Dylan's Visions of Sin. Christopher Ricks

that he issues the pleading admission, “There’s only so much I can do”. Same here. When it comes to greed and Dylan, there’s only so much I can do. He does a great deal with it, in a way, but the way is not direct, is not a matter of having greed ever be the pith or gist or nub of a song. Rather, greed will be found – with grim likelihood – doing its dirty business all over the place, this worldly place.

      Well, God is in his heaven

      And we all want what’s his

      But power and greed and corruptible seed

      Seem to be all that there is

      Blind Willie McTell on blind greed. Union Sundown on greed as in your line of vision:

      Sure was a good idea

      ’Til greed got in the way

      Sloth

      If some particular sin – sloth, say (no longer sayable, “sloth”, too old-world a word) – isn’t for you, good for you. But this may not be good for you. You may be a prig about it, self-righteous. (Ain’t no man righteous, no, not oneself.) Human beings, all too human, have long found it convenient to

      Compound for sins they are inclined to,

      By damning those they have no mind to.¹³⁶

      And for the artist, the imaginer, this not-being-tempted may turn out to be a mixed blessing, a bit of a curse. For temptation is a profound form that imagination may take. Is it possible to imagine deeply a sin that tempts you not a whit? The greatest artists have always been those who take the full force of temptation, and who know what they – not just we or you guys – are in for and are up against. So it is not surprising that on occasion these will be the very artists who lapse. The profoundest comprehension of snobbery, for instance, has come from writers who are not simply and unwaveringly impervious to it: Henry James, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ivy Compton-Burnett . . . True, they don’t invariably get it right, but this is inseparable from their getting it.

      Certain of the seven sins engage Dylan more rewardingly, and more often, than others, because he knows full well where he is susceptible. It can be salutary to be prone to these things, as against being either supine under them or superior to them. From this admission or admittance, there can rise the achievement of an art free from condescension and smugness.

      When it comes to the sins of anger and pride, there is many a Dylan song that comes to mind. You might, though, find yourself having to cast about a bit before seizing upon a Dylan song that settles upon – or into – sloth as the sin that challenges. Anger, yes; languor (sloth’s cousin), scarcely.

      “Energy is eternal delight”. Hear the voice of the bard, William Blake, in whom Dylan has often delighted. And Dylan is energy incarnate. Energy is Activity. Sloth finds its place in Roget’s Thesaurus under “Inactivity”. But does sloth – could it – find a place in Dylan’s art, given his indefatigable energy? It asks of us a positive effort even to imagine Dylan’s being lazy, slothful, idle, slack, inert, sluggish, languid, or lethargic (to pick up sticks from the thesaurus). The opposite of slothful? “Diligent” is the opposing term that is everywhere in the Book of Proverbs (which Dylan knows like the back of God’s hand). O O O O that Dylanesque rag. It’s so elegant. So intelligent. So Dyligent. Never negligent.

      But Dylan, as an heir of Romanticism (Blake’s and Keats’s, for a start), was sure to be drawn to imagine in depth those slothful-looking moods or modes that smilingly put it to us that we might put in a good word for them. Sloth is bad, but “wise passiveness” (Wordsworth) is the condition of many a good thing, including the contemplative arts in both their creation and reception. Sloth is bad, but leisure may be an amiably ambling ambience that should not be mistaken for, or misrepresented as, sloth. British English rhymes “pleasure” with “leisure”, relaxed about it, but perhaps in danger of complacency; American English combines “seizure” and “lesion” for its “leisure”, uneasy about it, but perhaps in danger of morbidity. And then again we differ about sloth. The American pronunciation, with a short o (sloppy, sloshy, this sloth, for slobs who haven’t even the energy for a long o), is differently evocative from the long o of British English, which assimilates the slow to sloth.¹³⁷ “Blue river running slow and lazy”. Sloth drags its eels.

      There is an undulating hammock of a word from the good old days: “indolence”. Keats, who had more energy than others would have known what to do with, valued indolence very highly, and devoted an Ode to it, to “The blissful cloud of summer-indolence”, such a relaxation as makes poetry seem hardly worth the effort. But then is poetry perhaps just a relaxation anyway?

      For Poesy! – no, she has not a joy –

      At least for me – so sweet as drowsy noons,

      And evenings steeped in honeyed indolence.

      It is characteristic of true art to be willing to acknowledge such feelings about art, feelings that pass for truth, but will pass.

      William Empson once invoked The Pilgrim’s Progress in a poem:

      Muchafraid went over the river singing

      Though none knew what she sang. Usual for a man

      Of Bunyan’s courage to respect fear.

      (Courage means Running)

      Usual for a man of Keats’s energy to respect indolence. Or for a man of Dylan’s energy, he who goes over the river singing. (“I’ll take you ’cross the river, dear / You’ve no need to linger here”: Moonlight.) No need to linger here? Oh, reason not the need, for it may be the fact that there is no need to do something that makes it so tempting, needless, and heedless, so innocently remiss. Dylan can sit by the river while never forgetting the claims of the activities that will sometime have to be resumed. He is not brushing them off, he is sitting them aside:

      Wish I was back in the city

      Instead of this old bank of sand

      With the sun beating down over the chimney tops

      And the one I love so close at hand

      If I had wings and I could fly

      I know where I would go

      But right now I’ll just sit here so contentedly

      And watch the river flow

      (Watching the River Flow)

      What brings this to a very different life in the singing is an unexpected cross-current or counter-current. You would never guess from the words alone that the phrasing and the arrangement would be so choppy, so bent on disrupting any easy flowing. Stroppy stomping is the note from the very start, before Dylan even hits the words – and hit them is what he does, not mollify them or play along with their sentiments or go with their flow. The third and then the last verse both kick off with “People disagreeing” – “People disagreeing on all just about everything, yeah”, “People disagreeing everywhere you look” – but then the song is thrillingly disagreeing with itself. Its rhythmical and vocal raucousness is far from flowing. More like shooting a few rapids. Bracing, really, because braced. In the singing, Watching the River Flow turns out not to be one of your usual floatings downstream. “Sweet Thames run softly, till I end my song”: this was sheer fluency in Spenser, but when T. S. Eliot incorporated the line as part of his own song, he did not leave it at that. Later in this same section of The Waste Land, his river is an old man, back in the city, who works for his living and who sweats at it.

      The river sweats

      Oil and tar

      The barges drift

      With the turning tide

      Watching the River Flow is tarred with a realism that qualifies and complicates the lure of the lazy, though never to the point of abolishing what the words express a hope for: some relaxing, please, if at all possible. For, whatever