Dylan's Visions of Sin (24 page)

Meanwhile “the one you love” comes to more than “the man you love”, since “the one” keeps the love singular, and doubly singular: “the”, not
“a”, and “one” as not just a formal or objective way of speaking but as one and only. For Donne, the mistress going to bed is “My kingdom, safeliest when with one man
manned”.

Just how warm Dylan’s song is can be brought out by comparing it with a poem by Thomas Hardy that leaves the word “love” unrhymed, a deeply chilling poem. Likewise leaves it
unrhymed, but how unlike.

Hardy in the first stanza rhymes only the even lines:
moon / strewn / hewn
.
¹⁷⁵
In the second stanza, he rhymes all the
lines, alternately (with assonance at one point instead of rhyme,
lawn / form / drawn
). In the final stanza, he rhymes all the lines, perfectly:
room / loom / bloom
, and
thought /
wrought / brought
. But in the penultimate stanza he has hauntingly violated this progression: the even lines rhyme perfectly:
lingeringly / me / be
, but the odd lines have an oddity:
scents / sentiments / love.
Love unrhymed, never to be fully rhymed (ah . . .), all the more poignantly because within the line there is that other feature of language that so often
cooperates with rhyme, alliteration: “When living
seemed a laugh, and love / All it was said to be”. (Dylan, likewise, on the sounds of
w
and
l
:
“Why wait any longer for the one you love / When . . .”
¹⁷⁶
) Just listen to, and feel acidly, acerbically, on your tongue the terrible
taste of the terminations in Hardy’s final stanza, the dental dismay in those
t
’s, always terminating the lines, their rhymes, but appearing not only there:

The sharpness of the Hardy poem makes it very unlike a few songs by Dylan that might otherwise be its kin.

– “Shut the light, shut the shade . . .” But then
I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight
moves on to a less bitter injunction, “Bring that bottle over
here”. Yet Hardy’s title,
Shut Out That Moon
, might open into Dylan’s way with titles. Hardy’s title derives not from the opening or shutting line of his poem, but
from that second line: “Shut out that stealing moon”. But
Shut Out That Moon
: the word “stealing” has been stolen. Hardy is a hard man. Dylan’s title is harsher
than the song that is
Baby, Stop Crying
: those words never exactly come in the song, where it is always “Baby, please stop crying”. The discrepancy is pleasingly teasing. What
happened to the magic word?

Love is a gamble, and so is inviting someone to make love. This sense of a responsible risk is playfully there in the phrase “while the night is still ahead”. This endearingly turns
the tables on the phrase. Quit while you are still ahead? No, stay, you can go on winning, the night – our night of love – is still ahead.
¹⁷⁷

William Empson memorably insisted that “the pleasure in style is continually to be explained by just such a releasing and knotted duality, where
those who have
been wedded in the argument are bedded together in the phrase”.
¹⁷⁸
But “wedded”, they wouldn’t have to be. The phrase and the
argument might be living in sin. Which would not have to mean falling into the sin of lust.

On a Night Like This

In
The Merchant of Venice
the young lovers thrill one another (and themselves) by bandying, in loving rivalry of to and fro, a little run of words that they love:
“In such a night as this”. These words are always the completion of a line and of a cadence. Or more than a completion, a consummation, and yet one that does not cease there but
immediately opens into further worlds of love and lovers, worlds to which these young lovers, Lorenzo and Jessica, lay claim with all the innocently insolent rights that young love takes to itself.
The opening of the scene (V, i) immediately intimates that “In such a night as this” is set to be the conclusive charm, first by at once proffering a line in two reciprocal parts, and
next by having these two embrace one another in an internal rhyme:
bright / night
. He:

And she at once picks up his triple “night”, completing his half-line, “Where Cressid lay that night”, with the fondled word, rhyming with itself and yet
happily. (Throughout the exchanges, all the classical lovers who are invoked are famous for being unhappy, and how warmly happy this makes our young couple feel, and so secure.) She:

Whereupon he (trumping pathos with tragedy):

And she, not to be outdone (a perfectly natural inclination that will have recourse to the supernatural):

Not romancy,
¹⁷⁹
necromancy! Young Lorenzo had better remember that one day he may be as old as Æson. He (thinking to win
the game by having the night be this very night, and by speaking not only to her but of her, stealing a pun on her):

But she has no intention of being beguiled by his sly self-deprecation – “an unthrift love”, indeed. She (if stealing is what is at issue . . .):

Her soul, not her body, he is mock-sternly reminded. At which point his dignity requires that he retort with mock-indignation. Time to tame his shrew. He:

The condescension of the man! Forgive her, forsooth. She is all set for another round of wrestling (“I would out-night you”), but the game has to be called off, and
neither they nor we will ever know who would have won. Not (and this is the sweet thought) that it matters in the slightest, for no one has been slighted. She:

There is no reason to think that Dylan set himself to out-night “In such a night”, and probably, for all its currency, it wasn’t in his mind. Yet there are overlaps beyond the
refrain: “kiss” taking up “this”, “wind” / “winds”, “run”, “away”, “old”, “far”,
“pretty”, “like”, plus the relation of “hand” to “fingers”, and of “hark” to “listen”. The opening in Shakespeare, “The
moon shines
bright
. In such a
night
as this”, has an affinity with Dylan’s prompt move from “On a
night
like this” to “Hold on to me so
tight
”. Anyway, whether source or analogue, to have the one love scene keep the other company may cast some light (or is it moonshine?) on why
On a Night Like This
sure feels
right.

The song is not at all cryptic, which makes Dylan’s comment on it doubly so: “I think this comes off as sort of like a drunk man who’s temporarily sober. This is not my type of
song. I think I just did it to do it” (
Biograph
). Assuredly tentative, this, with “I think” and “I think” and “as sort of like”.

But maybe I am too far off. Anyway (since I just did it to do it) I think I’ll not do this again. Not my type? Not my type of song.

Is he questioning the song, to take part in some kind of quiz? He clearly
catches the heady unclear mixture of inebriation and sobriety that is in the vinous air of
On a Night Like This
, as well as what this does to one’s sense of time (“temporarily”?). What we wait for all through the song is the rhyme for which the opening line
yearns, “On a night like this”, this line that both opens and closes the first three verses, though not the last verse, which, throwing open a window, throws the refrain-line to the
winds (instead: “Let the four winds blow”). “On a night like this” can’t wait – except that it can, since it just has to – for the word “kiss”,
the rhyme that is then enfolded within all the playful foreplay (“Run your fingers down my spine / And bring me a touch of bliss”: a nice touch, that) rising to the last verse:

At the start it looked likely that the rhyming would establish the title-refrain within a particular setting. “On a night like this” opens and closes the first verse, where it rhymes
with the sixth line, “And much to reminisce”. (Entirely at ease, this use of “reminisce”, not as an intransitive verb – which is how it operates these days– but
as transitive, as in the old days that we now reminisce, or reminisce about.) The rhyme-pattern, though, then comes to enjoy its freedom, especially when it comes to expanding and contracting. The
triple rhyme of the first verse,
this / reminisce / this
, is followed by an expansion as though to the four winds:
this / miss / bliss / this
, a pretty stroke that is the consequence
of the newly arrived further rhyme, “Hold on to me, pretty miss”. The third verse reverts to the triple rhyme (
this / hiss / this
), only to be followed again by a change, though
this time in the opposite direction: not an expansion but a contraction in the last verse, twofold only,
kiss / this
. Finis. A contraction, were it not that “kiss” is a
consummation devoutly to be wished, and the more so as one fertile figure of speech for a rhyme is a kiss.
¹⁸⁰
Furthermore, like expansion,
contraction is of
the nature of love and of this song. Take, for instance, the penultimate line of the refrain. In the first verse, “It sure is right”. In the
second verse, “It sure feels right”, which both expands (feeling right is a larger truth than being right, right?) and contracts (come on, being right is a larger truth than feeling
right – am I right or am I right?). The song stands by the claim for feelings, and then has – in the final verse – one word to add: “But it sure feels right”.
Intriguing, this final “But”, in the lover’s train of thought or rather of feeling: