Dylan's Visions of Sin (15 page)

The camera shots, the perspectives: do they create more than wistful but nebulous fragments? Do they add up to any kind of vision, as the whole presentation, duration and
solemnity of the song imply that they should? No. Dylan is resting, and cooing nonsense in our ears (very beguilingly, of course).

The only thing that unites the fragments is the mechanical device of the return to the chorus and thus to the title . . . It is, in the end, not a whole song at all but unconnected chippings,
and only the poor cement of an empty chorus and a regularity of tune give the illusion that things are otherwise.

In the end, whatever the song’s attractions and clever touches, they have been bundled together, and perhaps a bit complacently, without the unity either of a clear and real theme or of
cohesive artistic discipline.

In a footnote added later, Gray tried to square the circle, tried to square his readers by rounding on himself:

When I read this assessment now, I simply feel embarrassed at what a little snob I was when I wrote it. In contrast (and paradoxically), when I go back and listen, after a long
gap, to Dylan’s recording, every ardent, true feeling I ever had comes back to me. Decades of detritus drop away and I feel back in communion with my best self and my soul. Whatever the
shortcomings of the lyric, the recording itself, capturing at its absolute peak Dylan’s incomparable capacity for intensity of communication, is a masterpiece if ever there was
one.
¹²⁸

No one would begrudge Gray his feeling back in communion with his best self and his soul, or want him to be crippled by detritus, but there is something hollow about
this claim that an ill-worded song prompted a masterpiece of voicing. For it is only at a very low level of craft that any such distinction – between what the words can do and what the singer
can do with them – could operate. A
masterpiece
of singing needs to be precipitated by an answering masterliness or masterfulness in what is sung. Matthew Arnold repudiated,
unanswerably, an inordinate praise of Joseph Addison:

to say of Addison’s style, that “in its varied cadence and subtle ease it has never been surpassed”, seems to me to be going a little too far. One could not
say more of Plato’s. Whatever his services to his time, Addison is for us now a writer whose range and force of thought are not considerable enough to make him interesting; and his style
cannot equal in varied cadence and subtle ease the style of a man like Plato, because without range and force of thought all the resources of style, whether in cadence or in subtlety, are not and
cannot be brought out.

(
A Guide to English Literature
)

By the same token, all the resources of Dylan’s voice, in varied cadence and subtle ease and much else, are not and cannot be brought out except by (say) range and force
of thought – and it is such qualities that are, in Gray’s judgement, missing from a song that shows such “shortcomings” in the writing. I don’t believe that the
recording
could
be “capturing at its absolute peak Dylan’s incomparable capacity for intensity of communication” if what were communicated were compounded of
“nonsense” and of “fragments” held together by “the mechanical device of the return to the chorus”, and if “only the poor cement of an empty chorus and a
regularity of tune give the illusion that things are otherwise”. If
Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
really is “not a whole song at all but unconnected chippings”, then it
could never have been the occasion for an absolute peak of Dylan’s intensity of communication, any more than an ill-written speech in a play could be the occasion for an absolute peak (as
against, at best, quite a tour de force) of an actor’s genius.

For it cannot be just a matter of
how
Dylan sings such a moment as this, however exquisite its timing –

– but of
what
had swum into his mind and his eyes and his ears by way of
wording, wording of an inspiration that is commensurate with the
voice.
Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
is a masterpiece, but of a kind that Gray – trained as a literary critic in the bracing but narrow convictions of Dr Leavis – was sure to
disparage: the Swinburnean. Eliot knew better:

The words of condemnation are words which express his qualities. You may say “diffuse”. But the diffuseness is essential; had Swinburne practised greater concentration his verse
would be, not better in the same kind, but a different thing. His diffuseness is one of his glories. That so little material as appears to be employed in
The Triumph of Time
should release
such an amazing number of words, requires what there is no reason to call anything but genius.

What he gives is not images and ideas and music, it is one thing with a curious mixture of suggestions of all three.
¹²⁹

The possessions of the song, irrespective of where exactly they should be left, were retrieved from the warehouse that stores all such evocations – whether by Swinburne or
by Keats – of
La Belle Dame sans Merci
:

To a tune that enthrals and entices.

Keats does not tell you where his “pale kings” reigned. Dylan does: “The kings of Tyrus”. Why that particular city? But this can be answered only by first identifying
“the sad-eyed prophet” who is held in a dance of tension, throughout the song, with the sad-eyed lady of the lowlands.

And the word of the Lord came unto me, saying Son of man, prophesy against the prophets of Israel that prophesy.

(Ezekiel 13:1)

Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
prophesies against the prophets that prophesy. Ezekiel is sad at what he sees before his eyes:

Because with lies ye have made the heart of the righteous sad, whom I have not made sad; and strengthened the hands of the wicked . . . therefore ye shall see no more
vanity.

(Ezekiel 13:22)

Ezekiel is sad-eyed, and the more so because of being forbidden to weep:

And the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Son of man, behold, I take away from thee the desire of thine eyes with a stroke: yet neither shalt thou mourn nor weep, neither
shall thy tears run down. Forbear to cry.

(Ezekiel 24:16)

Moved by a poem of mourning and forbearance, Thomas Carlyle said of Tennyson’s
Ulysses
: “These lines do not make me weep, but there is in me what would fill
whole lachrymatories as I read.”
¹³⁰
A lachrymatory is a “vase intended to hold tears; applied by archaeologists to those small phials of
glass, alabaster, etc., which are found in ancient Roman tombs” (
The Oxford English Dictionary
). “Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?”

“Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes”: the phrase “no man” comes more than once in the Book of Ezekiel, and there is a gate nearby. Ezekiel 44:2:
“This gate shall be shut, it shall not be opened, and no man shall enter in by it.” (Similarly, 14:15: “that no man may pass through”.) “No man” is heard again
and again in the Bible. Isaiah 24:10: “Every house
is shut up, that no man may come in. There is a crying for wine in the streets; all joy is darkened, the mirth of
the land is gone. In the city is left desolation, and the gate is smitten with destruction.” Isaiah is another of the prophets who toll the words “no man”. As printed in
Lyrics
1962–1985
, the refrain is always “the sad-eyed prophet says”; in singing, Dylan moves from this to “the sad-eyed prophets say”.

“The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me,” William Blake recorded, straightforwardly, “and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them; and
whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition” (
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
).

“Moreover the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Son of man, take up a lamentation upon the king of Tyrus” (Ezekiel 28:12). In chapter 26 of Ezekiel, the pride of Tyrus is
brought low, for Tyrus will be set “in the low parts of the earth” (26:20), the low lands. A king of kings “shall enter into thy gates” (26:10). And the city’s music
will have a dying fall. “I will cause the noise of thy songs to cease; and the sound of thy harps shall be no more heard” (26:13).

– and then, scarcely waiting:

Should I wait? At which point we wait only a moment to hear (two lines later) that they are waiting in line, “The kings of Tyrus with their convict list” –
Tyrus, the city of Tyre, having been found guilty by the judgement of the Lord (
convict
: proved or pronounced guilty, as in “convict to eternal damnation”).
¹³¹

Guilty of what? Of being not only covetous but the cause of covetousness in others, of gratifying the covetous and of profiting from their covetousness.
“With
your pockets well protected at last”: glad to hear it, but their pockets are in need of protection.

Guilty of what would now be called conspicuous consumption or consumerism, a fast-fed greed that supposes that it can float free of the terrible ancient verb “consume”, a verb that
utters its fierce condemnation throughout Ezekiel.

Guilty of such a commodification as exults in its wealth of modifications. Tyrus is “a merchant of the people for many isles” (27:3). This one chapter includes among Tyrus’s
world trade splendours its shipboards of fir trees of Senir; cedars of Lebanon to make masts; oaks of Bashan for oars; ivory from Chittim for benches; and fine linen from Egypt for sails. (Where
are the Arabian drums?) It deals in silver, iron, tin, lead, and brass; ivory and ebony; emeralds, and fine linen, and coral, and agate; honey, and oil, and balm; wine and wool; iron, cassia, and
calamus; precious clothes; lambs, and rams, and goats; all spices, and all precious stones, and gold; blue clothes, and broidered work, and chests of rich apparel. (Rich apparel, precious clothes,
blue clothes, a cut above our modern world and “your basement clothes”.) The recurrent tribute in this chapter of Ezekiel, a tribute full of peril, is “. . . were thy
merchants”. All this, with a sense that we haven’t even started yet.
With your
, and
with your
, and
with your
.

These chapters of Ezekiel, with an unmisgiving redundancy that apes the extravagance that it sets down, marvel repeatedly at the city’s “merchandise” and its
“merchants”. Tyrus is “thy merchant by reason of the multitude of all kind of riches; with silver, iron, tin, and lead, they traded in thy fairs” (27:12). But wait, there is
a force that can outwait the kings of Tyrus: the Lord, he who speaks, through his prophet Ezekiel, of the doom to come: “And they shall make a spoil of thy riches, and make a prey of thy
merchandise” (26:12). The prophet speaks unto the prince of Tyrus, a warning delivered (should I leave it by your gate?) against covetousness and this sin’s compact with its fellow-sin,
pride:

with thy wisdom and with thine understanding hast thou gotten thee riches, and hast gotten gold and silver into thy treasures: by thy great wisdom and by thy traffick hast thou
increased thy riches, and thine heart is lifted up because of thy riches: therefore thus saith the Lord God; Because thou hast set thine heart as the heart of God; behold, therefore will I bring
strangers upon thee, the terrible of the nations. (28:4–7)

With thy wisdom and with thine understanding were these riches gained,
whereupon wisdom and understanding forgot the Lord God, and so precipitated
their own folly and destruction.

What is Tyrus but one huge warehouse of hubris? Its wares are of every kind. Tyrus is “thy merchant by reason of the multitude of the wares of thy making” (27:16), a lavish phrase
that is repeated two verses later, as though itself a gesture of conspicuously luxurious consumption. Thy wares, and the multitude of the wares of thy making: where better to see them all than by
looking deep in my eyes, “My warehouse eyes”? Warehouse eyes, taking a turn for the worse, can become whorehouse eyes. “Thou hast opened thy feet to every one that passed by, and
multiplied thy whoredoms” (Ezekiel 16:25).

I can see how someone can leave his drums by your gate, and I can sense the pulse that throbs from “eyes” to “drums” via the disconcertingly different
drums that are eardrums.
¹³²
But his
eyes
? Forget about
should
he leave them by your gate, how
could
he? The surrealistic glimpse
is of body-parts and parcels.

If we try to understand the way in which the phrase “my warehouse eyes” may be not only a riddle but a mystery, we are likely to ask ourselves in what circumstances of language a
noun (rather than an adjective) may be found preceding the noun that is “eyes”. Say, a noun with a sense, perhaps, of an occupied space, something that pertains to a house?