Like golden lamps in a green night.
(Bermudas)
The inversion of “the orange bright” is justified by there not being a rhyme for orange anyway, and if Marvell had said, “He hangs in shades the bright orange”, he’d have had to set out for a mountain range a long way from Bermuda. (That’s right, Blorenge, in Wales.) Even the great rhymester Robert Browning never ventured to end a line of verse with the word “orange”.
There’s a deft comedy that Dylan avails himself of here, in making something from the simple fact that some words do and other words don’t rhyme. True, the voice that exults in forcing “hers” into rhyming rapport with “yours” (“I don’t wanna be hers, I wanna be yers”) is one that never rests when it comes to wresting and wrestling, but there are limits . . .
Emotionally Yours: the phrase signs off, the usual formula unusually worded and unusually used. The song takes the great commonplaces of rhyme and makes them not quite what you would have expected. But then love is like that in its comings and goings. The first rhyme in Emotionally Yours is find me / remind me – itself a reminder that every rhyme is an act of finding and of reminding (that’s what a rhyme is, after all). Later there is rock me / lock me, this not locked into position (no feeling of being trapped), and with “rock me” – “Come baby, rock me” – having the lilt of a lullaby, not the drive of rock. It’s a song about how someone can be indeed “emotionally yours” but not yours in every way (not domestically, for instance – not available for marriage, for who knows what reasons?). Every verse signs off, as if in a letter at once intimate, cunning, and formal, “be emotionally yours”. Dylan sings it with a full sense that it is a deep pastiche of a good old old-time song, with stately exaggerated movements of his voice, especially at the rhymes – and he makes it new.
And how does this song, A Valediction: forbidding Mourning, like John Donne’s great poem about absence, end so that we are “satisfied”? Satisfied that though the song ends, the gratitude doesn’t. Again it’s the rhyming that realizes the song’s story. After a clear pattern:
find me / remind me
show me / know me
rock me / lock me
teach me / reach me
– after these:
Come baby, shake me, come baby, take me, I would be satisfied
Come baby, hold me, come baby, help me, my arms are open wide
I could be unraveling wherever I’m traveling, even to foreign shores
But I will always be emotionally yours
Shake me / take me: this is unexpected only in the benign impulse recognized in “shake” there. And unraveling / traveling: this is unexpected only in its sudden twinge of darkness. “As he lay unravelling in the agony of death, the standers-by could hear him say softly, ‘I have seen the glories of the world.’”63 But hold me / help me? How easily “Come baby, hold me” could have slid equably into “come baby, fold me”, with “my arms are open wide” simply waiting there to do the folding. But “Come baby, hold me, come baby, help me”: the rotating of “hold me” into that unexpected calm plea, at once central and at a tangent, “help me”. The turn has the poignancy of Christina Rossetti, who thanks the Lord For a Mercy Received:
Till now thy hand hath held me fast
Lord, help me, hold me, to the last.64
To the last. Will always be more-than-emotionally Yours. The thought lightens her darkness and ours.
In the lightness of a Doonesbury strip there was an exchange that enjoyed its comedy not exactly at Dylan’s expense (Jimmy Carter is the one who is quoted) but on his account:
– “An authentic American voice!” Can you beat that, Jim? I mean, I just want it to rhyme, man.
– Now he tells us.
Not so much “Now he tells us” as How he tells us, or rather How he does more than just tell us. Show and Tell. Anyway, Dylan himself has been happy to convey the ways in which rhyme, among the many things that it can be, can be fun.
Is rhyming fun for you?
“Well, it can be, but you know, it’s a game. You know, you sit around . . . It gives you a thrill. It gives you a thrill to rhyme something you might think, well, that’s never been rhymed before.”65
an’ new ideas that haven’t been wrote
an’ new words t’ fit into rhyme
(if it rhymes, it rhymes
if it don’t, it don’t
if it comes, it comes
if it won’t, it won’t)66
Robert Shelton had recourse to a rhyme of a sort when he put it that “Dylan pretends to know more about freight trains than quatrains.” Dylan, years later, spoke of what he knows:
“As you get older, you get smarter and that can hinder you because you try to gain control over the creative impulse. Creativity is not like a freight train going down the tracks. It’s something that has to be caressed and treated with a great deal of respect. If your mind is intellectually in the way, it will stop you. You’ve got to program your brain not to think too much.”
And how do you do that?
“Go out with the bird dogs.”67
What is at issue is not pretence but premeditation. Dylan is conscious of how much needs to be done by the unconscious or subconscious.
Still staying in the unconscious frame of mind, you can pull yourself out and throw up two rhymes first and work it back. You get the rhymes first and work it back and then see if you make it make sense in another kind of way. You can still stay in the unconscious frame of mind to pull it off, which is the state of mind you have to be in anyway.68
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, the aphorist and sage, believed that artists both do and do not know what they are doing, and that their works are even wiser than they are. “The metaphor is much more subtle than its inventor.”69
There’s a lyric in “License to Kill”: “Man has invented his doom / First step was touching the moon”. Do you really believe that?
“Yeah, I do. I have no idea why I wrote that line, but on some level, it’s just like a door into the unknown.”70
Envy
Song to Woody
It would have been only too human for Bob Dylan at nineteen to envy Woody Guthrie. His fame, for a start, and (not the same) the sheer respect in which Guthrie was held, his staunch stamina, his being an icon who wouldn’t have had any truck with such a self-conscious word and who had not let himself become an idol. Enviable. Inevitably open, therefore, on a bad day, to competitive petulance.
For ’tis all one to courage high,
The emulous or enemy.71
And yet not so. Truly high courage knows the difference between emulation and its enemy, envy. Dylan was sufficiently secure of his genius, even at the very start, to be able to rise above envy, rising to the occasion that was so much more than an occasion only.
Song to Woody is one of only two songs written by Dylan himself on his first album. (If the song had been called Song for Woody, it would not be the same, would be in danger of mildly conceited cadging as against a tribute at a respectful distance.) The other song by Dylan on the album, Talking New York, also paid tribute to “a very great man”,72