Not away for long, though: in the two songs that follow, Alberta and I Forgot More than You’ll Ever Know, Dylan gets some writing done (as he had hinted he would like to), though not all that much, since Alberta is a traditional song slightly adapted by him.142 Some writing done, and some singing, too, with backing from the serene women. After that, he is on his own, in Days of ’49. The women will never again on the album find themselves left frontless. Our man wouldn’t want to make a habit of such amicable sloth.
Genial relaxation hangs about All the Tired Horses, this plain-spun plaint, in some other respects, too. Attributed to Dylan on the album, the song doesn’t make it into the Lyrics 1962–1985. Someone couldn’t be bothered, was slothered?
And then again, with that receptiveness of leisure that may amount to creative sloth, the song cocks an ear for coincidences, or at any rate might not resent our wondering (mustn’t be heavy) about a possible coincidence or two. That word “tired”, for instance. It just happens that this is the word crucial to the musical drowsiness of The Lotos-Eaters:
Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tir’d eyelids upon tir’d eyes.
Tennyson on how to pronounce “tir’d” there: “making the word neither monosyllabic nor disyllabic, but a dreamy child of the two”.143 This dreaminess in The Lotos-Eaters is from within the “Choric Song”, and there is something about song that often finds itself drawn to such relaxation in the sun. Dylan, dawdling drawlingly into “All the tired horses in the sun”, wouldn’t have to have known this; all he would have needed was to be in sympathy with its sympathies. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first definition of “in the sun” is “free from care or sorrow”. The phrase “in the sun” likes to close the line when figuring in a song. In The Pirates of Penzance, there is an instance within a song that finds pleasure in contemplating the leisure of another: “He loves to lie a-basking in the sun”. A good old tradition, this, for in As You Like It the three-word phrase (likewise in conclusion) had been at play in a song that happily invoked the person “Who doth ambition shun / And loves to live i’ the sun”. In Twelfth Night there is a song of which we hear before we actually hear the song itself, one woven by those who weave, “The spinsters and the knitters in the sun”. Dylan’s “All the tired horses in the sun” is interknitted with such a feeling for it all, placing and timing. A very different feeling from the energetic aggression that can be felt in It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue:
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun
Crying like a fire in the sun
Marlowe staged a parade of the Seven Deadly Sins in his Doctor Faustus. And what is the first thing that Sloth wants to tell you? “I am Sloth. I was begotten on a sunny bank, where I have lain ever since.” And the last thing he wants to say? “I’ll not speak a word more for a king’s ransom.”
A word more: perhaps in the recesses of the song’s few words there is something else that is worth a king’s ransom. Or am I alone in flirting with the thought that if we had a crossword clue, All the –––– horses (5), the word we might wish we could ink in would be King’s?144 Dylan, who loves to make play with nursery rhymes, might enjoy playing the energetic pointlessness of “All the King’s horses and all the King’s men” (pointless because How were they s’posed to get any repairs done? whereas the Dylan women are all getting the singing done) against the unenergetic pointedness of
All the tired horses in the sun
How’m I s’posed to get any riding done
A good question (with no question-mark), though not exactly a question, really. A quasi-querulousness, rather, the weary aggrievance of someone who can’t muster the energy to mount an argument, let alone a horse. How’m I s’posed . . .: So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold. (To invoke the music of Browning’s A Toccata of Galuppi’s.) “How’m I s’posed . . .”: with, perhaps again, some pleasure derivable from this striking a chord, if we happen to know that “supposed” was for ages a helpful musical term, as The Oxford English Dictionary records:
Mus. Applied to a note added or introduced below the notes of a chord, or to an upper note of a chord when used as the lower note (supposed bars) etc.
Passivity rules? But Dylan’s words have their unobtrusive activity, as does his syntax, his articulate energy. There is no verb in the first line, as if unable to bring itself to do more than just point to, point out: “All the tired horses in the sun”. Blankly, as though a verb (for the verb is the activating part of speech) would be too much of a bustle or hassle. And then no syntactical relation between the first line, which just adduces those horses, and the second line, which is nothing but a fatigued remonstration. “How’m I s’posed to get any riding done”. I ask you. Not that you need take the trouble to answer. It is in vain for any of us to kick against the pricks – and anyway kicking would be more of an effort than I’m prepared to make, I don’t mind telling you. Forget it. But don’t forget the song, even though Lyrics 1962–1985 does.
Self Portrait doesn’t leave it at that. For there are other occasions when the album puts us in mind of the lure of sloth, easy though queasy. Wigwam is happy to undertake its instrumental operations, its ineffable wordlessness, for three minutes, just singing over and over again “la” and “da”. If you were to complain about this, you would only come across as la-di-da. And there is Copper Kettle (attributed on the album to A. F. Beddoe), which Dylan sings with an exquisite slowness that languorously lingers in the knowledge that “sloth” is a noun from the adjective “slow”. So easy and so slow.
Get you a copper kettle
Get you a copper coil
Fill it with new-made corn mash
And never more you’ll toil
You’ll just lay there by the juniper
While the moon is bright
Watch them jugs a-filling
In the pale moonlight
“And never more you’ll toil”. Dylan, working against the grain of his own character and disposition, has found a way of imagining this with affection – thanks to another. (Maybe Beddoe didn’t have to toil at it, but he must have had to work at it, which is how it manages to sound so effortless.) “They toil not, neither do they spin”: those are the gospel words that Keats chose as epigraph for his Ode on Indolence. Dylan isn’t the type to envy the lilies of the field, but he knows why you and I might.
Time Passes Slowly
Whereas the cadences of All the Tired Horses are entirely at one (vocally, musically, verbally), Time Passes Slowly sets itself to set your teeth on edge. On the page, it looks at first entirely equable in its setting, at its setting out:
Time passes slowly up here in the mountains
We sit beside bridges and walk beside fountains
Catch the wild fishes that float through the stream
Time passes slowly when you’re lost in a dream
It never becomes a nightmare exactly, but it assuredly isn’t voiced as happily idle, a happy idyll. From the start, the song evinces the kind of contrariety that characterizes Watching the River Flow; Time Passes Slowly, too, is rhythmically and vocally bumpy, jagged, pot-holed, unsettled