Dylan's Visions of Sin (68 page)

– there’s no reason why you shouldn’t end up having no end of a list, giving an inventory of the universe. If she really is the
sine qua non
, makes possible
everything for you, then without her you wouldn’t be able to find not only the door and the floor, but the stairs, and the fridge; and if not for her, you wouldn’t be able to hear not
only the robin sing, but the lark, the windhover, the cassowary . . .

How does the end of
If Not For You
succeed in ringing true? The inescapable acknowledgement that even gratitude cannot be expressed for ever is brought home by Dylan’s decision to depart
from the song with the words “If not for you” repeated and repeated – in their beautiful simplicity – as if they, though they have got to go, could go on ad infinitum. But
this simple device (not signing off but singing off) succeeds only because it is confirmed and happily compounded by Dylan’s recourse to a different rhyming at the end.

So evenly does the singing move, like the music, that it sounds as though each verse has the same rhyme-scheme. But not so. And this confirms the sense that to be truly grateful is to feel
something that is the good old story and yet is ever new, ever so slightly different. Here is the first verse:

The rhyme-scheme, then, is
abbaa
, beginning and ending with the refrain “If not for you”.

The second verse sounds as though it is set to do the same, with the new rhyme
c
replacing
b
, and it too begins and ends with the refrain “If not for you” – but it goes
accaaa
:

Three times now, the
a
rhyme, not twice, and this is something new. It is, as it happens, the line “But it would not be new”.

The third verse starts as though it is going to follow the pattern, since it begins
ad
, but then it reverts immediately to
a
(not
add
, but
ada
, as though it can’t tear itself away from the
rhyme that is due to “you”); so the rhyme-scheme has now become
adadaa
.

And with this verse – unlike those that precede it, and that had apparently established the refrain as the right opening and closing of each verse – now having
“If not for you” not as the last line but as the one but last:

Easily said, this knows, but this time, come on, you know it’s true, with this insistence spilling over the edge of the rhyme-scheme, or rather,
the refrain-scheme.

The next verse might seem to be only a reprise of this one, since it, too, has the scheme
adadaa
and mostly the same words:

But it isn’t the same, for now the refrain-scheme has reasserted its rights, restoring its claim to have the verse end as it begins:

As it begins, and yet not altogether so, for that “Oh!” could make all the difference in the world.

And then to the fifth and final verse, which again might seem to be identical with an earlier one (the second verse), since it, too, has the scheme
aeeaaa
: “you”,
“spring”, “sing”, “clue”, “true”, “you”.

But just a moment, is that it exactly? For the one but last line, the one that leads into that very last “If not for you” (the refrain that will then be repeated as
if for ever), ends not with the one word “true” but with the two words “ring true”, and the word “ring” picks up the verse’s other rhyme,
spring / sing
. So
the scheme is
a e e a ea a
–

Anyway it wouldn’t ring true     
ea

– and the words “ring true” plait together the verse’s two rhymes, there at the end as a love-knot, a ribbon that ties up the
gift of gratitude that is the song. Or, to slip the metaphor on to the finger of the words, as itself a ring, a pledge, an emblem of true love, endless, a virtuous circle.

If the song is to end, and it must, you know, then in some way it must itself “ring true” that this is an ending, not a stopping. And this word “true” is the only
rhyme-word that has returned, other than that of the refrain. “And you know it’s true” returns now as “Anyway it wouldn’t ring true” – and this with a
reminder about the challenge to which all art has to rise. For the earlier rhyme on “new” (“But it would not be new”) asks to be taken in conjunction with
“true”, to remind us that the challenge to the poet is to say something at once new and true. (Love, too, always new and true. With rhyme as a relationship.) It’s not difficult to
say something new if it doesn’t matter whether it’s true, or to say something true if it doesn’t matter whether it’s new. Dylan’s song rings new and true. And it does
so by courtesy of rhyme, including that dual rhyme with which it enters upon its ending:

But once again it matters that a device, a technique, will always be not a direction, but an axis. In the case of
If Not For You
, the penultimate line’s dual rhyme, “ring
true”, is in both senses a happy effect. Elsewhere exactly the same device can be used to be moving in the opposite direction, with the poignancy of a love-knot that is yearned for and is
never to be secured. I’m thinking of the end of a poem by William Barnes. A woman speaks, in Dorset English.
⁴⁹⁷

Notice – again, we register it even if we don’t consciously remark it – the truncated final line in both the last two stanzas. Earlier the last line has
always, like the other lines of the stanza, had eight syllables (“Where there’s a-stirrèn nothèn mwore”), but now it is reduced, bleakly, to six syllables:
“Where she is out o’ païn”. And again: “Up here a-while. Do come”. But it is the plea, the hushed but insistent plea, of those last two
words of the poem, “Do come”, that consummates its sympathy and ours. For the word “come” comes in the poem, first in a sentence of twenty words, then in one
of ten words, and then, finally, in one of two words: “Do come”, where not only does “come” rhyme, but “do” is the other rhyme-word of this concluding stanza: at
the line-endings, “do you”, into “Now do”, and at last into “Do come”. What in the Dylan song was the happy gratitude of “ring true”, both words
being rhyme-words in his last verse, is in the Barnes poem the sorrowing wish –
need
– for somebody to be grateful to: “Do come”. And for something to be grateful for: that
is, such charity as is free from the grudgingness that
The Oxford English Dictionary
sadly recognizes in the end as lurking within one of the forms that charity may take.

A disposition to judge leniently and hopefully of the character, aims, and destinies of others, to make allowance for their apparent faults and shortcomings; large-heartedness.
(But often it amounts barely to fair-mindedness towards people disapproved of or disliked, this being appraised as a magnanimous virtue.)

This, with an air of mild surprise, itself a strict appraisal (ensconced within its parentheses). Loving-kindness is more open.

There at the song’s opening, an open door.

Eternal Circle

Dylan’s love songs both evoke and evince a true surprise of love: they are individual, intensely idiosyncratic, and yet ripplingly everybody’s. So that to know
Dylan personally is disabling when it leaves Joan Baez saying that “everybody in the world thinks Bobby’s written songs about them, and I consider myself in the same
bag”.
⁴⁹⁸
She doesn’t mean everybody in the world, she just means Dylan’s entourage, and she just means songs with her in mind. What
matters, rather, is what the songs mean to those who cannot be under the illusion that Dylan had them in mind but who feel ominously divined.

“You know, I like Robert Graves, the poet. Do you?” (Dylan).
⁴⁹⁹
Graves was the twentieth-century love poet
who particularly commanded this combination of love’s individuality and love’s commonalty. It is a source of deep relief, with Graves and with Dylan, that my strongest feelings should
turn out to be so like everyone else’s. Everyone’s else.

This is sardonic in the song –
I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
– but it can be taken appreciatively elsewhere. Since we can easily, and
wrongly, be afraid of ordinariness, can feel it as a threat to our uniqueness and not as a stabilizing complement to it, we feel gratitude to the songs and poems that put such heart in us, helping
us not to take it amiss that we are like a lot of people. Of
Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
, Dylan wrote: “A lot of people make it sort of a love song – slow and
easy-going. But it isn’t a love song. It’s a statement that maybe you can say to make yourself feel better.”
⁵⁰⁰
No, it’s
something even better: the dissolving of any such distinction. Even gratitude can be oppressive, but
If Not For You
makes gratitude seem – or rather, shows it to be – simply a
delight.