The spirit of If Not For You, in so very far as its words are concerned, is realized in rhyme. From the start it sets itself to make a good end. For dear life.
If not for you
My sky would fall
The song will have to come to an end, but there must not be the feeling that the affection of gratitude has come to an end, or been switched off or faded out. “If not for you”: if your heart sings this to someone, and then immediately starts listing things –
If not for you
Babe, I couldn’t find the door
Couldn’t even see the floor
– there’s no reason why you shouldn’t end up having no end of a list, giving an inventory of the universe. If she really is the sine qua non, makes possible everything for you, then without her you wouldn’t be able to find not only the door and the floor, but the stairs, and the fridge; and if not for her, you wouldn’t be able to hear not only the robin sing, but the lark, the windhover, the cassowary . . .
How does the end of If Not For You succeed in ringing true? The inescapable acknowledgement that even gratitude cannot be expressed for ever is brought home by Dylan’s decision to depart from the song with the words “If not for you” repeated and repeated – in their beautiful simplicity – as if they, though they have got to go, could go on ad infinitum. But this simple device (not signing off but singing off) succeeds only because it is confirmed and happily compounded by Dylan’s recourse to a different rhyming at the end.
So evenly does the singing move, like the music, that it sounds as though each verse has the same rhyme-scheme. But not so. And this confirms the sense that to be truly grateful is to feel something that is the good old story and yet is ever new, ever so slightly different. Here is the first verse:
If not for you
a
Babe, I couldn’t find the door
b
Couldn’t even see the floor
b
I’dbesad and blue
a
If not for you
a
The rhyme-scheme, then, is abbaa, beginning and ending with the refrain “If not for you”.
The second verse sounds as though it is set to do the same, with the new rhyme c replacing b, and it too begins and ends with the refrain “If not for you” – but it goes accaaa:
If not for you
a
Babe, I’d lie awake all night
c
Wait for the mornin’ light
c
To shine in through
a
But it would not be new
a
If not for you
a
Three times now, the a rhyme, not twice, and this is something new. It is, as it happens, the line “But it would not be new”.
The third verse starts as though it is going to follow the pattern, since it begins ad, but then it reverts immediately to a (not add, but ada, as though it can’t tear itself away from the rhyme that is due to “you”); so the rhyme-scheme has now become adadaa.
If not for you
a
My sky would fall
d
Rain would gather too
a
Without your love I’d be nowhere at all
d
I’d be lost if not for you
a
And you know it’s true
a
And with this verse – unlike those that precede it, and that had apparently established the refrain as the right opening and closing of each verse – now having “If not for you” not as the last line but as the one but last:
I’d be lost if not for you
And you know it’s true
Easily said, this knows, but this time, come on, you know it’s true, with this insistence spilling over the edge of the rhyme-scheme, or rather, the refrain-scheme.
The next verse might seem to be only a reprise of this one, since it, too, has the scheme adadaa and mostly the same words:
If not for you
a
My sky would fall
d
Rain would gather too
a
Without your love I’d be nowhere at all
d
Oh! what would I do
a
If not for you
a
But it isn’t the same, for now the refrain-scheme has reasserted its rights, restoring its claim to have the verse end as it begins:
Oh! what would I do
If not for you
As it begins, and yet not altogether so, for that “Oh!” could make all the difference in the world.
And then to the fifth and final verse, which again might seem to be identical with an earlier one (the second verse), since it, too, has the scheme aeeaaa: “you”, “spring”, “sing”, “clue”, “true”, “you”.
If not for you
a
Winter would have no spring
e
Couldn’t hear the robin sing
e
I just wouldn’t have a clue
a
Anyway it wouldn’t ring true
a
If not for you
a
But just a moment, is that it exactly? For the one but last line, the one that leads into that very last “If not for you” (the refrain that will then be repeated as if for ever), ends not with the one word “true” but with the two words “ring true”, and the word “ring” picks up the verse’s other rhyme, spring / sing. So the scheme is a e e a ea a –
Anyway it wouldn’t ring true ea
– and the words “ring true” plait together the verse’s two rhymes, there at the end as a love-knot, a ribbon that ties up the gift of gratitude that is the song. Or, to slip the metaphor on to the finger of the words, as itself a ring, a pledge, an emblem of true love, endless, a virtuous circle.
If the song is to end, and it must, you know, then in some way it must itself “ring true” that this is an ending, not a stopping. And this word “true” is the only rhyme-word that has returned, other than that of the refrain. “And you know it’s true” returns now as “Anyway it wouldn’t ring true” – and this with a reminder about the challenge to which all art has to rise. For the earlier rhyme on “new” (“But it would not be new”) asks to be taken in conjunction with “true”, to remind us that the challenge to the poet is to say something at once new and true. (Love, too, always new and true. With rhyme as a relationship.) It’s not difficult to say something new if it doesn’t matter whether it’s true, or to say something true if it doesn’t matter whether it’s new. Dylan’s song rings new and true. And it does so by courtesy of rhyme, including that dual rhyme with which it enters upon its ending:
If not for you
Winter would have no spring
Couldn’t hear the robin sing
I just wouldn’t have a clue
Anyway it wouldn’t ring true
If not for you
But once again it matters that a device, a technique, will always be not a direction, but an axis. In the case of If Not For You, the penultimate line’s dual rhyme, “ring true”, is in both senses a happy effect. Elsewhere exactly the same device can be used to be moving in the opposite direction, with the poignancy of a love-knot that is yearned for and is never to be secured. I’m thinking of the end of a poem by William Barnes. A woman speaks, in Dorset English.497
I. WONESOMENESS
As I do zew, wi’ nimble hand,
In here avore the window’s light,
How still do all the housegear stand
Around my lwonesome zight.
How still do all the housegear stand
Since Willie now ’ve a-left the land.
The rwose-tree’s window-sheädèn bow
Do hang in leaf, an’ win’-blow’d flow’rs,
Avore my lwonesome eyes do show
Theäse bright November hours.
Avore my lwonesome eyes do show
&nbs
p; Wi’ nwone but I to zee em blow.
The sheädes o’ leafy buds, avore
The peänes, do sheäke upon the glass,
An’ stir in light upon the vloor,
Where now vew veet do pass.
An’ stir in light upon the vloor,
Where there’s a-stirrèn nothèn mwore.
This win’ mid dreve upon the maïn,
My brother’s ship, a-plowèn foam,
But not bring mother, cwold, nor raïn ,
At her now happy hwome.
But not bring mother, cwold, nor raïn ,
Where she is out o’ païn.
Zoo now that I’m a-mwopèn dumb,
A-keepèn father’s house, do you
Come of’en wi’ your work vrom hwome,
Vor company. Now do.
Come of’en wi’ your work vrom hwome,
Up here a-while. Do come.
Notice – again, we register it even if we don’t consciously remark it – the truncated final line in both the last two stanzas. Earlier the last line has always, like the other lines of the stanza, had eight syllables (“Where there’s a-stirrèn nothèn mwore”), but now it is reduced, bleakly, to six syllables: “Where she is out o’ païn”. And again: “Up here a-while. Do come”. But it is the plea, the hushed but insistent plea, of those last two words of the poem, “Do come”, that consummates its sympathy and ours. For the word “come” comes in the poem, first in a sentence of twenty words, then in one of ten words, and then, finally, in one of two words: “Do come”, where not only does “come” rhyme, but “do” is the other rhyme-word of this concluding stanza: at the line-endings, “do you”, into “Now do”, and at last into “Do come”. What in the Dylan song was the happy gratitude of “ring true”, both words being rhyme-words in his last verse, is in the Barnes poem the sorrowing wish – need – for somebody to be grateful to: “Do come”. And for something to be grateful for: that is, such charity as is free from the grudgingness that The Oxford English Dictionary sadly recognizes in the end as lurking within one of the forms that charity may take.
A disposition to judge leniently and hopefully of the character, aims, and destinies of others, to make allowance for their apparent faults and shortcomings; large-heartedness. (But often it amounts barely to fair-mindedness towards people disapproved of or disliked, this being appraised as a magnanimous virtue.)
This, with an air of mild surprise, itself a strict appraisal (ensconced within its parentheses). Loving-kindness is more open.
If not for you
Babe, I couldn’t find the door
There at the song’s opening, an open door.
Eternal Circle
Dylan’s love songs both evoke and evince a true surprise of love: they are individual, intensely idiosyncratic, and yet ripplingly everybody’s. So that to know Dylan personally is disabling when it leaves Joan Baez saying that “everybody in the world thinks Bobby’s written songs about them, and I consider myself in the same bag”.498 She doesn’t mean everybody in the world, she just means Dylan’s entourage, and she just means songs with her in mind. What matters, rather, is what the songs mean to those who cannot be under the illusion that Dylan had them in mind but who feel ominously divined.
“You know, I like Robert Graves, the poet. Do you?” (Dylan).499 Graves was the twentieth-century love poet who particularly commanded this combination of love’s individuality and love’s commonalty. It is a source of deep relief, with Graves and with Dylan, that my strongest feelings should turn out to be so like everyone else’s. Everyone’s else.
But if you want me to
I can be just like you
This is sardonic in the song – I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met) – but it can be taken appreciatively elsewhere. Since we can easily, and wrongly, be afraid of ordinariness, can feel it as a threat to our uniqueness and not as a stabilizing complement to it, we feel gratitude to the songs and poems that put such heart in us, helping us not to take it amiss that we are like a lot of people. Of Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right, Dylan wrote: “A lot of people make it sort of a love song – slow and easy-going. But it isn’t a love song. It’s a statement that maybe you can say to make yourself feel better.”500 No, it’s something even better: the dissolving of any such distinction. Even gratitude can be oppressive, but If Not For You makes gratitude seem – or rather, shows it to be – simply a delight.
A love song imagines someone in love, someone to love and be loved by. Or, admittedly, someone to have loved or been loved by. Perhaps someone to grieve the loss of, since love songs are often many too many mournings. Such a loved one can be real, and occasionally is so (sometimes fortunately), but she or he still has to be imagined, for imagination is no less necessary when the engagement is with a figure who is far from imaginary. Being imaginative is always the thing that is called for, even though the imagination’s responsibilities are bound to be different when devoted to someone existent – take Sara – as against the newly called into being.
Added to which, to multiply the matter, the love song has a further responsibility: not just to imagine love but to love singing. Love song? Yes, he does. He loves it in itself and for itself. Over and over and above.
Eternal Circle is an entrancing dance of shadows in which there are three pairs of partners. One pair is a man and a woman; another is the love of a woman and the love of singing; the third is the song that we are hearing and the song that we are hearing about. Each pair weaves its ways, and all are interwoven.
The woman happens to be a total stranger, but then this turns out to be by no means totally unsatisfactory. For one’s love-life, whether on-stage or off-stage, is often intimate with fantasy-life. Whereas people known to you have a way of thwarting your fantasy-life (or even taking it), you can’t beat a stranger as a person about whom to fantasize.
The singer maybe no stranger in the eyes – the “dark eyes” and “A million faces at my feet”, in Dark Eyes – of all those out there in the auditorium, but the hearers (setting aside an underwhelming minority of them) are strangers to the singer. Probably the performing artist would never be able to carry the whole thing off if he or she weren’t half carried away by postulating the pulsation out there of some particular endeared stranger, unknown (as yet?) though not simply unbeknownst.
Then again, this whole indulging is not just a fantasy, since there really are people out there who are in love with the performer, whether it be the over-laureated poet who is reading, the long-legged Principal Boy in the pantomime, or the bootlegendary singer who is there before their very eyes and ears. This singer especially. “We love you Bob” (without even a comma before “Bob”), you can hear them exclaim at the concert, in concert with him and with one another.
But it so happens that those who trumpet their love are always going to find themselves trumped by the performer’s thought of one attent and silent gazer.
I sung the song slowly
As she stood in the shadows
She stepped to the light
As my silver strings spun
She called with her eyes
To the tune I’s a-playin’
But the song it was long
And I’d only begun
Through a bullet of light
Her face was reflectin’
The fast fading words
That rolled from my tongue
With a long-distance look
Her eyes was on fire
But the song it was long
And there was more to be sung
My eyes danced a circle
Across her clear outline
With her head tilted sideways
She called me again
As the tune drifted out
She breathed hard through the echo
But the song it was long
And it was far to the end
I glanced at my guitar
And played it pretendin’
That of all the eyes ou
t there
I could see none
As her thoughts pounded hard
Like the pierce of an arrow
But the song it was long
And it had to get done
As the tune finally folded
I laid down the guitar
Then looked for the girl
Who’d stayed for so long
But her shadow was missin’
For all of my searchin’
So I picked up my guitar
And began the next song
Eternal Circle is a song the resilient sadness of which springs in part from the exquisite twining of the two kinds of love upon which it reflects. For even apart from the shadow that was missing (the only shadow on the scene missing), there cannot but be a shadowed side to the whole performing world. There is something sacrificial to it, something that can be heard in the very moment when Dylan in an interview speaks candidly about what brings him happiness: “The stage is the only place where I’m happy.”501 The only place? This is a claim so bright and so dark. “It’s the only place you can be what you want to be.” Those words, “the only place”, are said there not only once but twice, in a succession that acknowledges the price that may have to be paid for all such success.
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 49