Watch out when you step in
For 7 deadly sins
That’s when the fun begins
7 deadly sins
Sin number one was when you left me
Sin number two you said goodbye
Sin number three was when you told me a little white lie
7 deadly sins
Once it starts it never ends
Watch out around the bend
For 7 deadly sins
Sin number four was when you looked my way
Sin number five was when you smiled
Sin number six was when you let me stay
Sin number seven was when you touched me and drove me wild
7 deadly sins
So many rules to bend
Time and time again
7 deadly sins
One of the endearing things about the song, tucked up in all innocence, is that there don’t actually seem to be seven sins on the go at all. Just one good old one. Touching, really.
The claim in this book isn’t that most of Dylan’s songs, or even most of the best ones, are bent on sin. Simply that (for the present venture in criticism) handling sin may be the right way to take hold of the bundle. Dylan himself may make a mock of the idea that songs are about things, but he did speak of the “things I have to say about such things as ghetto bosses, salvation and sin”. And even in his travesty of owlishness (the notes accompanying World Gone Wrong), he heads these comments of his on other men’s songs with the words:
ABOUT THE SONGS
(what they’re about)
Of Broke Down Engine, Dylan remarks (in a way that may freewheel, but is not out of control) that “it’s about Ambiguity, the fortunes of the privileged elite, flood control – watching the red dawn not bothering to dress”. So I shall take Ambiguity as an excuse for returning to the author of Seven Types of Ambiguity, William Empson.8
Empson explained why he came to do the explaining in which he took delight. His method, verbal analysis, started simply from the pleasure of his response to a poem.
I felt sure that the example was beautiful and that I had, broadly speaking, reacted to it correctly. But I did not at all know what had happened in this “reaction”; I did not know why the example was beautiful. And it seemed to me that I was able in some cases partly to explain my feelings to myself by teasing out the meanings of the text.9
Empson’s example is crucial to me, not only in its happiness, but in his not being dead set upon convincing anybody else that a particular poem is good. The idea was not so much to show someone that a poem is good, as to go some way towards showing how it comes to be good, so very good.
You think that the poem is worth the trouble before you choose to go into it carefully, and you know more about what it is worth when you have done so.10
In the same spirit, I think of what I am doing as prizing songs, not as prising-open minds. (Most people who are likely to read this book will already know what they feel about Dylan, though they may not always know quite why they feel it or what they think.)
I think that nowadays we can explain why Milton was right, but the explanations usually seem long and fanciful; they would only convince men who believed already that the line was beautiful, and wanted to know why.11
Literary criticism – unlike, say, music criticism or art criticism – enjoys the advantage of existing in the same medium (language) as the art that it explores and esteems. This can give to literary criticism a delicacy and an inwardness that are harder to achieve elsewhere. But, at the same time, this may be why literary critics are given to competitive envy: What I’d like to know, given that he and I are working in the same medium, in the same line of work, really, is why I am attending to Tennyson, instead of his attending to me . . .
And then there is the age-old difficulty and problem of intention. Briefly: I believe that an artist is someone more than usually blessed with a cooperative unconscious or subconscious, more than usually able to effect things with the help of instincts and intuitions of which he or she is not necessarily conscious. Like the great athlete, the great artist is at once highly trained and deeply instinctual. So if I am asked whether I believe that Dylan is conscious of all the subtle effects of wording and timing that I suggest, I am perfectly happy to say that he probably isn’t. And if I am right, then in this he is not less the artist but more. There are such things as unconscious intentions (think of the unthinking Freudian slip). What matters is that Dylan is doing the imagining, not that he be fully deliberatedly conscious of the countless intimations that are in his art. As he put it:
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.12
A shrewd turn, this, the contrariety of “You’ve got to program your brain” and the immediate “not to think too much”.
T. S. Eliot, who knew that it “is not always true that a person who knows a good poem when he sees it can tell us why it is a good poem”, knew as well that “the poet does many things upon instinct, for which he can give no better account than anybody else”.13
Still, there are many admirers of Dylan who instinctively feel that adducing Mr Eliot when talking about Dylan is pretentious and portentous. So let me take an instance of a Dylan / Eliot intersection that is not of my finding (though I shall do a little developing). The Telegraph (Winter 1987) included a note:14
On a more literary level, had you noticed that Maybe Someday quotes from T. S. Eliot? In Journey of the Magi, Eliot has:
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
Later in the same poem there’s mention too of “pieces of silver”. So in Dylan’s lines:
Through hostile cities and unfriendly towns
Thirty pieces of silver, no money down
I remember the excitement I felt when I myself noticed Dylan’s debt (many pieces of silver) – and then the unwarrantable disappointment I felt when I later discovered from the Telegraph that I was not the first to discover it. Mustn’t be hostile or unfriendly about this not-being-the-first business. (The first shall be last.) But then the song is a tissue of memories of the poem. Here are a few more moments.
| Eliot | Dylan |
| an open door | breakin’ down no bedroom door |
| the voices singing in our ears | a voice from on high |
| it was (you may say) satisfactory | when I say / you’ll be satisfied |
| I remember | you’ll remember |
| all that way | every kind of way |
Take what you have gathered from coincidence, yes, but these are not coincidences, once you concede that the likeness of Eliot’s “And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly” to Dylan’s “Through hostile cities and unfriendly towns” goes beyond happenstance. Such a likeness, then, may give some warrant for