336 Whaaat? (the 1965 interview with Nat Hentoff, in full, differing from that in Playboy, March 1966), see this page.
337 The rhyme, as it were, of “exist” with “exist” (no shifting or paltering) lends to the people something of a heartening geological stubbornness: “Yes, ’n’, how many years can a mountain exist / Before it is washed to the sea? / Yes, ’n’ how many years can some people exist / Before they’re allowed to be free?”
338 He sings it otherwise than as printed in Lyrics 1962–1985, dropping it (in singing) from the third line of the first verse, but adding it at the start of the second and third verses.
339 Eliot in 1929, recalled in B. C. Southam, A Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot (sixth edition 1996), see this page.
340 “Lord Randall playing with a quart of beer” (Tarantula, 1966, 1971, see this page). Early nineteenth century, Lord Randal is in most anthologies of ballads or of Scottish verse.
341 Dylan: “Well my heart’s in the Highlands gentle and fair”. Burns: “My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here”.
342 T. S. Eliot in his essay John Dryden (1921): The State of Innocence and Fall of Man “is an early work; it is on the whole a feeble work; it is not deserving of sustained comparison with Paradise Lost. But ‘all the sad variety of Hell’! Dryden is already stirring” (Selected Essays, 1932, 1951 edition, see this page).
343 For the feminine ending móuntains (as against h´ılls), see the commentary on The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll (see this page), where again the body of the song is a cadence; both songs play the dying fall of the feminine ending against a refrain of masculine ending or endings. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall hoops together the opening and the closing of each verse by beginning and ending with the masculine: son (as it happens) / one and hard / fall.
344 Dylan sings “dark”; as printed in Lyrics 1962–1985, “black”.
345 Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930, second edition 1947), pp. 36–7.
346 Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca (1927); Selected Essays, see this page.
347 This picks up a warning from earlier in the verse: “I heard the sound of a thunder that roared out a warnin’”.
348 In singing, Dylan transposes the printed words, “think it and speak it”.
349 Desolation Row. “Everybody is making love / Or else expecting rain”. The train of thought? That the recumbent lovers share an intuition with the cows, who lie down (keeping that patch dry?) when expecting rain.
350 That Dylan hadn’t forgotten A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall when he came by Slow Train is suggested by the endings upon “it”: “Oh, you know it costs more to store the food than it do to give it” / “They talk about a life of brotherly love, show me someone who knows how to live it” / “A real suicide case, but there was nothin’ I could do to stop it”.
351 “I’m well dressed, waiting on the last train” (Things Have Changed). “There’s a long-distance train rolling through the rain” (Where Are You Tonight?)
352 Browning knew Shakespeare’s song well before he started writing. From King Lear: “Childe Roland to the dark Tower came, / His word was still, fie, foh, and fum, / I smell the blood of a British man”. Michael Gray is good on Dylan and Browning (Song and Dance Man III, 2000, see this page), but doesn’t mention this instance. In the order of the song, the two have these in common (but I’m assimilating, for instance, singulars and plurals: Dylan, “highways” / Browning, “highway”): “mountains”, “highways”, “dead”, “mouth”, “what did you see” / “Not see?” (at the start of the verse), “a baby”, “black”, “blood”, “water”, “what did you hear” / “Not hear?” (at the start of the next verse), “starve”, “laugh”, “a man”, “burning”, “dark”, “poison”, “executioner” / “hangman”, “ugly”, and “the souls”. Stronger may be the relation of Dylan’s “the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world” not only to Browning’s “my whole world-wandering” but to Browning’s immediately succeeding his other phrase, “the whole world”, with a ship’s going down in a storm.
353 The eighteenth-century ballad Edward, Edward was and is in The Oxford Book of English Verse, as well as in most anthologies of ballads and of Scottish verse.
354 Beckett: “It is made of dead leaves. A reminder of beldam nature” (Closed Place).
355 Studs Terkel Show, WFMT Radio, Chicago (3 May 1963).
356 As printed in Lyrics 1962–1985: “wounded with hatred”.
357 Printed in Lyrics 1962–1985, “And I walk out on my own”. Dylan sings “And I, I walk out on my own”.
358 “Well, if I don’t be there by morning / I guess that I never will” (If I Don’t Be There by Morning, Dylan with Helena Springs).
359 “Well, I try my best / To be just like I am / But everybody wants you / To be just like them” (Maggie’s Farm).
360 14 October 1818; Letters, ed. H. E. Rollins (1958), vol. I, see this page.
361 “They don’t want me around” and “A thousand miles” / Psalms 3:6: “I will not be afraid of ten thousands of people, that have set themselves against me round about”.
362 See how Señor ends with what is doubly a rhyme: for, Señor.
363 Psalms 130:3: “If thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O LORD, who shall stand?”
364 Music by Jerome Kern, words by Otto Harbach. Kern: “They asked me how I knew / My true love was true?”. Dylan: “They ask me how I feel / And if my love is real / And how I know I’ll make it through”. There are other small overlaps. In the order within the Kern song: “here inside” / [Dylan] “here in”; “laughed” (and “laughing”) / “laughter”; “my love”; “today”; “friends”; “Tears”; “say”; “heart”; “realize” / “real”. And there is “doubt” against “I believe”. It is extraordinary how different in its effect, as a cadence and a sentiment, is “Smoke gets in your eyes”, from the wording elsewhere in Dylan: “Smoke is in your eye” (When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky).
365 R. A. Knox’s question-and-answer. Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks, eds. J. A. Gere and John Sparrow (1981), see this page.
366 As to exaggeration and artistic accomplishment, there is T. S. Eliot on how Pope’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot “depends upon the justice and reserve, the apparent determination not to exaggerate” (John Dryden; Selected Essays, see this page).
367 Irish Times Magazine (29 September 2001), the Rome interview.
368 In the bridge here, the only word at the end of any line that doesn’t have a link to another end word is “me”. This uniqueness has its poignancy and oppugnancy.
369 See footnote, see this page.
370 Visions of Johanna, when sung in Los Angeles (30 November 1965) and in New York (21 January 1966).
371 To J. H. Reynolds, 3 May 1818; Letters, vol. I, see this page. Keats’s spelling is retained.
372 Dylan does not have to owe to anyone his title for the album on which Not Dark Yet appeared: Time Out of Mind. But Beckett’s Lessness opens: “Ruins true refuge long last towards which so many false time out of mind”. And it includes: “Blacked out fallen open true refuge issueless towards which so many false time out of mind”. Lessness consists of twenty-four paragraphs or blocks (one for each hour of all day), and of sixty sentences, each of which comes twice (minutes and seconds).
373 TLS (24 December 1925, 25 July 1929); for the contexts, see Eliot’s Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917 (ed. Christopher Ricks, 1996), p. xxviii.
374 On the stage fight, or staged fight, “Keats vs Dylan”, see Michael Gray, who points out that it was in 1992 that the playwright David Hare set up this show.
Never mind that Bob Dylan had spent the previous three decades with his face set firmly against the vulgar and the cheap, or indeed that John Keats had been a cockney oik and upstart himself. Such was the climate of opinion still that Hare’s comically inaccurate personifying of the divide caught on like a pop craze itself. Within minutes, that doyenne of the literary
clerisy, A. S. Byatt, could go on B.B.C.’s all-purpose arts programme, The Late Show, and pronounce that the qualitative difference between Keats and Dylan is that with Keats, she could take you through one of his poems and reveal many layers . . . She couldn’t take you through a Dylan lyric because she wouldn’t know where to begin. What’s disgraceful is not the preference for Keats, nor the ignorance about Dylan: it is the malappropriate self-confidence.
(Song and Dance Man III, p. xviii)
Gray, with appropriate self-confidence, remarks that it was (in the year 2000) nearly thirty years since he began to argue “the case for Dylan’s being, if you must, on the same side as Keats”.
375 Than I can bear may carry something of the sin that is often in Dylan’s mind, the sin of Cain: “And Cain said unto the LORD, My punishment is greater than I can bear” (Genesis 4:13).
376 London (4 October 1997); Isis (October 1997). USA Today (28 September 1997): “Making Time Out of Mind was a liberating experience for Dylan who can feel burdened by the weight of his legend.”
377 See footnote, see this page, on Beckett’s Lessness.
378 Lancelot Andrewes (1926); Selected Essays, see this page.
379 Rolling Stone (22 November 2001).
380 The OED records that Fielding and Gibbon in the eighteenth century tried “fortitudinous”. But the language wasn’t having it.
381 Athenaeum (11 April 1919).
382 Argufying, ed. John Haffenden (1987), see this page, a letter from Empson; Argufying, see this page; Using Biography (1984), see this page, from an essay on Fielding published in 1958.
383 Baudelaire (1930); Selected Essays (1932, 1951 edition), p. 421.
384 TLS (11 August 1927).
385 Newsweek (6 October 1997), on Dylan.
386 Michael Goldberg, New Musical Express (November 1979).
387 Biograph’s ellipsis.
388 OED, “unfaith”: lack of faith or belief, esp. in religion. From 1415, and including Tennyson: “Faith and Unfaith can ne’er be equal powers”. But there is no instance since 1870, and the word would now feel strained.
389 Philip Massinger (1920); Selected Essays, see this page.
390 Further Requirements, ed. Anthony Thwaite (2001), p. 39.
391 To Dixon, 23 October 1881; The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (1935, 1955 edition), see this page.
392 Don’t you know? This should not be news to you, given Ecclesiastes 1:9: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done, is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun.”
393 Interview with Kurt Loder, Rolling Stone (21 June 1984).
394 The OED citations include E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1960): “What is called ‘synesthesia’, the splashing over of impressions from one sense modality to another, is a fact to which all languages testify.”
395 As printed in Lyrics 1962–1985 (1985), simply, singly, “they say, ‘All is well’”.
396 OED, “square-eyed”: “jocular, affected by or given to excessive viewing of television” (1976). One of the television reviewers in Private Eye bears the name Square Eyes.
397 Dylan sings “torch”; as printed in Lyrics 1962–1985 “touch”.
398 Precious Angel, “so let us not be enticed”; T.V. Talkin’ Song, “It will lead you into some strange pursuits, / Lead you to the land of forbidden fruits”. T.V. Talkin’ Song, “His voice was ringing loud”; Revelation, “And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice.” The phrase “There’s violence in the eyes” swerves from the expected body-parts: “The violence of your hands” (Psalms 58:2); “the act of violence is in their hands” (Isaiah 59:6).
399 “An artificial channel for the conveyance of water. The alternate rhymes in lines 5 and 10 suggest the turning of the pipes ‘up’ or ‘down’.” John Tobin, George Herbert: The Complete English Poems (1991).
400 New York Times (29 September 1997).
401 For “know no”, in relation to both the negative and the positive, see the discussion of Blind Willie McTell (see this page), with Paradise Lost: “No happier state, and know to know no more”.
402 Epistle to the Hebrews 10:31.
403 Rolling Stone (22 November 2001).
404 For “’Cause I don’t be like they’d like me to” (I Believe in You), see this page.
405 OED 36a, “used with a future date following as subject . . . ‘come Easter’; i.e. let Easter come, when Easter shall come”. The first citation is 1420: “twenty year come Easter”. Come Easter; that is, “come the resurrection”.
406 In the penultimate verse, what is printed in Lyrics 1962–1985 is “Well, the devil’s shining light, it can be most blinding”, but he sings “. . . that can be most blinding”.
407 The sequence is forgiven / living; sleeping / weeping; resurrection / protection; blinding / finding; but then fake it / make it.
408 The sequence: apology / me; eternity / me; be / me; vanity / me; and then Calvary / me.
409 New York Times (29 September 1961).
410 18 September 1980.
411 As performed on Planet Waves (reissued on Biograph), the song swerves within the second line. Dylan sings “You angel you” but follows this by starting upon “You’re as . . .” (“You’re as fine as anything’s fine”); he splits the second, and proceeds, “got me under your wing”. The recovery is so prompt as to make the slip of the lip all but imperceptible. There is something simply unfussed (and delightfully appropriate to the spirit of the song) in his letting it stand, in his letting it go. Not at all “Go to hell”, this unruffled imperfectionism, rather “Go to Heaven, there’s an angel”.
412 For Lay, Lady, Lay and Dylan’s sense of how it sprang from the fillers “la la la”, see this page.
413 I Shall Be Released.
414 He sings “Yes I never did feel . . .”; as printed in Lyrics 1962–1985, “Never did feel . . .” (which is what he sings in the return of the bridge). And he sings “Never did get up and walk the floor”; as printed, “I get up at night and walk the floor”.
415 Dylan sings it so; as printed in Lyrics 1962–1985, “The way you talk and the way you walk / It sure plays on my mind”. The word “plays” plays along nicely with the talk of singing, but perhaps the punning suggestion then of “preys on my mind” has a darkness out of place in light of the song. “Mama, you been on my mind” is transformed, in Dylan’s memory, into “your memory on my mind”.
416 On seeing and hearing, there is a good junction in Alex Ross (New Yorker, 10 May 1999): “I had just seen Dylan sing Hattie Carroll, in Portland, and it was the best performance that I heard him give.”
417 He sings this; as printed in Lyrics 1962–1985 it says “It says everything”.
418 Bob Fass Show (WBAI-FM, New York, January 1966).
419 John Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman (1982), p. 353.
420 As to “on the ground”, Dylan sings with special tenderness Willie Nelson’s Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground (B-side of a single, 1983). She, an angel (not a raven) with a broken wing, is grounded for a while.
421 Lamia, I, 328–32.
422 To Dixon, 26 September 1881; The Correspondence of Hopkins and Dixon, see this page.
423 Tight Connection (Has Anybody Seen My Love).
424 On the antiphonal in Dylan’s songs, and particularly in A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, see this page. As to Dylan’s taking the dramatic role of a woman in a song, singing so throughout, there is (of his songs) only North Country Blues: “As I quit in the spring / To marry John Thomas, a miner”. House of the Rising Sun (which he sings feelingly but which is not his song) is likewise in a woman’s voice throughout: “It’s been the ruin of many a poor girl, / And me, O God, I’m one”.
425 They give pain in Goethe’s Faust (Part 1, line 1, 913), as Levi Dalton pointed out to me. Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita: “‘And what is this on her
foot?’ asked Margarita, tirelessly offering her hand to the guests who had overtaken the hobbling Madame Tofana . . . ‘On her foot, Queen, she has a Spanish boot’ . . . The Spanish boot interfered with her movement” (tr. Mirra Ginsburg, 1995, see this page).
426 As Blackjack Davey, on Good as I Been to You. “Pull off, pull off them high-heeled shoes / All made of Spanish leather”. A present. Hers, not His. Shoes, not boots.
427 These things are the creations of convention, granted, but then conventions are themselves creations: the convention by which a man sings as a woman or vice versa, or the convention that presents an alternation of speakers in one voice throughout. For my part, I am disconcerted or discomposed by the Dylan / Johnny Cash duet in Girl of the North Country (on Nashville Skyline). Dylan just about saves the day by pushing his voice up so as maximally to distinguish its young love from the male stubble of Cash’s voice. True, when Dylan and Cash fool around with One Too Many Mornings, as you can hear them doing on bootleg tapes (“You are right from your side, Bob, / And I am right from mine”), it is a different story, a funny story.
428 Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid (XI, 890–91): “Unspoiled shall be her arms, and unprofaned / Her holy limbs with any human hand”.
429 On feminine and masculine endings, see the commentary on The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, see this page.
430 The rhymes are: verse 1, morning / landing. Verse 2, ownin’ / ocean. Verse 3, golden / Barcelona. Verse 4, ocean / ownin’. Verse 5, askin’ / passin’. Verse 6, sorrow / tomorrow. Verse 7, sailin’ / feelin’. Verse 8, roamin’ / goin’. Verse 9, weather / leather. The repetition in verse 4, ocean / ownin’, of verse 2, ownin’ / ocean, a repetition with a reversal, suggests (Jim McCue suggests to me) that things – becalmed – aren’t going anywhere, although she is; the plea is repeated, unheeded.
431 The land of the ballad always welcomes visitors from the land of nursery rhymes.
I had a little nut tree, nothing would it bear
But a silver nutmeg and a golden pear;
The king of Spain’s daughter came to visit me,
And all for the sake of my little nut tree.
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