Read Dylan's Visions of Sin Online
Authors: Christopher Ricks
Dylan's Visions of Sin (48 page)
But the word for which “must” and “can” and “will it take”, each in its turn, stands by is the obdurately waiting word “Before”.
How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
And “Before” is soon compounded by the sounding sequence: “Before
they’re forever banned”.
Before . . . forever
:
yet let us not have to wait forever. Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. Even fortitude has its limits. But how many times does a man have to maintain that
Blowin’ in the Wind
is at
once simplicity and multiplicity? “Man, it’s in the wind – and it’s blowing in the wind.” You don’t need to make heavy weather, man, to know which way the wind
blows.
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
But when I came to man’s estate,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
’Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.
Shakespeare’s Song, its refrain to be adapted as that of
Percy’s Song
: “Turn, turn to the rain / And the wind”.
Blowin’ in the Wind
– Freewheelin’ along – turns to rain, to
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
.
It’s a hard song to befall the critic. (Tempted to take a hard rain check.) For one thing, it declines to be an allegory. If someone were to ask, “What does it mean,
I saw a white
ladder all covered with water
?”, might you reply “It means what it says”? T. S. Eliot was once asked what a line of
Ash-Wednesday
meant, “Lady, three white
leopards sat under a juniper-tree”. The answer: “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree”.
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And there is another
thing: that (as with
Blowin’ in the Wind
) we may well know the song too well, which can easily mean too easily. “I’ll know my song well before I start singin’”:
that’s for him to say, or rather to sing, as he does at the end of
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
, in the instant before drawing to a close the curtains of his cosmic stage.
Alexander Pope drew
The Dunciad
to an end with an apocalyptic vision:
Lo! thy dread Empire, C
HAOS
! is restor’d;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All.
In the universe of Dylan, there is the final rain to come.
And I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard,
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
He knows his song well. But as for us: instead of being kept on our toes, we may find ourselves resting on his laurels when we know his song well before he starts singing.
Similarly with what it means for a prodigious performer to sing “I heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’”. We’ve all been at Dylan concerts when this was
infuriatingly the case, except that the ten thousand weren’t whispering, they were talking or shouting. Or
singing along
. . . They know his song well before he starts singing. Know it
backwards. Would that they would just let the song surge forwards.
He will not have forgotten what it was like to be out in front of a dozen dead audiences. Bad trips. To be on the road is to be on a quest.
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
tells of a
quest, which spells the opening of a question. So each verse will open with some variation of the initiating inquiry:
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
And where have you been, my darling young one?
The immediate question about this question is “And you, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?” Dylan knows, and trusts us to know, just where this question has
been, has come from. Sure enough, this particular source and resource we are all soberly aware of.
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O where ha you been, Lord Randal, my son?
And where ha you been, my handsom young man?
Not a source only, but an allusion, calling something into play – as will happen with the opening of
Highlands
,
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where if you fail to recognize that you are in Robert Burns country you must be a pad-eared laddy of the lowlands.
The sinewy ballad
Lord Randal
prompted a structure within
A Hard Rain’s
A-Gonna Fall
: its having for each verse both an inaugurative question
and the concluding refrain. The song, like the predecessor ballad, takes poison, and it knows what impends: hell.
But the ways in which Dylan then chooses to depart so wide-rangingly from the original song of sin are one source of the achievement that is
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
. The
ballad’s questions and answers ask the justice of being here in full.
LORD RANDAL
“O where ha you been, Lord Randal, my son?
And where ha you been, my handsom young man?”
“I ha been at the greenwood; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie down.”
“An wha met you there, Lord Randal, my son?
An wha met you there, my handsom young man?”
“O I met wi my true-love; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie down.”
“And what did she give you, Lord Randal, my son?
And what did she give you, my handsom young man?”
“Eels fried in a pan; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie down.”
“An wha gat your leavins, Lord Randal, my son?
And wha gat your leavins, my handsom young man?”
“My hawks and my houns; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie down.”
“An what becam of them, Lord Randal, my son?
And what becam of them, my handsom young man?”
“They stretched their legs out and died; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie down.”
“O I fear you are poisoned, Lord Randal, my son!
I fear you are poisoned, my handsom young man?”
“O yes, I am poisoned; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie down.”
“What d’ye leave to your mother, Lord Randal, my son?
What d’ye leave to your mother, my handsom young man?”
“Four and twenty milk kye; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie down.”
“What d’ye leave to your sister, Lord Randal, my son?
What d’ye leave to your sister, my handsom young man?”
“My gold and my silver; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie down.”
“What d’ye leave to your brother, Lord Randal, my son?
What d’ye leave to your brother, my handsom young man?”
“My houses and my lands; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie down.”
“What d’ye leave to your true-love, Lord Randal, my son?
What d’ye leave to your true-love, my handsom young man?”
“I leave her hell and fire; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie down.”
Throughout, a question is at once asked twice; there is vouchsafed the briefest of answers; and then there is heard an exhausted plea on the verge of death.
Dylan’s creative departure from the shaping spirit of
Lord Randal
establishes his territory immediately.
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
And where have you been, my darling young one?
I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways
I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
Where have I been? Where fortitude and powers of endurance were called for. There, where I stumbled and walked and crawled. There, where I was the only human being – more,
the only sentient being. There, where there
was no bed for me to lie down upon, and no succumbing to weariness. The travelling: travail. The landscapes: lethal. This first
verse establishes the impulse of the song, a willingness if need be (not a masochistic wish) to take the path of most resistance. Hard going. Thorough going. “I fain wad lie down”. But
I’m pressing on.
What
Lord Randal
may help us to grasp, by taking the force of the contrasts, is the form that Dylan has given to fortitude.
The lineaments of
Lord Randal
are these. First, that every verse is divided equally between mother and son, between question and answer: two lines apiece. Second, that every verse is
therefore of identical size, a quatrain that asks and gives no quarter. Third, that every verse is possessed by not just the same rhyme-scheme but the same rhyming words:
son / man
[Scottish
mon
];
soon / down
[Scottish
doun
]. Fourth, that because so much of each verse is constituted of a question that will be sealed in due course by the refrain, it follows that
pitilessly few of the words ever change from verse to verse, and this means an unremitting indeflectibility and then a ratcheted force exerted by those few words that do change, the words that are
tortured into telling all.
Dylan, for all his respectful gratitude to
Lord Randal
, abides by none of these precedents that it sets. Such is his right. His making his own way may clarify the lines followed by his
song – and to what end.
First, Q. and A. to weigh the same? But in Dylan’s song the question is always outweighed by the scale of the answer, and furthermore this scale itself then varies. The first verse
consists of the opening couplet that is the question, followed by five lines of narrated endurance, and then by the two-line refrain – or is the refrain all one line really? (The refrain
comes as five asseverations: “it’s a hard . . .”, heard five times before being completed.)
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard,
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
There were, at first, five lines of narrative at the centre; this is varied by expanding to seven such lines and then to six, but with the last verse, doubled up but not
flinching in pain, encompassing twelve lines of narrative. Conclusively.
For his part, Lord Randal can do no more than urge again his fatal fatigue: “For I’m wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie down”. Will we weary of hearing this? Such is the
question that every refrain has to put to
itself. But no, we don’t weary, and this partly because here is no ordinary tiredness, “wearied wi hunting”,
rather the pangs of what will soon prove a cruelly altered refrain, with a death different from hunting: “For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie down”. All the more
sick
at the heart
, love-sick, because it was she who administered the poison, “my true-love”.
Far from working with the steeled unchanging penetrations of
Lord Randal
, Dylan needs a different – a widespread – monotony, something like what Dryden evoked as the infernal
ruin that fell to Lucifer after the war in heaven:
These regions and this realm my wars have got;
This mournful empire is the loser’s lot:
In liquid burnings, or on dry to dwell,
Is all the sad variety of Hell.
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As to rhyme-scheme,
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
doesn’t have one. Or much rhyming, come to that. This, despite its starting with a rhyming couplet that will be varied crucially
but never relinquished at any verse’s head:
Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
And where have you been, my darling young one?
The moment that it moves from this rhyming couplet (immediately, that is), the song sets itself at a great distance from how the ballad had enforced its sombre
cross-examination. The song proceeds to work upon us – after every opening question – not by rhyme but through an insistent cadence, the unstressed final syllable that is the feminine
ending: “I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty móuntains”.
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The most common feminine ending in the language, my darling young one, is
-ing
. Or
-in
’ in Dylan’s voicin’ – though not invariably. (“I heard
many people laughin’”, but “I met a young woman whose body was burning” – “laughin’” is one thing, “burning” is
no laughing matter.) Against the future that is
a-gonna fall
, the present participles from the past in the song are an ominous presence. If we pluck out the endings of the lines, we see or
hear that the first verse (surprising, in retrospect) has no truck with
-ing
. What it confronts at the line-endings is a mounting of nouns: “son”, “one”,
“mountains”, “highways”, “forests”, “oceans”, and (finally) “graveyard” – the mouth of the graveyard at once closing hard on the
rhyme as it swings around:
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
There will later be a variant of this vocal grimace at the end of the fourth verse: “I met another man who was wounded in hatred, / And it’s a hard, it’s a
hard . . .” – where “hatred” swallows “hard”.
Only one of the first verse’s noun-endings will return to such a position: “forests”, which (as “forest”) comes to darken the last verse within a sequence of words
that – given “deepest” – makes “forest” feel less like a noun than an adjective in the superlative, an extremity: “I’ll walk to the depths of the
deepest dark forest”.
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