Dylan's Visions of Sin (58 page)

But “watch you
talk
”? Yet it is an evocatively lovely and humorous moment; he doesn’t need to hear what she is saying, he just loves the sight of her talking,
maybe to him (his mind and heart on her, not, I’m afraid, on what she is saying, but she will forgive that), or the sight of her in conversation. And even while watching her (with good pride
in her) in the present, he can fuse this with his sense of what she has been in the past and continues to be: “With your memory on my mind”. One tribute to Dylan in concert would be to
murmur “I just want to watch you sing with your memory on my mind”.
⁴¹⁶

“The way you walk”:
do
angels walk? They can, as birds can, and Heaven has been known to witness a ceremony:

Sometimes angels deign down to our level, to our element. Very good of them. But again a comic glimpse nestles before gliding from the wing to walking. Edward FitzGerald
birdwatched:

Time duly brought the notorious retort: The bird is on the wing? No, the wing is on the bird.

The discreet slide from “wing” to “walk” is given salience by the alliteration, helped on its way by “way” and then walking on its
way with that word again:

– whereupon the next rhyme comes winging in: “I feel I could almost sing”. This, which is all the more winning because it is itself being sung to us (not being
read by us), has many facets to catch a twinkling light, but at this moment in the song it is offered so as to be suspended, patiently awaiting its comical confirmation in the very last line of the
song. Later.

Meanwhile:

The first line of that sequence does not walk straightforwardly into the second line. For “The way you walk and the way you talk” proceeds to proceed nowhere in a
way – which is where the subdued exclamatory excitement comes from. The effect is of an awed musing happiness blossoming then and there: “The way you walk and the way you talk / I feel
I could almost sing”. It is quietly jumping for joy from the one line to the next, a dawning joy.

One of the things that makes the song feel so simple, so trusting, is its being happy just to repeat those few things it has to say, giving them again without any misgivings. Not just “You
angel you”, rejoicing, and not only the bridge crossed over again, but “The way you walk and the way you talk” three times relished. What I tell you three times is true.

But then again it is of the nature of love to continue to be the same without being exactly the same or being merely the same again. We thrill to “You’re as fine as anything’s
fine”, which is fine but which, when it returns, is heard to make even more of a claim: “You’re as fine as can be”. Not just as fine as what
is
but as what
can
be. Or there
is “feel” feeling its way on within the song, from “I feel I could almost sing” into “Yes I never did feel this way before”. This is a song in which a
man’s feeling for a paramour is paramount. And how effortlessly “feel this way before” has
some feeling for our having so heard the word
“way” before, way before: “The way you walk and the way you talk”.

“Seems like I been down this way before” (
Sen˜or
). Dolefully, there. Delightfully, here.

Some such things escalate in the song, but one imaginative thing does the opposite. The first time, the exultation goes like this:

“If this is love . . .”. So how about “If music be the food of love, play on, / Give me excess of it” (the opening words of
Twelfth Night
).
Give me
, the
swell of the Duke, gets informally urgent as
gimme
: “then gimme more / And more . . .”. In Dylan’s song, as in the Duke’s speech, there is homage to love, and the
Duke’s words would catch the spirit of the love in
You Angel You
: “O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou”. But the Duke himself, unlike the spirited singer, does not stay
quick and fresh. No, everything quickly turns blah-blah-blasé:

Enough, no more,

’Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

In Dylan’s song, “more” likewise rhymes with “before”, but “Enough, no more” is the very last thing that it would want to say.
Moreover, we are not over with “more”; the reiteration of “more and more” does itself come back for more. But the second time, it goes like this:

Not five but four, one fewer “more”, or less more.

There is more to come, though: the final verse.

The earlier bemused gratitude, “I feel I could almost sing”, has become an amused gratification, “I swear it would make me sing”. This goes singing on
its way, but does not (dear auditor) issue any vaunt along the lines of “I swear it has made me sing”. This, because whether Dylan
sings
is the comic backupdrop to the song. I feel he
could almost sing. I swear it has made him sing!

Your music is great, but you’d be greater if you could kinda sing a little bit better.

“I appreciate that . . . a good solid rock-bottom foundational criticism and that just sinks it right in.”

Not everybody has the courage to tell Bob the truth.

“Not everybody has the courage to sing like I do.”
⁴¹⁸

John Berryman, who had been fond of Dylan Thomas, once exploded: “I can never forgive that young upstart for stealing my friend Dylan’s name.” “Yes, but
don’t you agree he’s a poet?” “Yes, if only he’d learn to sing.”
⁴¹⁹

Those of us who love to hear him sing may recall Shakespeare’s “I love to hear her speak”. Sonnet 130 brings together a loved woman, music, talking, and walking, always
refusing to sentimentalize:

Goddesses can fly, as can angels.
⁴²⁰
But the way she walks . . . In the unabashedly human words of Keats about mythological
loves:

“The way you walk and the way you talk”: so what exactly is an angel anyway? An angel is a messenger. Translating the Greek word, and the Hebrew, which was in full “messenger
of Jehovah”. And what does a messenger have to be able to do? Deliver. Walk and talk. The song is free to take wing.

And the difference between words in a song and in a poem? That in song there can be this thing called
melisma
, where “one word flowers out into a passage of several notes”. Or
rather, not one word but one syllable can do so.
God Save the Queen
: “long to- oo rei- eign over us”, where “to” and “reign” are not just extended through time,
not just held longer, but are granted two notes, not left as one note per syllable. Dylan’s imaginative decisions as to when and when not to take this responsible liberty would furnish matter
for a whole book.

Song has a different system of punctuation from those of both poetry and prose, and there is no equivalent outside song to what song does when it separates one syllable to live within more than
one note. The human voice can sing this flowering out into several notes, but the human voice cannot say it. (For a voice to change inflection when saying something is not the same thing as having
one syllable be extended through more than one note.) So it is a profoundly simple accomplishment that has only one word in the whole of
You Angel You
be committed to melisma, this aspect of the
art of song: the very last word of the song, the word “sing” itself: “I swear it would make me sing”. And this had not been the case with this line’s partner at the
end of the first verse, when “I feel I could almost sing” had been happy to have the word “sing” be musically one simple syllable. It is only now, in the final moment of the
song, that “sing” differently has the last word, and has it as a word to sing because the one syllable takes to itself more than one note. Unique to singing, this, and a unique moment
within this particularizing song. How very many different aspects of art it reconciles.

Hopkins, who complained about “precious” in the vicinity of “angel”,
was adamant. “I can never be reconciled to calling men or women
angels; there seems something out of tune in it.”
⁴²²
But then Hopkins never had the chance to hear Dylan’s tune in it.

Boots of Spanish Leather

“Have you ever been”, she asked him, “faithful?” It was meant to give him a turn, this turn at the last moment. The lover in
Boots of Spanish Leather
, a
leather lover it turns out in the end, has misplaced his faith – not in the sense that he can’t for the moment put his hand on it (“Has anybody seen my
love?”),
⁴²³
but in that he placed his faith in someone who no longer has any place for it. Faith, it becomes clear, has been betrayed by
infidelity, or by the thought of it, the possibility of losing her now, there in their immediate future.

In
Boots of Spanish Leather
, an indestructible song about the destruction of love, the artistic self-discipline is inseparable from the self-control of the one who comes to learn what it is to
be let down. Bitterness, which will not yet let up, is tinglingly contained. Here is a song in which alternately a man and a woman exchange words of love.
⁴²⁴
The song avails itself of the fact that you are not sure who speaks first. Because it is a song by Dylan sung by Dylan, the natural assumption is that the man does so:

Usually, after all, or before all, it was the man (in the old days) who had to leave for work, to set sail. Oh, it’s the opening of
Farewell
:

– where, immediately following those lines in Farewell, and bound for the Spanish place-names of
Boots of Spanish Leather
, there comes this:

So the initial alternation of verses in
Boots of Spanish Leather
might be heard as a man’s question issuing in a woman’s response. Still, it is clear that
whose-voice-is-whose isn’t (or isn’t yet) cleared up. The song holds its cards close to its chest. A treasure chest of silver or of golden.

The first verse opens with “Oh”; the second, with “No”, though proffering itself positively.

It is not for another five verses that it becomes unquestionable that it was the woman who asked the opening question, that it is she who is doing the leaving (in more than one
sense). You suddenly learn, as if you, too, had received a letter,

From this point, there will be no more reciprocity, no more alternation. The man, having been wronged, now has the right to speak without heeding the thought of a response. He
has heard her out, and anyway it was she who decided that out it is. The last three verses are his. His alone. His, alone. The final verse, the verse of finality (it is the long-delayed answer to
her insistent questioning as to a gift for him), moves on to the offensive, even
while being inoffensively couched in the terms not so much of a threat as of a warning,
not the terms of any refusal to accept the situation but of finally agreeing – in his way – to accept something to remember her by.