Dylan's Visions of Sin (49 page)

The lines come to an end with fateful nouns, and Dylan’s forests and mountains are in tune with those of Philip Sidney. The double sestina in
Arcadia
opens:

William Empson’s eliciting of Sidney’s greatness could be vouchsafed to Dylan’s plaining music:
³⁴⁵

The poem beats, however rich its orchestration, with a wailing and immovable
monotony, for ever upon the same doors in vain.
Mountaines, vallies,
forests; musique, evening, morning
; it is at these words only that Klaius and Strephon pause in their cries; these words circumscribe their world; these are the bones of their situation; and in
tracing their lovelorn pastoral tedium through thirteen repetitions, with something of the aimless multitudinousness of the sea on a rock, we seem to extract all the meaning possible from these
notions.

mountains
: they suggest being shut in, or banishment; impossibility and impotence, or difficulty and achievement; greatness that may be envied or may be felt as
your own (so as to make you feel helpless, or feel powerful); they give you the peace, or the despair, of the grave.

forests
: though valuable and accustomed, are desolate and hold danger; there are both nightingales and owls in them; their beasts, though savage, give the strong
pleasures of hunting; their burning is either useful or destructive.

music
: may express joy or sorrow; is at once more and less direct than talking, and so is connected with one’s permanent feeling about the characters of
pastoral that they are at once very rustic and rather over-civilised; it may please or distress the by-standers.

The
meaning
of Dylan’s music of joy and sorrow? “I would suggest”, T. S. Eliot said, “that none of the plays of Shakespeare has a
‘meaning’, though it would be equally false to say that a play of Shakespeare is meaningless.”
³⁴⁶
The first verse of
A Hard
Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
, while far from meaningless, is -ingless. The pressure is on in the second and third verses, in both of which there is this present tension in successive lines, first
two lines, then three lines (from within which you might add the ten thousand whisperin’):

The fourth verse has, on her own (and on its own as not
-in’
), “I met a young woman whose body was burning”. And then the last verse insists that there
is no escape, that there ain’t no going back. First, there arrive
the two participles –
a-goin’
and
fallin’
– that you have
been waiting for ever since you heard that “a hard rain’s a-gonna fall”: “I’m a-goin’ back out ’fore the rain starts a-fallin’”. A-going back
out: going to back out? Never. (This will be the last verse all right: no previous one has mentioned rain except as forming part of the refrain.) Next and last, there is the beginning of the final
end in the reiteration
I start sinkin’ / I start singin’
:

And the nub of it all? The pearly grit that is “it”. All the way from the specific identifications of “it” in “Oh, what did you see?”:

– through to the unspecified final “it” that is it all:

The refrain is sequential and torrential:

Its oppressive force is built by the repeated withholding of the other four-letter word, so that “It’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a
hard” must leave us waiting for “rain”. “Or else expecting rain”.
³⁴⁹
The scale of this protraction will be the clearer
if we think of another refrain that works by deferral, not massively amassed but quietly insistent or persistent: “There’s a slow, slow train comin’ up around the bend”
(
Slow Train
).
³⁵⁰
Not “There’s a slow, there’s a slow, there’s a slow, there’s a slow,
and there’s a slow train comin’ up around the bend”. Things have changed when it becomes a matter of waiting for a train.
³⁵¹

Waiting, because fortitude, like patience, is a relation of the present to both the past and the future. In this, it differs from, say, courage, which may be shown suddenly here and now. Courage
need make no claim as to what it was and what it will be. True, the habit of being courageous (“May you always be courageous”,
Forever Young
) is one to be cultivated, yet courage
does not have the habitual built into its very constitution. But patience and fortitude give, in the present, an assurance about what their past has been and what their future has every chance of
being; they are constituted of the three tenses, the three dimensions of past, present, and future. The past is summoned by the first four questions: “Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed
son?”, “Oh, what did you see . . .?”, “Oh, what did you hear . . .?”, and “Oh, what did you meet . . .?” But the final verse is spurred into the
future:

The final panorama could be seen as a journey into the depths of the word “resolution”. In the words of
The Oxford English Dictionary
:

Determination; firmness or steadiness of purpose; unyielding temper.

I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest dark forest

A statement upon some matter; a decision or verdict on some point; a formal decision, determination or expression of opinion.

Where black is the color, where none is the number

The process by which a material thing is reduced or separated into its component parts or elements.

Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters

The act, process, or capability of rendering distinguishable the component parts of an object or closely adjacent optical or photographic images, or
of separating measurements of similar magnitude of any quantity in space or time.

And I’ll tell it and speak it and think it and breathe it

And reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it

Fortitude is the supreme virtue of the quest.
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
calls up the quests both of the medieval world and of the medievalizing world of
later art. “I had so long suffered in this quest”: the poem that in some ways most breathes the pestilential air of Dylan’s song (as against being the ballad that launched his
song) is not medieval but Victorian, Browning’s “
Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came
”.
³⁵²
Like the song, it is a vision of
judgement. “’Tis the Last Judgement’s fire must cure this place”. It ends, after a daunting parade of all those who had failed in the quest, with – dauntless all the
same – fortitude,
fortissime
:

But when you have a trumpet at your lips (or a harmonica, for that matter), you cannot ask or answer questions, and
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
is built, above all and below all, on
its being – as Browning’s poem is not – antiphonal. Like
Lord Randal
, Q. and A. Unlike
Lord Randal
, not equally Q. and A. Alternation with alteration. Q.E.D.

But this does itself raise a Q. For while there is no doubt at all as to who asks

– there is doubt as to who opens by asking

Moreover, antiphonal structure is markedly unusual in Dylan.
Blowin’ in the Wind
has the asker be the answerer.
Who Killed Davey Moore?
has its question
answered one by one by all those around the boxing ring. True, there is one song, alive with questions, that does set out as antiphonal:
Boots of Spanish Leather
, which alternates the verses
until the seventh verse, when the dark truth dawns, with one of the interlocutors now becoming the narrator for the last three verses, verses that no longer have any place for questions. Though
Dylan songs often turn upon questions, none of them has any such sequence of exchanges as makes
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
distinctive.

Added to which, “Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?” doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that one asks oneself – unlike, say,
Are You Ready?
(“I
hope I’m ready”). And Dylan will not have failed to register that
Lord Randal
is not only antiphonal, it is an interrogation, an inquiry that becomes an inquisition. “My
son” . . . “Mother”, in every verse. What is so horrible about this murder story is how close the whole scene is to the banality of every mother to every son.

Which is where another unforgettable ballad comes into the grim picture.
³⁵³
A man with his sword-blade a-bleedin’. Mother and son,
antiphonally, her “Edward, Edward” being met always by his “Mither, mither”.

Whereupon the mother insists “Your haukis bluid was nevir sae reid” (“My deir son”) – alternating her four lines with his four again, as in all
seven of the verses. “O I hae killed my reid-roan steed”. She again refuses to believe him. And he: “O I hae killed my fadir deir, / Mither, mither”.

He will set sail, journeying into exile.

And then the devastating desolate end:

Like
Lord Randal
, this ends with the curse of hell, levied again upon a woman, this time not a true-love but (even more hideously) no truly loving mother or wife.

A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
is a vision of judgement, a scouring vision of hell. Hell on earth. And who is the mother who asks “Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed
son?”? Mother Earth.

Milton has his
Paradise Lost
, where the fallen angels in hell, “with impious hands, / Rifled the bowels of their mother Earth”. A. E. Housman has his Paradisal Shropshire
Lost: “The earth, because my heart was sore, / Sorrowed for the son she bore”. Dylan has his Paradise Lost: “There’s a million dreams gone, there’s a landscape being
raped” (
Where Are You Tonight?
).

Mother Nature. And Mother Earth. If you don’t care for the old girl, you call her “beldam earth”, and leave her to her unlovely landscape of cosmic indigestion: