When a girl finally decided to let you fuck her she’d always put on this act like she was being taken advantage of and 9 times outa 10 the girl would say “Well, will you still respect me?” Some goof-ball shit like that. Well the cat was always so hot and ready to go by then that he was ready to promise anything, even respect. That always seemed so silly, but it was just the way the game was played. I had a chick ask me that once, a real pretty little blond girl, everybody really was hot for her ass and I had her alone one nite in her house. We were both about 15 and necking pretty heavy both getting worked up and I was in and I knew it and then she came up with that cornball line: “Gary, if I let you do it would you still respect me?” Well, I blew it, I started laffing and I told her: “Respect you? For what? I just wanta fuck and so do you, what the fuck am I sposed to respect you for? You just won a first place trophy in the Indianapolis 500 or something?” Well, like I said I blew that one.
(The Executioner’s Song, 1980, see this page)
165 I draw on an essay of mine on American English and the inherently transitory (The Force of Poetry, 1984).
166 As sung; as printed in Lyrics 1962–1985 (1985), “She took off her wheel, took off her bell, / Took off her wig, said, ‘How do I smell?’ / I hot-footed it . . .”
167 Lyrics 1962–1985 prints an ellipsis. Dylan doesn’t sing dot dot dot, he sings a void.
168 See this page.
169 As performed on Before the Flood (1974), the song ends: “I long to reach out for you in the dead of the night / Stay, lady, stay, stay while the night is still ahead”. This chooses the different pattern of chiasmus, abba: dead . . . night . . . night . . . ahead.
170 A Man’s Song, which begins “In deeper fat the sense of sin retires”; New Poems 1963, ed. Lawrence Durrell (1963).
171 The OED includes this suffix and various words such as “glossolalia”, but it neglects erotolalia, though sexologists have murmured the word.
172 See this page, on All the Tired Horses.
173 He’ll say, “Oh darling, tell me the truth, how much time I got?”
She’ll say, “You got all the time in the world, honey”
(Handy Dandy)
174 As sung on Hard Rain, the song lets things rip, an invitation to what Dylan in Tarantula (1966, 1971, see this page) dubs “humanity in the gang bang mood”. So there need to be some new words in the new swing of things: “Forget this dance, let’s go upstairs”, rhyming with “Who really cares?”
175 There is a question as to the pronunciation of one line’s end-word (not that this would affect the rhyming). Is “read” present tense [reed]: that we now read? Or is it past tense [red]: that we used to read? The former, I take it (reading the inscription on the commemoration stone); but one thing that the word on the page can do is leave us insecure. (Are these things present or past? That is a question on which Hardy often declines to rule.) Geoffrey Hill begins a poem: “Rilke could ['ri:d] Bible in bad light / or shaky script. Most of what I claim / can be so ['red]” (Scenes from Comus, 2002, section III, 16). But in a song the voicing may leave us in no doubt (which can be a differently good thing). Dylan: “It’s been nice seeing you, you read me like a book” – past tense [red], no longer the case (you flatter yourself). Under Your Spell has this serious joke about spelling.
176 Weird, on the face of it, that “one” alliterates with “why”, but what do you know.
177 “I’m stayin’ ahead of the game”, Dylan sings in Waitin’ for You (released on the soundtrack of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, 2002), where the opening verse includes the rhymes way / say / day and head / spread / dead. (Lay, lady, lay and bed / ahead.)
178 Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930, second edition 1947), see this page.
179 There is such a word (“Associated with, or redolent of, romance”), and it likes nights as well as knights: “Where others’ lamps have burnt long Attick nights, / With rank romancie oil to grease their knights” (OED).
180 See this page. The scene from The Merchant of Venice makes its opening move: “The moon shines bright. In such a night as this, / When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees”.
181 The American Spectrum Encyclopedia (1991).
182 The original military application (“a sharp-shooter”, OED) dates from 1824. “Several sepoys were killed and wounded by the enemy’s snipers.” 1897: “It is impossible to see the snipers, who generally stalk the sentries from behind stones.” 1900: “The artillery keep the Boer snipers down.”
183 Florence in For the Union Dead (1965).
184 For a different infection, see Michael Gray, who believes that Medgar Evers and his killer are “a device for strengthening an essentially political and social polemic”: “the two men are just pawns in Dylan’s ‘game’” (Song and Dance Man III, 2000, p. 24). For me, either this judgement is crassly “a handle” (for the critic) or the song is.
185 Maud, II, v, 1. Tennyson and Dylan: “beat”, “brain”, “grave”, “hoof(s)”, “never”, “pain”. Tennyson, “handful”; Dylan, “handle” and “hand”.
186 In 1994 Byron de la Beckwith was found guilty of Evers’ murder. This matters, but not to the conscience of the song.
187 Only a Pawn in Their Game: “the one / That fired the gun”. Hurricane: “And though they could not produce the gun / The D.A. said he was the one”.
188 A disconcertingly deranged and unforgettable way of putting it. “A finger fired the trigger to his name”? Pulled the trigger that put an end to his name? (Not that it succeeded in doing that.) To? To?
189 Tarantula (1966, 1971), see this page.
190 “Like a Rolling Stone changed it all; I didn’t care any more after that about writing books or poems or whatever. I mean it was something that I myself could dig. It’s very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don’t dig you” (Playboy, March 1966).
191 1614; The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, ed. J. A. Simpson (1982).
192 Black Cross, Lord Buckley’s monologue from Joseph Newman’s poem. Dylan recorded it (Michael Gray gives the date, 22 December 1961).
193 11 September 1906; Letters (1920), vol. II, see this page.
194 Sleeve-notes to Desire.
195 The refrain, on its second appearance, does not say “Like a complete unknown”, but – unmitigated – “A complete unknown”.
196 Richard Woodhouse to John Taylor, about 27 October 1818; The Letters of John Keats, ed. H. E. Rollins (1958), vol. I, see this page.
197 Playboy (March 1978).
198 “The finest song on the album, and Dylan’s greatest so far, I think, is Like a Rolling Stone, the definitive statement that both personal and artistic fulfilment must come, in the main, by being truly on one’s own. Dylan’s social adversaries have twisted this to mean something very devious and selfish, but that is not the case at all. Dylan is simply kicking away the props to get to the real core of the matter: Know yourself. It may hurt at first, but you’ll never get anywhere if you don’t. The final ‘You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal / How does it feel? / How does it feel? / To be on your own’ is clearly optimistic and triumphant, a soaring of the spirit into a new and more productive present.”
(Sing Out!, February / March 1966)
199 “Like a Rolling Stone is of course a put-down – most likely the best Dylan ever wrote. What is annoying about it to me is its self-righteousness, its willingness to judge others without judging oneself, the proselytizing in disguise for Dylan’s own way of life” (Jon Landau, Crawdaddy!, 1968).
200 Bob Dylan by Miles (1978), see this page (not to be confused with the compilation by Miles, Bob Dylan in His Own Words, also 1978). Apparently from an interview with Jules Siegel (March 1966).
201 Playboy (March 1966).
202 Rolling Stone (26 January 1978).
203 Now you see this one-eyed midget
Shouting the word “NOW”
And you say, “For what reason?�
��
And he says, “How?”
And you say “What does this mean?”
And he screams back, “You’re a cow
Give me some milk
Or else go home”
(Ballad of a Thin Man)
How now no brown cow.
204 “Napoleon in rags” is, among other things, the great man who has fallen. People’d call, say, “Beware, Boney, you’re bound to fall”; he thought they were all kidding him. On Napoleon and his fall in relation to how language can be used, consider Byron on “the ‘greatest living poet’”: “Even I . . . / Was reckoned, a considerable time, / The grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme. / / . . . But I will fall at least as fell my hero” (Don Juan, XI, 55–6). My hero: compare Dylan’s Hero Blues, “You need a different kind of man, babe / You need Napoleon Boneeparte”.
205 The “you” in “you’re” is a different sound, and it does different work in the song (three times).
206 There are two excruciating crescendos that writhe with “him” and “he”:
You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain’t it hard when you discover that
He really wasn’t where it’s at
After he took from you everything he could steal
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse
207 Stephen Leacock, Studies in the Newer Culture; Winnowed Wisdom (1926), see this page.
208 Interview, London (4 October 1997); Isis (October 1997).
209 When Tennyson was about to be given his honorary degree at Oxford in June 1855, an undergraduate (recalling the first line of The May Queen: “You must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear”) called out as the long-haired honorand entered, “Did your mother call you early, dear?”
210 Philip Larkin has a soundly patterned evocation of the bestselling novelist in lavish exile among glittering prizes: “the shit in the shuttered chaˆteau / Who does his five hundred words / Then parts out the rest of the day / Between bathing and booze and birds” (The Life with a Hole in it). To bathe, not to bath, I take it.
211 Matthew Arnold, on some verses by Wordsworth about education and its benches, verses grim in the extreme:
One can hear them being quoted at a Social Science Congress; one can call up the whole scene. A great room in one of our dismal provincial towns; dusty air and jaded afternoon daylight; benches full of men with bald heads and women in spectacles; an orator lifting up his face from a manuscript written within and without to declaim these lines of Wordsworth; and in the soul of any poor child of nature who may have wandered in thither, an unutterable sense of lamentation, and mourning, and woe!
(Wordsworth, 1879)
There was no conversation. “Benches full of men with bald heads”: to baldism, I shall return.
212 A twist might then be given to “There was little to say”, given that a parliament is a place to say things.
213 Shakespeare, Sonnet 73: “Bare ruined quires, where late the sweet birds sang”. The leafless branches as pews or benches.
214 Tennyson, Mariana: “All day within the dreamy house, / The doors upon their hinges creaked; / The blue fly sung in the pane”. A board of examiners would lower the mark (for sung read sang), but T. S. Eliot raised the mark: “The blue fly sung in the pane (the line would be ruined if you substituted sang for sung)” (Selected Essays, 1951 edition, see this page). The words sing differently.
215 Dylan’s title has “day” in the singular, “locusts” in the plural. Nathanael West’s had them both in the singular: The Day of the Locust (1939). He might have come to Dylan’s mind, not only because he died the year before Dylan was born but because of the name-changing: Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein (1903–40) into Nathanael West; Robert Allen Zimmerman into Bob Dylan. West hadn’t had Allen as his middle name, but he did have Allen within his middle name: Wallenstein.
216 Gotta Serve Somebody. As to the stage, compare 11 Outlined Epitaphs: “who have no way of knowin’ / that I ‘expose’ myself / every time I step out / on the stage” (Lyrics 1962–1985, 1985, see this page). See this page, on Eternal Circle.
217 Exodus 10 has the word swarming through its verses:
tomorrow will I bring the locusts into thy coast . . . And the Lord said unto Moses, Stretch out thine hand over the land of Egypt for the locusts, that they may come upon the land of Egypt, and eat every herb of the land, even all that the hail hath left . . . and when it was morning, the east wind brought the locusts. And the locusts went up over all the land of Egypt, and rested in all the coasts of Egypt: very grievous were they; before them, there were no such locusts as they, neither after them shall be such. For they covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened.
Revelation 9:2–3: “and the sun and air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power.” Day of the Locusts: “Darkness was everywhere, it smelled like a tomb”.
218 See footnote, see this page.
219 The painter Walter Sickert wrote about the patron Sir Hugh Lane: “Now that Sir Hugh Lane has been knighted for admiring Manet – (I wonder if Manet would ever have been knighted for being Manet?), it might perhaps be permissible without blasphemy to speak the sober, unhysterical truth about him” (A Free House: Being the Writings of Walter Richard Sickert, ed. Osbert Sitwell, 1947, see this page).
220 Letters, ed. Valerie Eliot, vol. I (1988), see this page.
221 To Eleanor Hinkley, 14 October 1914; Letters, vol. I, p. 61.
222 Lyrics 1962–1985 (1985), see this page.
223 On Doris Day and the song, see Michael Gray, Song and Dance Man III (2000), see this page.
224 “May I help you” to stay out of trouble and the courts . . .
225 Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930, second edition 1947), see this page.
226 See this page.
227 In Our Exagmination . . . (1929), see this page. I discuss this in Beckett’s Dying Words (1993), see this page.
228 “Patience, hard thing! the hard thing but to pray, / But bid for, Patience is!”
229 Sung so; as printed in Lyrics 1962–1985, “do for You”.
230 For Dylan on questions that truthfully answer themselves in some way, see this page.
231 Saved was recorded in February 1980.
232 Dylan One Year Later (1980), see this page.
233 Dylan, Biograph: “The Bible says ‘Even a fool when he keeps his mouth shut is counted wise,’ but it comes from the Bible, so it can be cast off as being too quote religious. Make something religious and people don’t have to deal with it, they can say it’s irrelevant.”
234 Melody Maker (21 June 1980).
235 Off-rhyming here, just this once. The ensuing opening rhymes come straight down the line: breaking tonight / shaking tonight, dying tonight / crying tonight, and in trouble tonight / seeing double tonight.
236 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, prologue.
237 “God got the power, man has got his vanity” (Ain’t No Man Righteous). Think how different “man has got his pride” would be, bringing home that pride, unlike vanity and unlike conceit, can be a good thing, self-respect for instance.
238 Psalms 36:11.
239 Proverbs 26:5: “Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.” 26:12: “Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of a fool than of him.” 26:16: “The sluggard is wiser in his own conceit than seven men that can render a reason.”
240 Introduction to Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New York, 1937).
241 The Sacred Wood (1920), preface to the 1928 edition, p. ix.
242 In the love songs Tomorrow Is a Long Time and Boots of Spanish Leather, the word means much.
243 Dylan sings “had”; as printed in Lyrics 1
962—1985 (1985), “at”.
244 Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930, second edition 1947), see this page.
245 T. S. Eliot, in Little Gidding, II, has an alternation of feminine and masculine endings, arriving at the end of the seventh line at just such a monosyllable that is unstressed, a feminine ending (“sóund ws”):
In the uncertain hour before the morning
Near the ending of interminable night
At the recurrent end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed below the horizon of his homing
While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was
246 Often noted in Hattie Carroll has been the spectral presence of Cain (identical with cane to the ear that hears, though not to the eye that reads): “slain by a cane”. “To lay cane [Cain] upon Abel; to beat any one with a cane or stick” (Francis Grose, Vulgar Tongue). A rhyme is wielded in Every Grain of Sand: “Like Cain I now behold this chain of events that I must break”, and Cain and Abel put in their appearance in Desolation Row. As for Hattie Carroll: “The table . . . the table . . . the table”: does this -able prepare for the word that soon follows, “cane”? Cain and Abel, masculine and feminine endings.
247 Like the sharp identification in The Waste Land: “You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!”
248 A statement with Eliot’s recorded reading (1947) of Four Quartets.
249 “Do You Mr. Jones?” Bob Dylan with the Poets and the Professors, ed. Neil Corcoran (2002), see this page.
250 Rolling Stone (22 November 2001).
251 T. S. Eliot: “Stendhal’s scenes, some of them, and some of his phrases, read like cutting one’s own throat; they are a terrible humiliation to read, in the understanding of human feelings and human illusions of feeling that they force upon the reader” (Athenaeum, 30 May 1919).
252 Pope opens his Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot with a chafed impatience that immediately repeats an imperative through clenched teeth: “Shut, shut the door, good John! fatigu’d I said, / Tie up the knocker, say I’m sick, I’m dead, / The Dog-star rages!” The Dog-star isn’t the only thing that rages. Pope seizes the difference between repeating, say, an intransitive verb such as “Go” (where you could just say “Go, go” without necessarily being impatiently maddened), and repeating a transitive verb, “Shut, shut” as though unable to wait even a second for the object: “the door”.
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