(1 Timothy 6:7–10)
They tell you, “Time is money” as if your life was worth its weight in gold
Not that any of these matters are as simple as the confident repudiation of covetousness would like to believe. The realist Samuel Butler would again like to say a word: It is only very fortunate people whose time is money. My time is not money. I wish it was. It is not even somebody else’s money. If it was he would give me some of it. I am a miserable, unmarketable sinner, and there is no money in me.120
Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
Sad to say, there has been many a sad-eyed lady. One of the most haunting, and haunted, is Dolores, she whose very name means sadness.121 Swinburne’s Dolores (1866) opens with her hidden eyes, and soon moves to her flagrant mouth, all this then issuing in a question:
Cold eyelids that hide like a jewel
Hard eyes that grow soft for an hour;
The heavy white limbs, and the cruel
Red mouth like a venomous flower;
When these are gone by with their glories,
What shall rest of thee then, what remain,
O mystic and sombre Dolores,
Our Lady of Pain?
He covets her, even as she covets so much.
Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands opens with the mouth of our lady of pain, and soon moves to her eyes, all this then issuing in a question, one that is on its way to further questions:
With your mercury mouth in the missionary times
And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes
And your silver cross, and your voice like chimes
Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?
With your pockets well protected at last
And your streetcar visions which you place on the grass
And your flesh like silk, and your face like glass
Who among them do they think could carry you?
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums
Should I leave them by your gate
Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?
He covets her, even as she covets so much. The seductive “mercury mouth” may be a death-dealing poison (thanks to a particular plant), or it may be a health-dealing antidote (thanks to a compound of the metal).122 Swinburne has “Red mouth like a venomous flower” (and “eyelids that hide like a jewel”); Dylan has “eyes like smoke”, and then “like rhymes”, “like chimes”.123 The first question (within a song that puts so many searching questions), “Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?”, might summon the goddess who is summoned in Dolores, “Libitina thy mother”. For she is the Roman goddess of burials, who since ancient times has been identified – in a sad misguidance – with the goddess of love, Venus herself.
Dolores moves in time to that of which it speaks, “To a tune that enthralls and entices”, as does Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. Throughout, Dolores sings of sins. Like Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, it insists upon listing – sometimes directly, sometimes to one side. It retails all of her energies, her incitements and excitements, her accoutrements, her weapons, her pockets of resistance well protected at last, moving inclusively through all these with an indeflectibility that runs parallel to Dylan’s “With your . . .”, the obdurate formula of his that sets itself, all through the song, to contain her and her properties, her wares. “With your sheets like metal and your belt like lace”, “With your childhood flames on your midnight rug”, “With your holy medallion which your fingertips fold” . . . Part inventory, part arsenal, these returns of phrase are bound by awe of her and by suspicion of her, alive not only with animation but with animus. The more times the initiatory “With your . . .” recurs, the more pressure it incurs, both as threat and as counter-threat.
Swinburne’s “thy”, in comparison, loses terror in archaism, and it lacks the pointed needling of “With your . . .”. The run within Dolores, 205–67, soon starts to feel of the mill: thy serpents, thy voice, thy life, thy will, thy passion, thy lips, thy rods, thy foemen, thy servant, thy paces, thy pleasure, thy gardens, thy rein, thy porches, thy bosom, thy garments, thy body . . .
But again like the song, Swinburne’s poem has recourse to questions that are stingingly unanswerable:
Who gave thee thy wisdom? what stories
That stung thee, what visions that smote?
Wert thou pure and a maiden, Dolores,
When desire took thee first by the throat?
What bud was the shell of a blossom
That all men may smell to and pluck?
What milk fed thee first at what bosom?
What sins gave thee suck?124
These are no streetcar visions, but they, too, take flesh. Dylan’s song, for its part, is given form by its questions and by their specific shape.
Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?
Who among them do they think could carry you?
* * *
Who among them can think he could outguess you?
Who among them would try to impress you?
* * *
But who among them really wants just to kiss you?
Who among them do you think could resist you?125
* * *
Oh, how could they ever mistake you?
How could they ever, ever persuade you?
– through to the end:
Who among them do you think would employ you?
Oh, who among them do you think could destroy you?
Their credulity is matched only by yours, my dear. (From “do they think” to “do you think”.) “And you wouldn’t know it would happen like this”. Our Lady of Pain, wide-eyed as being credulous for all her worldliness, will meet her match in our gentlemen of pained surprise. “Oh, how could they ever mistake you?”
Dolores would not have to be a source for Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands (leave alone an act of allusion by Dylan) for it to illuminate the song’s art. More than decor is a tissue. Overlappings include (in the order within Dylan’s song, though neglecting singular / plural differences): “mouth”, “times”, “eyes”, “like”, “prayers”, “voice”, “visions”, “flesh”, “face”, “lady”, “prophet”, “man”, “comes”, “[ware]house”, “the sun”, “light”, “moon”, “songs”, “kings”, “kiss”, “know”, “flames”, “midnight”, “mother”, “mouth”, “the dead”, “hide”, “feet”, “child”, “go”, “thief ”, “holy”, “finger[tip]s”, “face”, and “soul”. And Dylan’s “outguess” (“Who among them can think he could outguess you?”) is in tune with Swinburne’s “outsing”, “outlove”, “outface and outlive us”.
What may be revelatory is that these apprehensions of languor and danger so often coincide in their cadences and decadences. Swinburne’s anti-prayer to his anti-madonna, an interrogation that hears no need why it should ever end, may be heard as a prophecy of the Dylan song, a song that has been