Dylan's Visions of Sin (50 page)

Browning had shown her in a bad light and a bad mood, bitching about what had become of her landscape:

The damp dirty prisoners. But in
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
Dylan sorrows for the mother who is being lost to all her sons. Mother Earth and Mother Nature are imperilled by the hard
rain. And by the pellets of poison. And by so much else that haunts the song. Not just the one Dead Sea, but a dozen dead oceans.

Childe Roland
had asked “Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage?”, with the adversaries “Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight”. It might
be wondered why my commentary says nothing about the Cuban crisis of October 1962, about the fact that – as Dylan himself said – the song was written when it seemed that Khrushchev and
Kennedy were head-to-heading towards the war to end life. What Dylan says about the song –
said
, one should say, since it was all back then – earns respect and asks thought:

It’s not atomic rain, though. Some people think that. It’s just a hard rain, not the fall out rain, it isn’t that at all. The hard rain that’s gonna
fall is in the last verse, where I say the “pellets of poison are flooding us all” [“flooding their waters”], I mean all the lies that people are told on their radios and in
the newspapers, trying to take people’s brains away, all the lies I consider poison.
³⁵⁵

“Every line of it is actually the start of a whole song.” “Line after line after line, trying to capture the feeling of nothingness. I kept repeating things I
feared.” Feared, but imagined facing with fortitude.

What precipitated the song was the Cuban crisis. Agreed. But the song,
being a work of art, is always going to be larger than and other than what
precipitated it.
The Oxford English Dictionary
: “Hence the frequent precipitation of heavy rain, and the banks and sheets of morning cloud which veil the tree-clad peaks” (1859).
The misty mountains. And there remains the solitary man, whose individual suffering asks no less fortitude. “I met one man who was wounded in love”. Next, “I met another man who
was wounded in hatred”. In English, you can be in love, and you can say something in hatred, and you can be wounded by or with hatred
³⁵⁶
– but “who was wounded in hatred”? Terribly damaged and damaging: in hatred with her or him or them, as if hatred were an ethos and an atmosphere. The man who is left alone may
stand in need of fortitude. You can feel it and you can hear it in
Most of the Time
or (with an alien sense of desertion) in
I Believe in You
. “They’d like to drive me
from this town”.

I Believe in You

There was once a “righteous king who wrote psalms”.
I and I
is at one with
I
and
You
, there in
I Believe in You
– which sings
“And I, I”, and which is a psalm. As always in the Psalms, the unrighteous are the enemy.
You
, though, are my enemy’s enemy, thank the Lord.

The stronger the unrighteous are, the more will fortitude be called for and called upon. “I will be sorry for my sin. But mine enemies are lively, and they are strong: and they that hate
me wrongfully are multiplied” (Psalms 38:18–19). “Deliver me from my persecutors; for they are stronger than I” (Psalms 142:24).

The unrighteous are
they
. Unidentified, nameless. Psalm3 begins:“L
ORD
, how are they increased that trouble me! Many are they that rise up against me”.
Five verses later, it confronts those “that have set themselves against me round about”.
I Believe in You
begins:

Me around / me round about.

They prowl in and around the song. They are in the first and second verses, and they return to lurk at the last. But the hope that is fortitude (“I know I’ll make it through”)
is at the heart of the song, for the word “they” is not to be heard in the central sequence of it: not in the bridge the first time (beginning “I believe in you even through the
tears and the laughter”), and then not in the central verse (“Don’t let me drift too far”), and then not in the bridge the second time (“I believe in you when winter
turn to summer”). That there exists this they-free zone puts hope in me: you and I can be there on our own together. Yet we need to be still aware of the threat, since the bridge – the
second time – has to acknowledge “though my friends forsake me”. (Psalms 38:11, “my friends stand aloof from my sore; and my kinsmen stand afar off ”.)

“And they, they” rings out its duplicity once only. “And I, I . . .” counters this twice with its refusal to flinch: “And I, I walk out on my own”, “And
I, I don’t mind the pain”.
³⁵⁷

The bad grammar is up to no little good, since it is not a matter of slumming or of dumbing down but of intimating something different. Instead of the expected “Because
I’m not like they’d like me to be”, the turn of phrase makes “I don’t be” take into itself both “I won’t be” and “I can’t be”
(
like they’d like me to be
). My choice and at the same time my destiny.
³⁵⁸
People, uglily, will like you for being like what they want,
which usually means like them.
³⁵⁹
The pressure that whets the word – “be like they’d like me to” – is the malign
counterpart to what had been for John Keats a happiness about what this little word “like” (likewise near “because”) could do in the right hands: “You will by this
time think I am in love with her; so before I go any further I will tell you I am not . . . I like her and
her like because one has no
sensations
– what we
both are is taken for granted.”
³⁶⁰

These lines contain in themselves all that they simply need, so they don’t stand in any
need
of our remembering an earlier song of Dylan’s in which he
didn’t feel alone because he believed in someone. Still, the relation between the two songs may have something to proffer.

Including the righteous king who wrote psalms?

It isn’t that
I Believe in You
in any way reneges on the having believed in Woody Guthrie; rather that what had been social conscience has become religious conscience.
“I’m seein’ your world” has become seeing a world that is not any man’s, even an especially good man who was a true artist. “For me He was rejected by a world
that He created” (
Solid Rock
). Woody Guthrie is not rejected by
I Believe in You
, but the song witnesses to belief in One who was despisèd and rejected, rejected of men
(Handel’s compassionate setting in
The Messiah
), and witnesses to how this has led to being despised and rejected.
³⁶¹
Being so, not just
feeling so. For the song moves past
feeling
. The first verse begins “They ask me how I feel”, the second has “But I don’t feel alone”, and the bridge has
“this feeling’s still here in my heart”. So we might have expected that every verse would want to speak of feeling. But the remaining twenty lines of the song choose not to do so
– they evince a great deal of feeling, but
all the more for making no further announcement. There is no longer any going along with the terms initially set by the
unrighteous: “They ask me how I feel”.

“And how I know I’ll make it through”: and as we make it through the song (process, not product, constituting any Dylan song), the word “through” modulates into the
word “though”, which then becomes the excrucial turn within the song. Dylan brings this about (“I believe in you when winter turn to summer”) through having “even
through” turn to “even though” (and on to “even on”):

Whereupon “even though” is at once clipped back to the root of the matter:

Dylan’s vocal punctuation is dramatically other than that of his page: he takes back the snarled and yelping “Oh” so that it clutches all but desperately at the previous line
of bridge no. 1 and of bridge no. 2:

– with the strangled voicing of “heart” and of “back” bearing witness to his nerving himself not to be forsaken by fortitude.

“They” may start as though solicitous, but their string of questions (like those bent upon Christ) is meant to entangle him:

No answer is ever given to their asking – except the answer that is the song itself. Nothing is said to them (“no matter what they say”). Everything that is
said is said to the One and to oneself, as with a psalm or a prayer. They may issue an imperative: “don’t come back no more”. But the song counters this with a plea, or rather two
parallel pairs of pleas, set together not only by their syntax and their strong assonance but (I believe) by their invocation of the Psalms:

“O L
ORD
, be not far from me” (Psalms 35:22). “Know that the Lord hath set apart him that is godly for himself ” (Psalms 4:3).

Fortitude means keeping going. Which means, in its turn, that a song of fortitude must face something of the same challenge as a song of gratitude. The ending must maintain something. That the
word “maintain” may itself be doubly a rhyme (it rhymes within itself and with other words)
³⁶²
might prompt us to notice how Dylan at the
very end, for the first and last time, brings it about that the refrain, “’Cause I believe in you”, is the culmination not of a single rhyme but of something that is doubly a
rhyme, when two consecutive words rhyme, and are later rhymed with:
do pursue / you
.

They
have their form of persistence (“all the plans they
do pursue
”). The answer must be my better form of it.

The confidence, which is quite other than a boast, is realized in the syntax of “sustain”, by which the breastplate of righteousness is variously buckled into place.
First, “I don’t mind the driving rain that I know that I will sustain, and the reason that I don’t mind is that I believe in you.” Second, “I don’t mind the
driving rain that I know that I will sustain because of (as a result of) my believing in you.” Third, “sustain” not as a transitive but as an intransitive verb, absolutely:
“I don’t mind the driving rain, for I know that I will sustain, because I believe in you.”

The English language ordinarily has “sustain” be transitive, but would, I am sure, be willing to entertain an imaginative exception. As it did in the old days, when
“sustain” could be intransitive (
The Oxford English Dictionary
: “to bear up, hold out”) and when Wyclif could translate – as it happens – Psalm 130:
“If wickedness thou shalt all about keep, L
ORD
: L
ORD
, who shall sustain?”
³⁶³
And it is
the Psalms that sustain the close of
I Believe in You
. Psalms 3:5–6: “for the L
ORD
sustained me”. Psalms 55:22, “Cast thy burden upon the
L
ORD
, and he shall sustain thee”.

“I know I will sustain”. That this possibility, even if it is misguided, is not the extravagance of one man alone is borne out by Robert Shelton’s having ended his review of
Slow Train Coming
with the words “He will sustain”. Two men alone, maybe.