May your hands always be busy
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift
A good wish, that your hands may always be busy, and yet possibly hinting at what it is that goodness may be up against:
In works of labour, or of skill,
I would be busy too;
For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.
(Isaac Watts, Against Idleness and Mischief)
It is likewise a high hope, that your feet may always be swift, one that might be associated not only with hope (“True hope is swift”479) but with love: “Love is swift of foot”.480 And yet this again is possibly a wish that acknowledges the existence of dark alternatives. Of the six things that the Lord hates (Proverbs 6:18), one is “feet that be swift in running to mischief” (mischief again), and when feet are swift in the Epistle to the Romans (3:15), it is that “their feet are swift to shed blood”.
But last things last, the lasting things.
May your heart always be joyful
May your song always be sung
And may you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young
The song’s last wish remains what it has been throughout. And the one-but-last wish? “May your song always be sung”. You have a song of your own, you know (sings this unique singer to a child of his, and to us, and to himself), your song. Your song, as the one that you will have as your own, everybody having his or her song, even those of us who don’t write songs or can’t sing. Your song, as this one of yours, this one for you, this one – Forever Young – in which I do for you. (May I always do so.) Always be sung, as continue to be sung (may it always find itself sung). Always be sung, there being – as earnest of this hope – two versions of this song on this one album.
A prayer is not an end in itself. Those of us who are old enough (though forever youthful) to remember the sweet startlement with which in 1974 we first heard Forever Young will never forget what it was like to turn Planet Waves over (something that is lost in the single-sidedness of a CD) and discover that the first track on the second side was a discovery, an utterly – no, an utteredly – different version of the song we had just heard as the last track on the first side. Forever indeed. The reprise was a feat of modesty and pride. Modesty, in acknowledging that even Dylan himself couldn’t sing one of his songs so that everything about it was realized in one performance.481 Pride, in this same fact, that he could create a work of art that greatly escapes even the artist’s power over it (like a child, really), pride that here was to be heard the living witness of what it is for a work of art to be forever young – and forever new.
And, happy melodist, unwearièd,
For ever piping songs for ever new . . .
To hear the song is to realize how much Dylan, the happy melodist, unwearied, can realize. There is the staying power that waits so patiently after the word “stay”, so that the line is not
And may you stay forever young
but
And may you stay forever young
– with “stay” extending its stay. And there is what we hear in the close of the refrain, which is not what we might read (“Forever young, forever young / May you stay forever young”) but something audibly true, something that the eye cannot fathom, something in the timing that cannot be rendered by placing and spacing, however much we exercise our liberties:
Forever y o u n g forever y o u n g
May you s t a y forever young
Even as the nymph Melisma stays forever young . . .482 The longing is in the elongations, as well as in the complementary rhyme (“May you stay . . .”), even as the shift “When the winds of changes shift” is a shift in how a word is voiced by the wind that is breath, and thereby changed.
When young, or when even younger than he was when he wrote Forever Young, Dylan had set down Bob Dylan’s Dream, a dream that had gone but had left a memory at once happy and sad:
By the old wooden stove where our hats was hung
Our words was told, our songs was sung
With hungry hearts throug
h the heat and cold
We never much thought we could get very old
We thought we could sit forever in fun
Our songs were sung: May your song always be sung. We never much thought we could get very old . . . forever in fun: forever young. And behind Forever Young there may be a deep memory not only of the memory that is Bob Dylan’s Dream but of Isaiah 26:1–4:
In that day shall this song be sung in the land of Judah; We have a strong city; salvation will God appoint for walls and bulwarks. Open ye the gates, that the righteous nation which keepeth the truth may enter in. Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee. Trust ye in the Lord for ever. Trust ye in the Lord for ever.483
“May God bless and keep you always”.
Charity
Watered-Down Love
At Stanford University in California, the Memorial Church is decked with allegorical figures: Faith, Hope, Charity, and Love. Designed by the great architect Maximus Crassus Ignoramus (of Soloi, birthplace of the solecism), the Memorial Church is certainly a memorial to something. A memorial to the railroad millionaire Leland Stanford’s wish to railroad St Paul by erecting not just the Christian trinity of graces, Faith, Hope, and Charity, but a quadrangle that can then grace university expansion. Fourfold! Billfold! A memorial to institutional indifference towards the English language as well as towards history, including the history that it purports to honour. For charity is love, or certainly was so (and therefore is so, if you respect the enduring life of the tradition that you are invoking), within the supreme sequence voiced in St Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 13: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”
But now abideth in an educational establishment not just these three but these four. And once Love is to be granted a separate spot, what is left for Charity to undertake? Up there on the fac¸ade of the Memorial Church, she is apparently doling out soup to the unfortunate. Well worth doing, and the great virtue that is Charity does not disdain such compassionate doing of good. But this is not because she is distinct from Love, it is because she incorporates such love within the many kinds and kindnesses of her patient love. “Charity suffereth long, and is kind.” Charity is pure love.
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 47