Love that’s pure hopes all things
Believes all things
The opening words of Watered-Down Love are themselves an act of hope and of belief: in the simplest way, the hope that those who hear the song will recognize (in both senses of recognize) what is being alluded to, together with the belief that St Paul is to be believed when (in the words of that glory of the language, the King James translation) the saint speaks with such divine eloquence of this the highest form of Love, the form that the English language then called Charity so as to distinguish it from, for instance, the love that is erotic love. (Love that’s pure “Won’t sneak up into your room, tall, dark and handsome”.484) Charity gives way to none of the sins, least of all pride.
Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
Those closing clauses constitute one of the most noble progressions ever realized. Dylan’s song does nothing to demean this but does have the courage to play mischievously with it (as against competing with it) when calling it into play. Instead of “endures” and “bears” along with “believes” and “hopes”, there is this at the very start:
Love that’s pure hopes all things
Believes all things, won’t pull no strings
Allusion always pulls strings. And the more so when there may be a stringed instrument (contributing to the medium) in the immediate vicinity. One shouldn’t harp on this, but allusion may itself be thought of as a stringed instrument. Love that’s pure “won’t pull no strings”: this strings us along by means of the plain-spun double negative, the grammatical solecism (“Won’t pull any strings, Master Dylan”) that then strings together “to pull strings” (“to exert influence privately”) and “no strings attached”: string, “a limitation, condition, or restriction attached to something. Freq. in phr. no strings attached.”
Charity “beareth all things” and “endureth all things” – including bearing and enduring this sort of thing, this taking of a liberty to the point of blasphemy. But then religious art has to be willing to risk the accusation of blasphemy.485
The bells of the evening have rung
There’s blasphemy on every tongue
(’Cross the Green Mountain)486
Every tongue, not just as deploring blasphemers but as including all who ever venture to speak of religion, even the bells (for a bell has a tongue).487 If the charge of blasphemy were never even to arise, that could only be because the art were playing safe. What saves the song from being blasély blasphemous or shallowly sacrilegious is its conviction that these are strings that can be plucked in plangent comedy. This, which is implicit in the song, is explicit in an interview. Dylan is considerate of God: “He’s got enough people asking Him to pull strings. I’ll pull my own strings, you know.” An assurance that sounds a different note when it comes from a guitar-player.
Are there any heroes or saints these days?
“A saint is a person who gives of himself totally and freely, without strings. He is neither deaf nor blind.”488
What strings of saintliness, within a Christian song, might connect “deaf” to “strings”? The miracle in Mark 7:30–35:
Be opened. And straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain. And he charged them that they should tell no man: but the more he charged them, so much the more a great deal they published it; and were beyond measure astonished, saying, He hath done all things well: he maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak.489
And in this as in so many miraculous Dylan songs, straightway our ears are opened. So much, pure love can do, charity, or loving kindness, or “love that’s pure”. The song sets itself to rescue the idea and the ideal of charity from the slightly archaic colouring of that word, a colouring that has come to make people mistake its largest meaning.
“Love that’s pure, it don’t make no false claims”. What kind of false claim might charity ever be accused of making? Admittedly, there is the dangerous pasture “Where charity is supposed to cover up a multitude of sins”. But Something’s Burning, Baby knows the difference between covering up and covering. St Peter’s First Epistle does not speak of covering up when it promises that “charity shall cover the multitude of sins”. (To cover, as benignly to protect, to clothe, and so – by extension – to forgive.) Psalms 32:1: “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered”. Proverbs 10:12: “Hatred stirreth up strifes: but love covereth all sins”. Charity is the opposite of any covering up.
Charity firmly sets its gentle face against sin, the sin of envy, for one. Charity envieth not. Charity thinketh no evil. Love that’s pure
Won’t pervert you, corrupt you with foolish wishes490
Will not make you envious, won’t make you suspicious
But the song is not content either to update or to endorse St Paul, for those would be presumptuous as well as needless. Watered-Down Love takes up its own enterprise when it sets “love that’s pure” against love that isn’t.
Such a contrast was no part of St Paul’s undertaking in chapter 13 of the First Epistle to the Corinthians. Plainly, one enemy of the charitable is the uncharitable. Less plainly, another enemy of the love that is charity is the love that falls short because it is diluted or impure. Love that’s pure is to be contrasted with love that’s watered-down.
You don’t want a love that’s pure
You wanna drown love
You wanna watered-down love
“You wanna drown love” – which does not then form, as you might have expected, an exact parallel with “You wanna watered-down love”, for then it would have had to be “You wanna drowned love”. And “wanna” is compact in more than one way: “you want a . . .” (which is how the previous line spelt it out) plus “you want to . . .” But circulating throughout the song is this contrast of the pure with the watered-down, the strong drink with the drowning of the drink. Too much tonic. Love that’s pure might even have been love’s that neat, if it weren’t that this would have been too neat by half. Love that’s proof (against temptation)?
But love that’s pure doesn’t have to insist on purism, on pure English. The song has as usual the unusual feats that characterize the true claims of Dylan’s words.
Love that’s pure, it don’t make no false claims491
Intercedes for you ’stead of casting you blame
– ’stead of casting it as you might have expected, namely “’stead of casting the blame on you”. Or might it have been “’stead of casting you as the one to be blamed”? Either way, I’d like to intercede on behalf of “casting you blame”. Or there is the transgression / confession rhyme, grilling you (at the police station or through the confessional’s grill) about the transgression without which you wouldn’t have to be coming to confession:
Will not deceive you, lead you into transgression
Won’t write it up and make you sign a false confession
– an ugly conjunction of the police and the priest.
“Will not” do this, “Won’t” do that: these are all among the negative things that are positively negated by “love that’s pure”, and this way of establishing the positive power of love by setting it against the negatives that it defies and defeats is itself fully in the spirit of St Paul, however different its idiom may be. Has the small inexorable word “not” ever been called upon to do more sterling positive work than in St Paul’s celebration of this, the most positive virtue of all?
Charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity . . .
There is a cascade of heartening negatives throughout the Dylan song, too:
Love that’s pure won’t lead you astray
Won’t hold you back, won’t get in your way492
It is the pressure of all the negatives, some of them working positively (“Won’t hold you back”) and some of them negatively (alas, “You don’t want a love that’s pure” – would that you did), that explains why such force attaches in the song to the utter simplicity of the greatest praise that Dylan gives to love that’s pure: “It knows that it knows”. Now there’s something entirely positive for you, for you not against you, as against the repudiation of all those ways of being bad. A positive good: “It knows that it knows”.
Love that’s pure, no accident493
It knows that it knows, is always content
The words as printed in Lyrics 1962–1985 had been “Always on time, is always content” – a good thing to be, certainly, for punctuality is the politeness of princes, and to speak in a song of being “Always on time” is to be alert to the musical humour of putting it like that. But “Always on time” didn’t attain the utterly unmisgiving rightness, the repudiation of all misguided sophistication, that is the justified confidence of “It knows that it knows”. With, behind it, the authority of this same chapter of St Paul on charity: “For we know in part . . . now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” We know in part, and I know in part, but “It knows that it knows”. With consummate assurance. And yet – so that the whole thing not repose in complacency – this, too, is set against the warning with which the song comes to an end, the warning that you (by which the song means all of us, the speaker included) are always going to be tempted by the lesser love, the watered-down love. A more insidious temptation than anger, say, for watered-down love isn’t one of the sins, after all. The song ends, not with the words as printed, but with the addition of something newly admonitory, the reminder over and over again of the human propensity to lapse, to settle for the diluted or the polluted:
Watered-down love
You wanna watered-down love
Watered-down love
You wanna watered-down love
Yes you do, you know you do . . .
– this repetition itself being then repeated. From “It knows that it knows” to “Yes you do, you know you do”.
The song doesn’t sermonize or speechify, choosing instead to avail itself of the angled accents of speech. One discreet skill here is the song’s ways with parts of speech, and with one part of speech in particular: the adverb. Deftly, unobtrusively. The enterprising song is, as you would expect, happy to accommodate a wide range of different parts of speech: verbs as tonally different as “sneak up” and “intercede”, nouns as different as “strings” and “transgression”, adjectives as different as “foolish” and “eternal” . . . The other members of the family are there, too: prepositions (“up” and “down”), conjunctions (“and” and / or “or”), interjections (that undulating “ooh-ooh-ooh” near the end), pronouns (“Yes you do, you know you do”). But one part of speech does take some time to arrive. You don’t want adverbs? Despite all the verbs (seven in the first verse alone) that might enjoy the company of an adverb? After a while, I find myself starting to feel hungry for an adverb – granted, the other linguistic dishes are fine in their way, but not in its way. What is keeping it? So there is gratification for me, halfway through the song, when “astray” strays into the song: “Love that’s pure won’t lead you astray”. But not fully satisfying, this, since a fully satisfactory adverb has a way of ending, as “fully” does, with -ly. Patience will be rewarded, though, for the last verse of the song (before it enters its final refrain and coda) is rife with adverbs: first, “always”, and then two adverbs that are manifestly such:
Love that’s pure, no accident
It knows that it knows, is always content
An eternal flame, quietly burning
Never needs to be proud, loud or restlessly yearning494
Quietly, never restlessly. And then it is the very last word, “yearning” (the last asseveration of the song proper), that Dylan sings less in exhortation, than in exaltation and exultation. His voice ripples the word out so that it does itself become an eternal flame.
The effect is thrillingly contrarious, for in the very moment when it is being insisted that love that’s pure “Never needs to be proud, loud or restlessly yearning”, there is to be heard in the very word this unassuageable yearning. Do you understand this? “Yes, you do, you know you do”. For although we may aspire to being beyond such yearning, we cannot fully achieve this (any more than we can entirely extirpate the deadly sin that is pride). Moreover, what is to be heard in the yearning with which “yearning” is voiced is not the false claim that charity suffers from yearning (for it “Never needs to be proud, loud or restlessly yearning”), but our yearning for it.
The album Shot of Love was unlovingly shot down by the reviewers. And Watered-Down Love (which is not a watered-down song at all, being a variant on the thought of a shot of love, “I need a shot of love”) was among the targets. Which is where the vexatious question of what a song actually sounds like must become central. “Be opened. And straightway his ears were opened”. Stoning the album in Rolling Stone,495 Paul Nelson managed to hear its Christianity as seething with “hate” (his word, and not just word), and then had no difficulty in hating it:
Dullards that we are, we can’t understand God. We don’t understand Dylan. Our love is no damn good (Watered-Down Love) . . . Therefore, each and every one of us can go to hell.
In Watered-Down Love . . . the singer’s so mad that he can barely manage his splutters of spite.
For my part, I don’t think that Watered-Down Love says anything like “Our love is no damn good” or that “each and every one of us can go to hell”, but more crucially I don’t think that the song sounds anything like those damning sentiments. From its opening notes and its opening words, it moves more jauntily than jouncily, a series of acts of serious jesting, not a solemn commination. This song recital is no recital of divine vengeance against sinners. “Splutters of spite”? But Nelson, blind in at least one eye: I see no spite. I hear no evil. And I don’t think that I am the one who has his hands to his ears. If there should be love that’s pure, so there should be hate that’s pure, too, unpolluted by injustice and inattention. Nelson sounds as though it is he who needed a shot of hate.
A shot of scepticism, fine. “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” “Doubt, Despair and Scrounging, shall I hitch my bath-chair to the greatest of these?” The question is pondered by one of Samuel Beckett’s delinquents.496
Yet there is a moral, hereabouts, in a vital change that Dylan made to the song. The change brings home how hideously easy it can be to lapse from charity, from a love that’s pure, and to fall into what does sound all too like spluttering and spite. The studio out-take (which is the performance that was released but with a final verse that was edited out when released) ends its assurances not with the rising delight felt in the confidence that love that’s pure “Never needs to be proud, loud or restlessly yearning”, but with a further verse that would have demeaned the song into the self-serving, the self-pitying, and the self-praising:
Love that’s pure is not what you teach me
I’ve got to go where it can reach me
I’ve got to flee towards patience and meekness
You miscalculate me, mistake my kindness for weakness
I don’t mean that we would have had to take this as autobiographical; not that it would save the artistic situation to make the claim (false or not) that Dylan is imagining and dramatizing another’s betrayal in love. For the move out from the large love that is charity to a love-affair about which one of the parties now feels uncharitable, this move is in itself a false move artistically. Whereas the song as released, and as blessedly released from its final verse, does not have even once any of the words “I”, “me”, or “my” (and not because Dylan is
exempting himself from the need to give and to receive such love as is charity), this misjudged verse that so enjoys passing judgement has in its four lines me / I / me / I / me / my.
I’ve got to flee towards patience and meekness
You miscalculate me, mistake my kindness for weakness
This was itself a miscalculation, a mistake, mistaking unkindness for strength. Its excision proved to be one of Dylan’s best revisions. For “charity vaunteth not itself ”.
Centuries ago, a preacher named Hill was not allowed to become a priest because he was an itinerant preacher. But he won a place in dictionaries of quotations for these good words: “He did not see why the devil should have all the good tunes.” Dylan is an itinerant non-preacher. Watered-Down Love doesn’t preach. It has a good tune, thanks be not to the devil but to God, and it is aware that “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”
If Not For You
Charity is love, Christian love in the main, whether as God’s love to man, or man’s love of God and of his neighbour. But a love not restricted to the Christian. The Oxford English Dictionary extends such love: “Without any specially Christian associations: Love, kindness, affection, natural affection: now esp. with some notion of generous or spontaneous goodness.” In short, such a love as might come esp. with some notion of If not for you . . .
If charity be love, can there be a love song that is a charity song? If so, it would be characterized by its shaping spirit, not by any shapely body, and it would move with and be moved by affection, natural affection, and by loving-kindness, the lovely compound that Coverdale in the sixteenth century, in praise of his Creator, created from the two words “loving” and “kindness”. Coverdale translated Psalms 25:6 as “Call to remembrance, O Lord, thy tender mercies and thy loving kindnesses, which have been ever of old.” So the dictionary, thanking Coverdale, promotes loving-kindness: “Affectionate tenderness and consideration; kindness arising from a deep personal love, as the active love of God for his creatures.” God, to whom a believer would most wish to say If Not For You. “Without your love I’d be nowhere at all”. Those words of Dylan’s are addressed to one of God’s creatures, such a one as the “lady of unbounded loving-kindness” whom Washington Irving praised in the America of his day. Just such a lady or woman is praised in If Not For You, an unbounded love song of which the kind of love is loving-kindness, affectionate tenderness and consideration received with thanks and reciprocated with thankfulness.
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 48