Dylan's Visions of Sin (6 page)

“All beauty may by a metaphor be called rhyme, may it not?” asked a speaker in Hopkins’s imaginary conversation. Moreover, rhyme is itself one of the forms that metaphor may
take, since rhyme is a perception of agreement and disagreement, of similitude and dissimilitude. Simultaneously, a spark. Long, long ago, Aristotle said in the Poetics that the greatest thing by
far is to be a master of metaphor, for it is upon our being able to learn from the perception of similitude and dissimilitude that human learning of all kinds depends. One form that mastery of
metaphor may take is mastery of rhyme.

Ian Hamilton said of “Dylan’s blatant, unworried way with rhyme” in
All I Really Want to Do
that it
is
irritating on the page, but sung by him it very often becomes part of the song’s point, part of its drama of aggression. Many of
Dylan’s love songs are a kind of verbal wife-battering: she will be
rhymed
into submission – but to see them this way you have to have Bob’s barbed wire tonsils in
support.
⁴⁹

I think it’s true that women in Dylan’s vicinity sometimes have as their mission being rhymed into submission, but that isn’t battering, it’s bantering.

Still, the rhyming can be fierce. Take the force of the couplet in
Idiot Wind
,

Rolling Stone
reported: “It’s an amazing rhyme, Ginsberg writes, an amazing image, a national image like in Hart Crane’s unfinished epic of America,
The Bridge
. The other poet is delighted to get the letter. No one else, Dylan writes Ginsberg, had noticed that rhyme, a rhyme which is very dear to Dylan. Ginsberg’s tribute to that
rhyme is one of the reasons he is here”:
⁵⁰
that is, on the Rolling Thunder Review and then in Dylan’s vast film
Renaldo and
Clara
.

And it’s a true rhyme because of the metaphorical relation, because of what a head of state is, and the body politic, and because of the relation of the Capitol to the skull (another of
those white domes), with which it disconcertingly rhymes. An imperfect rhyme, perfectly judged.

Dylan: “But then again, people have taken rhyming now, it doesn’t have to be exact anymore. Nobody’s gonna care if you rhyme ‘represent’ with ‘ferment’,
you know. Nobody’s gonna care.”
⁵¹
Not going to care as not going to object, agreed; but someone as imaginative about rhymes as Dylan must
care, since always aware of, and doing something with, imperfect rhymes, or awry rhymes, or rhymes that go off at half-cock, so that their nature is to the point. The same goes for having assonance
instead of rhyme: entirely acceptable but not identical with the effect of rhyme, and creatively available as just that bit different. The rhyme
skull / Capitol
is a capital one.

Dylan adapts the skull of the Capitol to the White House elsewhere, in
11 Outlined Epitaphs
:

But can it be that Dylan was guilty of baldism? A bad hair day. Time to soothe and smoothe:
A Message from Bob Dylan to the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee
(13
December 1963) assured those of us who are bald oldsters or baldsters that “when I speak of bald heads, I mean bald minds”. You meant bald heads, and it was a justified generational
counter-attack, given how the young (back then) were rebuked for their hair.

A rhyme may be a transplant.

One of the best rhymes, that. For all rhymes are a coincidence issuing in a new sense. It is a pure coincidence that
sense
rhymes with
coincidence
, and from this
you
gather
something. Every rhyme issues a bet, and is a risk, something for gamblers – and a gambler is a better (“for gamblers, better use . . .”).

Granted, it is possible that all this is a mere coincidence, and that I am imagining things, rather than noticing how Dylan imagined things. We often have a simple test as to whether critical
suggestions are far-fetched. If they hadn’t occurred to us, they are probably strained, silly-clever . . . So although for my part I believe that the immediate succession “gamblers,
better . . .” is Dylan’s crisp playing with words, not my doing so, and although I like the idea that there may be some faint play in the word “sense”, which in the American
voicing is indistinguishable from the small-scale financial sense “cents”,
⁵²
I didn’t find myself persuaded when a friend suggested
that all this money rolls and flows into “coincidence”,
which does after all start with
c o i n
, coin. Not persuaded partly, I admit, because I
hadn’t thought of it myself, but mostly because this is a song, not a poem on the page. On the page, you might see before your very eyes that coincidence spins a coin, but the sound of a
song, the voicing of the word “coincidence”, can’t gather coin up into itself. Anyway Dylan uses his sense. “One of the very nice things about working with Bob is that he
loves rhyme, he loves to play with it, and he loves the complication of it.”
⁵³
A quick canter round the course of his rhyming. There is the
comedy: it is weird to rhyme
weird / disappeared,
reckless to rhyme
reckless / necklace
, and outrageous to rhyme
outrageous / contagious
.
⁵⁴
And in
Goin’ to Acapulco
the rhyme
what the hell / Taj Mahal
mutters “what the hell”. There is the tension, for instance that of a duel in the
world of the Western:

Once “did dim” has set the scene, the two of them stand there: Jim and him, simplicity themselves. And there is the satire: Dylan can sketch a patriotic posturing
simply by thrusting forth the jaw of a rhyme with a challenge.

A true American will pronounce the proud word, juttingly,
Americán
. You got a problem with that?

Clearly, rhyme is not exactly the same phenomenon on the page as it is when voiced (on stage or on album). On the page, “good” at the line-ending in
One Too Many Mornings
is
likely to be broadly the same in its pronunciation (though not necessarily in its tone, and this affects
pronunciation) as the same word, “good”, at the
line-ending two lines later. But in singing, Dylan can play what his voice may do (treat them very differently) against their staying the same: the word both is and is not the one that you heard a
moment earlier. Or take “I don’t want to be hers, I want to be yours” (
I Wanna Be Your Lover
). On the page, no rhyme; in the song, “yers”, which both is and is
not a persuasive retort to, or equivalent of, “hers”, both does and does not enjoy the same rights. The first rhyme in
Got My Mind Made Up, long / wrong
, has an effect that it
could never have on the page, since Dylan sings “wrong” so differently from how he sang “long”. There is something very right about this, which depends upon comprehending
the way in which the multimedia art of song differs from the page’s poetry.

Other favourites. The rhyme in
Talkin’ World War III Blues
, “ouch” up against “psychiatric couch”.

Ouch: no amount of plump cushioning can remove the pain that psychiatry exists to deal with – and that psychiatry in due course has its own inflictions of. (There’s
a moment in the film
Panic
when the doleful hit-man played by William H. Macy is asked by the shrink as he leaves – after paying $125 for not many minutes – how he is feeling
now? “Poor.”) Dylan’s word “pad” plays its small comic part; to
write
on, not like the padded couch (not padded enough: Ouch!) or the padded cell.
Ouch /
couch
is a rhyme that is itself out to grab you, and that knows the difference between “Tell me about it” as a soothing professional solicitation and as a cynical boredom. Moreover,
rhyme is a to-and-fro, an exchange, itself a form of this “I said” / “He said” business or routine.

Another rhyme that has spirit: “nonchalant” against “It’s your mind that I want” in
Rita May
:

You don’t have to
believe
him (I wouldn’t, if I were you, Rita May), but “nonchalant” arriving at “want” is
delicious, because nonchalant is so undesiring of her, so cool, so not in heat.

Or there’s the rhyme in
Mozambique
of “Mozambique” with “cheek to cheek” (along with “cheek” cheekily rhyming with “cheek” there, a
perfect fit). There’s always something strange about place names, or persons’ names, rhyming, for they don’t seem to be words exactly, or at any rate are very different kinds of
word from your usual word.
⁵⁵

My favourite of all Dylan’s rhymes is another that turns upon a place name, the rhyme of “Utah” with “me ‘Pa’”, as if “U–” in Utah
were spelt
y o u
:

That’s not a rhyme of “tah” and “pa”, it’s a rhyme of “Utah” and “me ‘Pa’” – like “Me Tarzan,
You Jane”. And it has a further dimension of sharp comedy in that Dylan has taken over for his peaceful pastoral purposes a military drill, words to march by – you can hear them being
chanted in Frederick Wiseman’s documentary
Basic Training
(1971):

Yet there is pathos as well as comedy in
Sign on the Window
, for the Utah stanza is the closing one of a song of loss that begins “Sign on the window says
‘Lonely’”. But then “lonely” is perhaps the loneliest word in the language. For the only rhyme for “lonely” is “only”. Compounding the lonely,
Dylan sings it so that it finds its direction home:

Dylan knows the strain that has to be felt if you want even to be in the vicinity of finding another rhyme for “lonely”:

Lonely / Y’ Don’t Own Me
. No Company Allowed? Company is inherent in rhyming, where one word keeps company with another. And rhyme, like any metaphor, is itself a threesome,
though not a crowd: tenor, vehicle, and the union of the two that constitutes the third thing, metaphor.

Arthur Hallam, Tennyson’s friend in whose memory
In Memoriam
was written, referred to rhyme as “the recurrence of termination”. A fine paradox, for how can termination
recur? Can this really be the end when there is a rhyme to come?

Rhyme has been said to contain in itself a constant appeal to Memory and Hope. This is true of all verse, of all harmonized sound; but it is certainly made more palpable by the
recurrence of termination. The dullest senses can perceive an identity in that, and be pleased with it; but the partial identity, latent in more diffused resemblances, requires, in order to be
appreciated, a soul susceptible of musical impression. The ancients disdained a mode of pleasure, in appearance so little elevated, so ill adapted for effects of art; but they knew not, and with
their metrical harmonies, perfectly suited, as these were, to their habitual moods of feeling, they were not likely to know the real capacities of this apparently simple and vulgar
combination.
⁵⁶

Rhyme contains this appeal to Memory and Hope (is a container for it, and contains it as you might contain your anger, your laughter, or your
drink)
because when you have the first rhyme-word you are hoping for the later one, and when you have the later one, you remember the promise that was given earlier and is now fulfilled. Responsibilities
on both sides, responsively granted.

So rhyme is intimately involved with lyric – Swinburne insisted on this, back in 1867: “Rhyme is the native condition of lyric verse in English: a rhymeless lyric is a maimed
thing.” There are few good unrhymed lyrics of any kind because of the strong filament between lyricism, hope, and memory.
⁵⁷

Dylan loves rhyming on the word “memory” (and rhyme is one of the best aids to memory, is the mnemonic device: “Thirty days hath September, / April, June, and November . .
.”). The line in
Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
, “With your sheet-metal memory of Cannery Row”, rings true because of the memory within this song that takes you back to the
phrase “your sheets like metal”, and because of the curious undulation that can be heard, and is memorable, in “memory” and “Cannery”. And Cannery Row is itself
a memory, since the allusion to John Steinbeck’s novel has to be a memory that the singer shares with his listeners, or else it couldn’t work as an allusion.