Dylan's Visions of Sin (23 page)

The expansion and contraction are simply evoked in the relation of two words: “long” and “longer”. Ah, but the first is a verb, not an adjective. Exactly.

– where there are not only the parallel syntax and the rhyme but the internal assonance (
see / reach
), with “I long to see you” reaching across to
“I long to reach for you”.
¹⁶⁹
The couplet is for a couple and a coupling, and it reaches back (we should see and hear) to two earlier
parallel lines:

Why wait any longer for the world to begin

Why wait any longer for the one you love

It is as though “longer” were a longer form of the word “long”, and so it is, but not of this yearning meaning of the word. The feeling of longing is
evoked, of longing and waiting. But how much longer?

That phrase might float in from a burlier song,
New Pony
, where the women’s voices interject “How much longer?” – how much longer would your new pony satisfy you
before she, too, needed shooting? The blunter-spoken world of
New Pony
might accommodate the embittered dismay of the ageing man (imagined by the man Hilary Corke) who looks at himself
physically and emotionally: “My lust grows longer and my lunger shorter”.
¹⁷⁰
The line is a lunge, with the word “lunger”
inviting the thought that, gee, that’s a soft
g
that you have there. But in
Lay, Lady, Lay
the continuing question is: How much longer can you continue to invite or solicit or
plead?

Dylan has spoken of how
Lay, Lady, Lay
came, came to him:

The song came out of those first four chords. I filled it up with the lyrics then, the la la la type thing, well that turned into Lay Lady Lay, it’s the same thing with
the tongue, that’s all it was really.

“The la la la type thing” is a nice way of putting it because so indifferent to the niceties; the phrase has the casualness of just a way of getting amiably or
amatorily started on a song. But the bit about its being “the same
thing with the tongue” might remind us that the occasion for the song is immediately erotic.
Erotolalia: sexual excitement that is intimate with the linguistic tongue’s taking things into its head: “
lalia
: terminal element representing Greek
speech, chatter, used in forming words denoting various disorders or unusual faculties of speech”.
¹⁷¹
Try erotolayladylaylia. The chatter might be just the thing for a chatter-up of someone. There’s a song on
New Morning
in which Dylan has a blithe delight in making a prompt start, not
in words but through la la la:
The Man in Me
opens with la la la accompanying a whole verse of the tune, more than forty of them, before he gets over his sheer exuberance and into the words
“The man in me”, and the song ends with the return of this glee that finds and expresses its pleasure in the mouth but not in words exactly.

And what an innocent childlike pleasure alliteration may be, with “Lay, lady, lay” only too happy to move across to “big brass bed”. Among the games that the song plays,
there is a number game: playing twos (two couplets as the first verse) against threes (
lay lay lay / stay stay stay
, plus
big brass bed
) against an opening alliterative foursome:
lay lady lay lay
. It is with the phrase “until the break of day” that something new breaks through, in that the internal rhyme is continued into this third line of the second
verse:

With “day”, something should dawn upon us.

“Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed”: he sings the word “bed” king-sizedly. It’s not a monosyllable when he sings it, something happens to it by which it
becomes extraordinarily wide. Yet it isn’t quite a disyllable. What he does with it is like the way Tennyson says you should register the word “tired” in
The Lotos-Eaters
:
“making the word neither monosyllabic nor disyllabic, but a dreamy child of the two”.
¹⁷²
(Or a child of the two that are the one and the
two.) You are to hear in your mind’s ear something that isn’t as monosyllabic as, say,
tied
, and isn’t as disyllabic as “tie-erd”, but is just hovering,
vacillating, between the contracted and the expanded. That’s
how the song makes its word “bed”, one that it likes the luxurious thought of lying
across.

Jonathan Swift had let his unhappy imagination play over
A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed
. More than a century earlier, John Donne had let his happy imagination play over his hope,
To His Mistress Going to Bed
. She is to disrobe for him: “Off with” this, and off with that. And so to “This love’s hallowed temple, this soft bed”. The
poem’s opening lines are instinct with the powers that alliteration and rhyme can call upon, in touch with the same thing with the tongue:

Come, Madam, come: or Lay, lady, lay. Donne’s second line is alive not only with the insinuating word “lie” (chiming with “I”, twice) but with the
rotation of this sound (“lie” into “labour”): “labour . . . labour”. Donne’s poem might be a source but what matters is that it is an analogue. Great minds
feel and think alike.

Alliteration and rhyme are ways of having one thing lead to another. An
opening injunction or plea, in both Donne and Dylan, makes play with all these
devices of the tongue, so that there is a real likeness between the age-old urging and the long-standing urgencies of the body. Love, not lust, but physically candid. Give him an inch, and
he’ll take an ell. There is many an ell in the Dylan lines, as in the Donne lines. And when Wallace Stevens in
The Plot Against the Giant
imagined what would really capture “this
yokel”, he gave the climactic temptation to the “Heavenly labials” of the Third Girl. The First Girl was planning “the civilest odors”, and the Second Girl was
planning “cloths besprinkled with colors” –

– but it is the Third Girl on whom we should put our money:

La . . . le -ly labials: Dylan, who knows how to bend people’s ears, knows all about heavenly labials. Good on gutturals, too:

Lay, Lady, Lay
is itself a lay, “a short lyric or narrative poem intended to be sung” (a Lay of our First Minstrel), even apart from all the other puns that stretch themselves
provocatively. “Lay, lady, lay”: at once, and at once an imperative. No pretence at a question, nothing along the lines of
Do you come here often?
or
Where did you get those
cute beads?
or
Didn’t we meet at a Ralph Nader rally?
No messing.

There are twenty-four imperatives in the song, but they amount to there being one imperative. And the power of the song as sung is a matter of its not being imperious
in its imperatives. When Donne begins his poem with “Come, Madam, come”, we enjoy the privilege of deciding for ourselves just what tone those words are uttered in: wheedling? pleading?
urging? enjoining? dictating? But
Lay, Lady, Lay
is a song, and one that is sung by its creator with his sense not only of its sense but of the senses. And from the very first chords and
words, it is clear that the woman addressed is not being dressed down. She is being invited. Invited to swoon, as the music with its voice swoons and croons or even cwoons.

It is this patience that is the calmly reassuring air of the song. No hurry. No flurry. No need to scurry. True, he has an end in view. But then, as John Donne put it in the very first words of
another of his Elegies,

Choppy, the waters there, unlike the leisurely sway of
Lay, Lady, Lay
(which has more the feeling of a hammock than of a brass bed).

There are other ways in which the song does not allow impatience to raise its butting head.
¹⁷³
For instance, the promise that is made is not the
self-assertive one that would say that if we make love, you will find out what is within me. Or, come to that, that I shall find out what is within you. Rather, I shall show you what is yours
already (in the unspoken hope that you will be doing the same for me):

It is by courtesy of others that we get to see – are shown – what is in our minds. What on earth is in your mind? Colours that we are shown by our bodies, with the
help of another’s body.

These interanimations are intimate with the song’s play with pronouns,
pronouns that have the singer – in a spirit altogether different from the
relationship in
Positively 4th Street
– stand outside his shoes.

My bed
, but
your man
– who is me, you know. You can rest assured on my big brass bed. Then, as the hinge, there is the comedy that has him be both first
person and third person in the run of a few words: “let me see you make him smile”. Split personality, but splitting into a grin. And then there is the confident standing back from
himself, to see ourselves as others see us (or as we ask that they should, or hope that they may). “His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean”. Casting himself in the third person
is a way of making sure that the person addressed, the second-person
you
, gets to feel unquestionably the first person in the eyes of the pleading lover:

His hands are clean because he is innocent, free of sin: no lust, for all the honest desire, and no guile.
¹⁷⁴
And this is the
moment when Dylan in singing does not abide exactly by the words as printed, for he sings, not “His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean”, but “His clothes are dirty but his
– his hands are clean”. It is a lovely catch in the line, though there is no catch to it.

One central effect in the song’s rhyming is that there are – and you are likely to have registered this whether consciously or not – two lines that
don’t
rhyme.
This matters very much in a love song, particularly since one of these two lines ends in “love”. Dylan pairs the unrhymed lines structurally, syntactically, changing only their final
three words, so that you will pick up on them:

Why wait any longer for the world to begin

Why wait any longer for the one you love

The paired lines don’t rhyme, but the first one has some relation, in the sound of “begin”, to the rhyme
clean / seen
in the previous verse,
particularly given how Dylan sounds those words. Nevertheless there isn’t a word that completes or ends the rhyme begun with the word “begin’ – that is, “begin”
doesn’t fully rhyme with anything and doesn’t lead to, lead into, anything. And nor does “love”. The song intimates – urges – that the rhyme upon
“love” would not be any word or any sound: it would be an action. That is, the act of love, if she will lie across his big brass bed. (A plea, without a
please
.) That would be
the answer to the question “Why wait any longer for the one you love”, which isn’t really a question after all (Dylan doesn’t sing it or print it with a question-mark), but
an invitation. “Love” doesn’t rhyme there. Yet it is comical and affectionate, and perfectly happy, because it trusts that the rhyme will be consummated by behaviour – by
trust and love and acquiescence. With time to acquiesce, since the song is patient; no need for the
ahquickyes
of James Joyce.