Señor (Tales Of Yankee Power)

Introduction

Sam Peckinpah’s film Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid, on which Dylan was involved, is of particular interest for the comparison it draws between the eponymous characters. While history presents them as representing good and evil respectively, the film suggests that morally there’s little to distinguish them. Both, for example, are gunslingers out to get revenge, both use prostitutes, and both die in a gunfight, the victims of revenge. Señor takes a not wholly dissimilar approach, blurring distinctions between good and evil by uniting them in the narrator.

The Narrator

The narrator combines the characters of Billy the Kid and Christ. As the former, he’s the chief protagonist in the Lincoln County War between opposed financial interests in late nineteenth century New Mexico. The conflict is notable in that both factions enlisted the support of lawmen  and criminal gangs, so that again there is no sharp division between good and evil. The narrator seems to be an outlaw looking for revenge on the person who betrayed him. When he can’t find her, he settles for pointlessly wrecking the place he thinks is harbouring her.

At the same time, but independently, the narrator is Christ – or at least Christ-like. The first verse hints at this when it has the narrator say:

‘Seems like I been down this way before
Is there any truth in that, Señor?’

The words ‘way’ and ‘truth’ in close proximity reminds us of Christ’s saying ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’ (John 14.6).

And in the final verse he wants to:

‘Overturn these tables’

a clear reference to the incident in the Jerusalem temple which is held to have precipitated Christ’s arrest and subsequent crucifixion.

Other indications that the narrator is Christ include a reference to the cross, his being called ‘Son’, and an implication that he’s scourged – ‘stripped and kneeled’ (Matt 27: 27-30). There’s also perhaps a hint of the resurrection in the phrase ‘pick myself up’.

Despite these characteristics the narrator-as-Christ comes across as thoroughly human and far from confident. He’s constantly asking for information and advice. His humanity is also emphasised in the phrase ‘I stripped and kneeled’. The gospel account of Christ’s passion has the mob kneeling before him in mockery, so in kneeling he seems to be being treated as one of the mob. And as such he comes across not so much as a redeemer but as in need of redemption.

The Señor

We’re told nothing about the person addressed as ‘Señor’ in the majority of the verses. Nevertheless from the mode of address it’s clear that this person is respected and looked to for direction. The Spanish title perhaps links him to New Mexico and the Lincoln County War so on one level – where the narrator is a gangster – he may be a gang boss.

It’s noticeable however that not one of the narrator’s nine questions gets answered. Thus the Señor seem to be no ordinary human. It may be that where the narrator is to be seen as Christ, the Señor is God. The narrator is thus putting his faith in God since he lacks the confidence to answer his questions himself. The Senor’s lack of response leaves us with the impression that either there is no God, or else that God is relying on the narrator to achieve his purpose without direct, divine intervention. That the narrator might at this point have a skewed idea about the nature of God is suggested not only by his excessive reliance on him, but by his seeming to think that even God might not have the answers – ‘Do you know…’ he asks, and ‘Can you tell me …?’.

The question the song ends with:

‘Can you tell me what we’re waiting for, Señor?’

not only goes unanswered but, with its echo of Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, implies that to rely on God for answers is to take the wrong approach. Yet by the end of the song the narrator is already thinking about actions of the sort the historical Christ took. He’s begun to achieve his, possibly divine, purpose unaided without the need of answers from God.

Third Verse: The Ancient Mariner

Two verses, the third and the fifth, stand out from the rest in that neither of them is addressed to the Señor. Instead they seem to represent the narrator’s thoughts prior to his gradual adoption of a more self-dependant attitude. Ironically what brings about this self-dependence seems to be thoughts of revenge. We learn in the second verse that he’s searching out an unnamed ‘her’ – perhaps someone whose betrayed him – while at the same time remaining wary of a counter-attack.

The more immediate onset of the narrator’s self-reliant attitude is presented through his realisation that he can play a part in defeating evil. That there’s evil in the world, and that its perpetrators can be redeemed, is presented by way of allusions to Coleridge’s poem The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner. In that poem the eponymous mariner tells of how he was punished for needlessly killing an albatross by being made to wear the dead bird round his neck ‘instead of a cross’. While the burden fell away once his crime had been expiated, the ship’s crew suffered death for approving it.

In ‘Señor’ the action equivalent to the falling away of the albatross has yet to occur:

‘There’s an iron cross still hangin’ down from around her neck’

Instead of an albatross, or Christ’s cross which the albatross replaced round the ancient mariner’s neck, his adversary ‘s guilt is represented by an iron cross, thus emphasising the association of evil with war and militaristic conquest.

By using the word ‘still’ in ‘still hangin”, The narrator seems to see evil as on the one hand continuing, but on the other as capable of being overcome. The word achieves the same effect in the preceding line:

 ‘There’s a wicked wind still blowin’ on that upper deck’

and its use again in the immediately succeeding line is also suggestive of hope.

‘There’s a marchin’ band still playin’ in that vacant lot’

The ‘marchin’ band’ would seem to represent the unrewarded activity (since there’s no one around to hear them) of people with the potential to redeem others. That they’re still playing shows they haven’t given up. The verse ends with the narrator’s realising that he has a role to play in responding to his adversary’s plea for redemption – ‘Forget me not’.

The Woman

The woman is made to wear the iron cross as a punishment. She has betrayed the narrator (one assumes) but may also represent Eve, or – since ‘upper deck’ puts us in mind of the ‘upper room’ in which Christ predicted his betrayal – even Judas. As Eve, she represents mankind in need of redemption and her ‘hiding’ thus represents Eve’s attempt to hide from God. In trying to find her, the narrator is both a Billy character bent on revenge for personal betrayal, and a redeemer responding to her plea not to be forgotten despite having betrayed God.

Fifth Verse: The Fools And The Gypsy

The fifth verse again represents the private thoughts of the narrator – and it again represents progress in the narrator’s outlook. It takes up where the third  verse left off, beginning by referring back to the woman’s plea for redemption, ‘Forget me not’:

‘The last thing I remember before I stripped and kneeled
Was a trainload of fools bogged down in a magnetic field’ ¹

At this point his pessimism causes him only to remember humanity in its fallen state, those lost forever like the crew on the ship. They’re fools in that ‘the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God (Psalm 14.1) – something which the narrator avoids doing despite receiving no response to his questions.

The fools too, it’s implied, are wearing iron crosses whose weight, or magnetic attraction to the bog, represents their spiritual demise.

Just as Coleridge’s mariner is redeemed, and the crew lost, so we can assume the woman will be redeemed but not the fools – at least while they remain fools. Before becoming instrumental in bringing about redemption, however, the narrator once more puts his trust in an external source.

‘A gypsy with a broken flag and a flashing ring
Said ‘Son this ain’t a dream no more, it’s the real thing’

In apostrophising him as ‘Son’, a term appropriate to Christ as son of God, the gypsy is confirming the narrator’s status as redeemer. If ‘a broken flag and a flashing ring’ refer to the flag pole and a band used to repair it (a flashing ring being a ferule used to hold a pipe in place), the flag and ring are likely to represent either Christ’s death and resurrection, or (which may amount to the same thing) the fallen state of the world and its subsequent redemption. The gypsy, in effectively calling his Son to action, represents God. But he’s not the Señor  – the God of simple answers.

That the narrator recalls the gypsy’s words, suggests that he is now prepared to take on his allotted role as redeemer. That he does in fact take on the role is indicated by his use in the final verse of the gypsy’s language. Where the gypsy had said ‘Son, this ain’t a dream no more‘, the narrator declares:

‘This place don’t make sense no more‘

The repetition of ‘no more’ identifies him with the gypsy, and so with God. Accordingly he’s ready to begin his mission of redemption represented by overturning the tables in the Temple.

Time And Eternity

As the Christ-like narrator comes to realise he needs to act, a sense is created of time speeding up. Early in the song ‘How long…?’  occurs twice, giving the impression that time is barely moving, and a similar impression is created by the occurrence of ‘still’ three times in the third verse. By contrast the sixth verse finds the narrator hurried – ‘Well, give me a minute’. Time stretching out is associated with the world of betrayal and revenge, and an absence of time with the world’s redemption.

There is no one era in which the song seems to be set. The Lincoln County reference suggests late nineteenth century, whereas the colloquial language is late twentieth century. The effect is to make time seem unreal, and this is reinforced in a number of ways. First, we realise that what has still to happen – what the narrator’s ‘waiting for’ in the last line – has happened already:

‘Seems like I been down this way before’

Secondly, an allusion to the resurrection in the sixth verse make it seem to take place between the third and fourth lines, so that it is happening as the narrator speaks:

‘I just gotta pick myself up off the floor
I’m ready when you are, Señor’,

This is anachronistic even within the confines of the song since the events which historically led up to the resurrection (‘let’s … overturn these tables’) have still to happen.

The question:

‘How long must I keep my eyes glued to the door?’

is similarly anachronistic in that the precaution to which it alludes is presented as continuing to be taken after it can no longer be of use. From a temporal perspective it’s too late because the narrator has already been caught – as is implied by his having stripped and kneeled.

The overall effect is to place these events outside of time, enhancing their significance by giving them a non-temporal permanence.

The answer to the narrator’s question about his destination:

‘Lincoln County Road or Armageddon?’

is therefore both. The fact that Billy the Kid’s famous battle is in the past and Armageddon is in the future makes no difference – the Lincoln County war and Armageddon are two aspects of the same battle between good and evil. Armageddon is no more just a one-off future event than the Lincoln County battle was just a one-off past event. Both are eternal, and one’s murderous intent in one will be one’s fate in the other.

Similarly the woman’s plea to ‘forget me not’ followed her act of kindness in holding the narrator in her arms. But the expression ‘she held me in her arms one time‘ suggests not just a passing event, but  an eternal event – a kind act of permanent significance.

Tales Of Yankee Power

That the events of the song are not applicable to any particular time or place is also suggested by the sub-title ‘Tales Of Yankee Power’.  They highlight a need for redemption that’s ongoing and everywhere. For that reason the setting is as much nineteenth century America as first century Jerusalem. Initially the sight of ‘that painted wagon’  causes the narrator to think of a ‘trainload of fools’ – presumably a wagon-train load – and only after that is he reminded, by way of its being a gypsy’s caravan, of the gypsy.²

In that it’s a wagon train, the fools are pioneers  setting about conquering the west. They’re American invaders travelling in convoy for safety. This explains why the narrator can ‘smell the tail of the dragon’; he’s aware of the beginning – just the tail – of American domination, the dragon representing a power-mad, twentieth-century  America.

It is, then, this awareness of a nascent dragon which further impels the narrator to take action. Initially he tries conciliation:

‘Can you tell me who to contact here, …’

but when this doesn’t work:

‘… their hearts is as hard as leather’

he advocates a more radical approach:

‘… let’s disconnect these cables,
Overturn these tables’

It’s this approach which leads to his death, the act of redemption.

However, the placing of Christ’s first century action in a nineteenth century context seems to imply that redemption is ongoing, not limited to a particular time or place. Thus when the narrator despairingly cries:

‘This place don’t make sense to me no more’

it’s not just first century Jerusalem but the world throughout its history which is in need of reform.

Conclusion

Although redemption is a major focus of the song, its main concern is with who can achieve it. Contrary to traditional Christianity, the view seems to be that it’s up to individual humans to redeem themselves and help redeem others. The narrator represents such a person. While on one level he can be interpreted as wholly unrepentant outlaw, on another he is no more than a flawed human being capable of redeeming himself and others.

On the first level he can be seen as a Billy the Kid killed in the process of attempting to exact revenge. He’s a gangster whose overturning of tables, far from to bring about a new order, is an act of wanton destruction. And his picking himself up off the floor is literal – what he does having lost a fight – and is not to be interpreted metaphorically as resurrection.

On the other level, though, he is a different character, only superficially similar to the gangster.  His overturning of tables is far from wantonly destructive.  It’s this version of the character alone to whom the  two verses of private thoughts belong. And it’s these thoughts that mark him out as a potential redeemer. Nevertheless, the Christ-figure here is far removed from the Christ of the gospels. He’s human, through and through. He lacks confidence, needs to be cajoled, initially wants revenge and takes time to see that purely human actions might fulfil a divine purpose.

¹ That the ‘stripped and kneeled’ refers to Christ’s scourging is perhaps reinforced by a compression of ‘fools’ and ‘bogged‘ to make us think of ‘flogged’.

 

² The expression ‘painted wagon’ is perhaps inspired by Coleridge’s description of the motionless ship:

‘As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean’

In each case the effect is to give an impression of stagnation associated with guilt.

Minor revisions 23/23.4.17

Baby, Stop Crying

Introduction

For the most part the song presents the character of the narrator. A number of techniques are used along the way, including ambiguity – and in particular ambiguity about identity. The narrator is apparently the same as that of No Time To Think, a song which ended with him contemplating murder or suicide.

Baby, Stop Crying starts with the narrator on the brink of carrying out his intention:

‘Go get me my pistol, babe’

It’s still unclear who the intended victim is. If the wife has a lover it seems likely to be him. But either way, given the narrator’s deranged state of mind, he could be considering killing either himself, or his wife, or them both. As it is, the song ends without the intention having been fulfilled.

The Baby

The phrases ‘stop crying’ and ‘baby, please stop crying’, occur repeatedly in the chorus. It’s probable that Dylan is here re-using a device he used in ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’ – playing on an ambiguity in the sense of ‘baby’. In the four main verses the woman is addressed as ‘babe’, not ‘baby’, indicating that – although she can still be seen as the one addressed in the chorus – the addressee is someone else, probably the narrator’s infant child. Since a child is referred to in No Time To Think, then it’s plausible that ‘baby’ would refer to an actual baby. That the identity of the addressee doesn’t have to be limited to one or other is significant in that the destructive effect of the crying on the narrator’s state of mind will be double. This at least mitigates what might otherwise come over as sheer heartlessness – a plea to stop crying repeated no less than thirty-two times.

On Street Legal the phrase ‘stop crying’ is also sung by the female backing singers, possibly without the word ‘baby’. Accordingly the addressee could also be the narrator. His wife would be complaining equally about his effect on her mental state. And, of course, she too could also be addressing a baby. The overall effect would be to show both the narrator and his wife driven to distraction in each others’ company.

Life And Death

The second verse is replete with ambiguity. The reference to fare in:

‘I will pay your fare’

suggests a journey, but we’re told nothing explicitly about the nature of the journey. The instruction:

‘Go down to the river, babe
Honey, I will meet you there’

is consistent with the fare being for a journey along the river, across the river, or even to the river. And even if we assume it’s along or across, we still don’t know if the narrator is going to accompany the woman, or if he’s expecting her to go alone.

Much will depend on what the journeys along and across the river each represent. It’s most likely that they are journeys to life and death respectively. Rivers traditionally represent life, and if the river is the Styx it would represent death. For the woman, a journey along the river might represent life without the narrator. One across it would represent life with him – if that for her is a sort of death.

The first verse too can be taken as involving the river, though here the direction of travel is vertically downwards – ‘down to the bottom’:

‘You’ve been down to the bottom with a bad man, babe’

As noted above, the phrase ‘down to’ in ‘You’ve been down to the bottom’ is echoed in the second verse’s ‘Go down to the river, babe’. The ‘bottom’ and the river are thus associated; the bottom is the bottom of the river. The narrator would seem to be contrasting life with him, represented by a joint journey along the river, with life with the ‘bad man’, which he associates presumably with drowning.

Given that the woman survives, ‘down to the bottom’ might also be taken as a sort of baptismal immersion. In this case, for the narrator the wife has survived metaphorical drowning in the ‘bad man’s’ company, but has emerged spiritually better off in that she’s returned to him. And from the wife’s point of view the ‘bad man’ has been the source of spiritual, or emotional, renewal, and her return to the narrator is to be associated with drowning.

Suicide

The language of the third verse suggests an alternative interpretation of the second. This is that while the river does indeed represent death, it’s representing literal death. Accordingly, when the narrator says ‘I will pay your fare’, he’s offering to facilitate his wife’s journey into the next world – in other words, to kill her. Support for this in the third verse comes in the opening line:

‘If you’re looking for assistance babe’

To the early twenty-first century ear ‘assistance’ has overtones of ‘assisted suicide’. At any rate the word ‘assistance’ is distancing in a way that its synonym ‘help’ isn’t. The second line:

‘Or if you just want some company’

could then be referring to company in death – in other words a suicide pact. It would be for the purpose of such joint suicide that the narrator offers in the second verse to meet his wife at ‘the river’ (now more obviously the Styx).

The ‘Bad Man’

Just as the ‘baby’ need not be the wife, it’s clear that the ‘bad man’ is not to be uniquely identified with the wife’s lover. The description ‘bad man’ equally applies to the narrator himself, particularly if he’s also the narrator of No Time To Think.

At the surface level, the ‘bad man’ clearly is a different person to the narrator. This is implied by some subtle differences in the language and tone of the second verse compared with the language and tone of the first. In the first verse the narrator declares:

‘You’ve been down to the bottom with a bad man, babe’

and in the second,

‘Go down to the river, babe
Honey I will meet you there’

The difference in language concerns the words ‘with’ and ‘meet’. While we’re told the wife has been ‘with‘ a bad man, we learn that the husband intends merely to ‘meet’ her. The difference is crucial because it points to a harmony between the wife and the ‘bad man’, but to a distance between her and the narrator. Doing something with someone creates a kind of unity between them, whereas simply meeting them draws attention to their prior separation. Being with someone implies a mutual closeness, whereas ‘I will meet‘ implies at best closeness on one side.

Secondly, the tone of the first quotation suggests the wife’s behaviour was voluntary; there’s nothing to indicate compulsion. By contrast the second quotation has him ordering her, and tells her he’s going to meet her whether she likes it or not.

The ‘Bad Man’ As The Narrator

Despite these differences, there is also a marked similarity in the language which hints at an identity between the bad man and the narrator. In each verse the direction of travel is described using the same phrase – ‘down to the‘. She has been ‘down to the bottom’ with a man and she’s told to go ‘down to the river to be met by a man’. If, as this seems to imply, the bad man is the narrator, the narrator is unconsciously informing us that he himself is at least in part responsible for the woman’s demise in going ‘down to the bottom’.

The narrator and the’ bad man’ can, then, be seen as two men or one. If there are two men, the happiness and misery represented by different interpretations of the river can easily be accommodated. It’s possible for the wife to be happy with one man and miserable with the other. However if the narrator and the ‘bad man’ are one and the same it cannot be that the wife is happy with one man and miserable with the other. Instead her happiness and misery must apply to her relationship with the same man, the narrator, but at different times.

Breaking The Cycle

The wife, and perhaps the narrator, seem to be locked in a cycle of misery. Her attempt to find happiness with the ‘bad man’seems futile. The use of the word ‘back’ in the second line of the song emphasises this:

‘But you’re back where you belong’

She has arrived at where she is in the present only by having come back to it from the past. Not only does an earlier present give rise to an exactly similar present now but, if things don’t change, that present too will give rise to an exactly similar present in the future – and so on, ad infinitum. ¹ On the narrator’s view his wife is locked in an eternal cycle of repeatedly finding the present. A way out of the cycle would be if a decisive step is taken.

Right And Wrong

There is reason to suppose that the narrator might be on the way to breaking the cycle. In the fourth line of the song,

‘Honey, I can’t tell right from wrong’,

which is apparently intended to refer to the use of the pistol, the narrator has, he claims, lost the ability to distinguish good from bad. There are a number of things to say about this. ³

First, if the line is taken at face value, it might indicate the narrator’s having concluded that traditional moral values don’t always apply. While it’s far from clear that the song is espousing this, there’s some suggestion in No Time To Think that remaining unfaithful to his wife might have been the better course of action. This might seem to him to justify decisive action.

It may be that the narrator has not really lost the ability to tell right from wrong, though. If he had, he surely wouldn’t think it necessary to point it out. It might be natural to do so after killing someone, to the police perhaps, but it’s unlikely to be the sort of thing on his mind beforehand. Furthermore, if he really knew what he was contemplating might be right or wrong, that would be a reason for not going ahead just in case. It would hardly excuse going ahead as he seems to expect it to. More likely the narrator is just trying to bolster himself in the woman’s eyes, hoping perhaps that she’ll prevent him from doing what he’s threatening, while at the same time trying to get her to feel guilty for the murderous or suicidal state she’s put him in. If so, the cycle of misery seems set to continue.²

Identity And Division In The Chorus

In the chorus there’s again an implication of identity between different people – this time the narrator and the woman. And it’s because they share the same knowledge:

‘You know, I know, the sun will always shine’

At this point  they’re unified by their optimistic outlook – or so the narrator is convincing himself. Yet while the narrator and the woman can be seen as a unity, the narrator sees himself as mentally disintegrating. The crying is:

‘…  tearing up my mind’

Unity with her, it seems, goes hand in hand his own mental disintegration.

The precise nature of the division in the narrator’s character comes out in the same line that informs us of his disintegration. In saying:

‘So baby, please stop crying, ’cause it’s tearing up my mind’

he’s unintentionally making himself out to be both considerate and selfish. He does so in giving two different reasons why she should stop crying. The word ‘so’ – used to imply a reason’s been given – refers back to the previous line which ends:

‘… the sun will always shine’

Accordingly the reason he’s giving that there’s no need to continue crying is that there are always grounds for optimism. But immediately, this considerateness for her state of mind vanishes as he follows up with a very different reason – her crying is destructive of his mental state. One part of him focuses on her need for comfort, while the other part is selfish.

Just as we’re told the narrator and his wife are united by the same optimistic outlook, so it seems they’re united in distress. In her case it’s shown by her crying, and in his it’s shown by his claim about the effect of the crying on his mind. Despite their being so similar, neither seems to recognise that each has as much need of sympathy as the other.

The Narrator’s Character – Positive

The presence of ‘please’ four times in the chorus shows the narrator to be respectful, and the offer of assistance and referring to himself as a friend suggest at least some consideration for others. He seems sympathetic too, recognising that she’s been often hurt before, and the recognition that she must be ‘madly in love’ combines sympathy with generosity.

If he’s actually unable to tell right from wrong, this too would work in his favour. Someone who murders, but can’t tell right from wrong, can hardly be judged guilty.

The Narrator’s Character – Negative

The narrator has a number of negative characteristics which not only seem to outweigh any good points, but enable us to see why the relationship might have foundered. He imposes on his wife, he’s selfish, and he seems to lack commitment to her.

Imposing: He’s both imposing and sexist when he tells the woman she’s back where she belongs.

And his expectations of her are equally imposing. From the outset he seems bossy, taking it for granted she’ll do what he says. The order:

‘Go get me my pistol, babe’

is followed by,

‘Go down to the river, babe’,

And even though the tone of the final verse is sympathetic, he still ends up being bossy:

‘Honey, come and see about me’

Selfish:  Despite the sympathetic tone, it’s clear that the narrator is self-centred and selfish. In the line just quoted, instead of saying he’ll go to her, he requires her to come to him.

Additionally, he doesn’t just say ‘come and see me’ which the context requires, but ‘come and see about me’. Why ‘about‘? It changes the meaning. The focus is suddenly himself. He’s telling her that his state is as bad as hers, and that he’s just as in need of sympathy.

One might also wonder how he knows, in verse four, that she’s:

‘… been hurt so many times’

– unless, that is, he is the one who has hurt her.  If the narrator is the same as the narrator of No Time To Think, we know that he has been unfaithful. In this case the aura of sympathy looks disingenuous. Apology would seem more appropriate than sympathy.

Uncommitted: The narrator’s commitment to his wife gets thrown into doubt in the third verse which begins:

‘If you’re looking for assistance, babe
Or if you just want some company’

‘Assistance’ seems remarkably stiff and formal in the context. So does ‘company’. And despite the offer in the next line:

 ‘Or if you just want a friend you can talk to’

it’s apparent that it’s not friendship pure and simple he’s offering. The qualifying ‘you can talk to’ sounds distancing . Once again he’s eschewing an opportunity for closeness, just as he did earlier in wanting to ‘meet’ her at the river instead of going with her. The expression ‘talk to’ provides no indication that he’s offering anything other than a one-sided conversation in which his own contribution will be minimal.

This lack of commitment continues in the fourth verse in which the tone suggests he’s resigned to losing her. When he says:

‘ I know what you’re thinking of’

he may mean he thinks she’s considering leaving him for good. That this has been in the back of his mind is suggested by his having said ‘Come and see about me’. The word ‘come’ implies he expects her to be somewhere else, and not likely to return unless pressed. If this is what she’s thinking, it suggests too that he’s relinquishing his other explicit claim to knowledge in the chorus, that the sun will always shine. He doesn’t actually think it will.

His recognition that her commitment is to her lover is implied when he says:

‘Well, I don’t have to be no doctor, babe
To see that you’re madly in love’

The ‘doctor’ reference has him presenting her love for someone else as an illness. At the same time the word ‘well’ – read as the opposite of ‘ill’ – either ironically suggests that her love is anything but an illness, or that he (not being ill, in the sense of ‘in love’) is in a position to judge. On each interpretation his claim that she’s ‘madly’ in love has him trivialising her suffering, rather than recognising that she too is mentally deranged – something borne out by her constant crying.

The lack of commitment shown goes hand in hand with a gradual diminution in his affection which becomes apparent as the song progresses. By the end he’s no longer so inclined to use expressions of endearment. While in three of the four  verses ‘babe’ and ‘honey’ occur, after the second verse their appearance gradually lessens so that by the fourth ‘babe’ appears just once. And by this time ‘honey’ doesn’t appear at all.

Conclusion

The song uses a dramatic monologue style to present in his own words the narrator’s character and view of his situation. The presentation is helped along by way of a number of ambiguities, particularly ones involving identity. He doesn’t specify the identity of the ‘baby’, and this enables us to see it as both the wife and a child. The effect is to show us the extent of the pressure he’s under. On the other hand the ‘bad man’ can be seen both as his wife’s lover and as the narrator himself. Where the ‘bad man’ is seen as the lover, the narrator’s failure to recognise the ‘bad man’s’ characteristics in himself is complemented by his failure to recognise his wife in himself. He fails to see that her mental distress and  need for sympathy is as great as his. At the same time, his actual identity with the ‘bad man’ would mean there is no lover. In that case the wife’s happiness and sadness would accompany her relationship with the narrator at different times, rather than the narrator and a lover at the same time. It’s not that he’s been replaced in her affections, but that in her eyes he’s no longer the man he was.

Although he seems to be a man at end of his tether, the narrator’s words are not entirely trustworthy. On the surface he comes across as polite, kind and sympathetic, an impression which belies his deviousness in pretending to be in a worse state than he really is. And towards his wife, he’s both imposing and sexist. In addition he’s selfish, his apparent concern for her wellbeing being insincere, or at least immediately being replaced by concern for himself. His attitude to his wife has been ambivalent from the outset. He’s never seemed committed , and by the end what feeling he may have had for her seems all but gone.

By the end of the song the narrator has made no progress towards carrying out any violent intention. The pistol of line three doesn’t get mentioned again. We’re left with the impression that he’s been bluffing in order to elicit sympathy.

Revised 20.2.17

1. See footnote 3.
2. Both the ideas of eternal recurrence, which a strong man can escape, and of a need to break down traditional distinctions between right and wrong, have their origin in Nietzsche. Eternal recurrence is also a theme of Mr Tambourine Man.
3. See footnote 1.

 

No Time To Think

Introduction

This is a story about a possible suicide combined with bloody and hypocritical revenge. It’s presented by way of the multifarious thoughts of the would-be murderer – thoughts which cover his failed marriage, his past infidelity, his rejection of present temptation and  his apparent commitment to a violent resolution. Yet we see him as a tragic figure, far from one-sidedly evil, and capable of admitting his faults. Ultimately he’s presented at least in part as a victim of his own nature.

The richness of the protagonist’s thinking comes across by way of three striking techniques. First, every alternate verse begins with a list of concepts, a stream of consciousness reflecting the rapid movement of his thoughts. Most are developed in the ensuing verses, while repetitions serve to indicate a hectic mind grappling with unresolved issues. Secondly, different facets of his character are represented by figures from Tarot playing cards – most importantly, Mercury and the Magician. And thirdly, the protagonist addresses himself in both the first and second person, as well as his wife in the second. In so doing he draws our attention to a major theme, the divided personality. Together the techniques present to us a tortured and fractured mind unable to control its darker side.

We can only come to a general idea about what happens. Certain things are reasonably clear, while others are left vague so that the listener is forced to accommodate multiple interpretations. It’s clear that we’re being privileged with a first-hand account of the narrator’s thoughts and feelings. And we can gather that he’s distraught about his wife’s infidelity, and that this leads him to beat up his rival, for which he goes to prison.¹ He then sets about killing. It’s almost certainly himself he intends to kill, although the reference to ‘the victim that’s there’ suggests that he means to kill his wife or her lover.

The precise nature of his intentions doesn’t matter. The song’s primary concern is not with this, but with how someone can be driven to do something terrible. It’s a study in human psychology, and as such it’s about human motivation generally, and not just the narrator’s. The narrator’s violent intent at the end of the song can be attributed to facets of his character and a decline in his mental state. Self-deceit, pessimism and moral weakness all contribute. There are compensating characteristics, but these are too few to make much difference.

The post is quite ridiculously long. Apart from the Introduction and Conclusion the most important sections are 1, 2, 4 and 7. And failing that, just 2 and 7.

1. The Traitor

A theme of the song is betrayal. Both the narrator and his wife have betrayed each other, and it’s the narrator’s response to being betrayed which becomes the main focus. In verse seven, however it’s the narrator’s conscience which is treated as the traitor:

‘Your conscience betrayed you when some tyrant waylaid you’,

One way his conscience betrayed him was by acting as it should – urging him to give up thoughts of revenge. The narrator responds only begrudgingly however, going for a compromise:

‘I’d have paid off the traitor and killed him much later’

Thus, insofar as his conscience is the traitor, he’d have reached an accommodation with it and at least postponed his revenge.

But he didn’t postpone his revenge. This happened, we’re told, because ‘some tyrant waylaid you’. The narrator’s complaint about his conscience might now be that it didn’t divert him away from revenge when it should have done. A tyrant gets in the way. We need to know, then, who this interfering tyrant is who provides the narrator with the lame excuse of a frustrated conscience.

2. The Magician

It’s the magician:

‘But the magician is quicker and his game
Is much thicker than blood and blacker than ink
And there’s no time to think’

The magician has thwarted the narrator’s attempts to follow his conscience. If the narrator is now on a path to murder or suicide, it’s the magician who’s to blame. But who then is the tyrannous magician?

In the Tarot the magician is someone who ‘sells’. He frequents the marketplace and misleads by sleight of hand.² So too this magician. He’s evil – ‘blacker than ink’ – as shown by his wares:

‘Anger and jealousy’s all that he sells us’

Since only the narrator can be blamed for his own anger and jealousy, the magician must be none other than an aspect of the narrator himself. He’s his more mercurial side, the side the narrator recognises in himself when he says:

‘Mercury rules you …’

Since the tyrant is the magician, and the magician is the narrator, it follows that the tyrant is the narrator.

This identity of narrator and magician is confirmed by the narrator’s own words. Were the magician’s existence – his ‘game’ –  merely ‘thicker than water’, there’d be no reason to see more than a blood relationship. But that’s it’s ‘much thicker than blood’ implies a relationship much closer than even a blood one.³

The magician, then is the narrator – at least in the sense that he’s a representation of the narrator’s more evil, mercurial side.

Accordingly, although the narrator complains that the magician’s speed leaves him ‘no time to think’, it’s really the narrator himself who’s limiting his options and so preventing his conscience from rescuing him.

Recognising that:

‘… your kindness throws him’

he goes out of his way to keep the magician in him content by acting impulsively on his desire for revenge. He has a strategy rendering impotent the kindness in him:

‘To survive it you play deaf and dumb’

In other words, he refuses to either listen to or discuss alternatives to revenge. It’s a hopeless strategy for, far from enabling him ‘to survive’, it puts him on a path towards suicide.

3. Infidelity And Attitude To Sex

Much about the narrator’s character can be gleaned from his changing attitude towards sex as the song progresses. Given his own infidelity, his reaction to his wife’s seems nothing short of hypocritical. As he says about himself:

‘You can give but you cannot receive’

Furthermore,  while prepared to admit he’s unfaithful, his attitude represents another instance of his trying to avoid blame. Just as he blames the magician, so he passes the buck here. In claiming to have been:

‘Betrayed by a kiss …’,

(assuming he’s referring to himself) he seems to be trying to put the blame on the kiss itself, instead of on himself.  And, in the line:

‘Your conscience betrayed you when some tyrant waylaid you’

(again, assuming he’s the addressee) he appears to be blaming his infidelity on both his conscience and the supposed tyranny of a seductress.

Infidelity, it would seem, is deeply embedded in his character.

Further evidence of this is his naturally using language suggestive of extra-marital liaisons. Destiny fools him, he says:

‘Like a plague, with a dangerous wink’

implying that normally he’s susceptible to being fooled by winks, even dangerous ones .

While later in the song we find him eschewing sexual pleasure:

‘For pleasure you must now resist’

this doesn’t indicate he’s a reformed character. Sexual licentiousness has simply been put on one side so that he can focus on revenge. He’ll gain nothing morally, and his action seems likely to exacerbate the feelings of loneliness hinted at in the second verse. He stands only to lose. In finishing with ‘the Babylon girl’, he seems in addition to be turning his back on what is both beautiful and natural, as represented by the rose in her hair. And in obtaining ‘one last real glimpse of Camille’ – presumably a courtesan like the Camille in Dumas’ La Dame aux Camélias – the inclusion of ‘real‘ suggests that in leaving her he’s turning his back on reality.

4. Salvation

The narrator’s attitude to infidelity becomes a focus of the song’s attention in another way. Not only is it presented as a betrayal, but as a betrayal of Christ. The victim is ‘betrayed by a kiss’ which was the manner of Christ’s betrayal, and furthermore it takes place:

‘In secret, for pieces of change’

The phrase ‘pieces of ‘ echoes the expression ‘thirty pieces of silver’ used by the gospel writer to describe Judas’ fee (Matt 26.15).

Like Judas, the narrator ends up suicidal, thinking he can’t be forgiven:

‘You can’t find no salvation …’

This is his tragedy. He fails to appreciate the possibility of spiritual renewal. Or else he thinks it’s for other transgressors who ‘offer their heads for a prayer’. Instead of taking the traditional representation of spiritual renewal, water, as a sign of hope, for him it’s just something which ‘gets deeper’ and leads him onto the ‘brink’ – presumably of damnation.

That all is not yet lost is also indicated by the wording of the narrator’s excuse for postponing thoughts of revenge:

‘That’s just the way that I am’

God told Moses, somewhat tautologically, ‘I am who I am’, and goes on to refer to himself as ‘I am’ (Exodus 3,14). It seems that in the above quote the narrator is unconsciously alluding to his own God-like nature. There is a sense in which he and God form a unity, if only he realised it.

And, of course, ‘the way that I am’ is a reversal of Christ’s saying ‘I am the way’. If he were to give up thoughts of revenge, he would be more Christ-like – in a sense forming a unity with Christ. This leads to a further understanding of the nature of his betrayal. If in betraying his wife he is betraying Christ, then his betrayal of Christ will be a betrayal of himself.

The result:

‘Stripped of all virtue as you crawl through the dirt
You can give but you cannot receive’

The amusing rhyme between ‘virtue’ and ‘dirt/You’ helps make the claim palatable. Nevertheless the narrator is reduced to seeing himself as the snake in the garden of Eden.

5. Similarities

A theme of the song is similarity. Often it’s impossible to tell who a line refers to. The result is that we have to deny individuals characteristics which would distinguish one from another. Not so the narrator who who considers himself a special case despite obvious similarities between his situation and those of his wife and his rival. As a result he proceeds to usurp the moral high ground and make them his enemies.

It’s his short-sightedness in this respect which causes the narrator to condemn his rival for a failing which applies to himself. His prediction:

‘He who cannot be trusted must fall’

shouldn’t just apply to his rival, as the narrator presumably intends. Since neither is trustworthy, the narrator has no justification for making an exception of himself. Had he realised this he might have seen how hypocritical he’d be to condemn his rival

A similar point can be made with respect to the line:

‘Your conscience betrayed you when some tyrant waylaid you’

Whether it’s his wife or himself he’s addressing, there’s no indication that he realises his words apply no more to the one than the other. If the action of a tyrant exonerates him, then they should also exonerate his wife.

And then again, the grammatical incompleteness of the line:

‘Betrayed by a kiss on a cool night of bliss’

makes it applicable both to the husband who has been unfaithful to the wife, and the wife for being unfaithful to her husband. The line, in not distinguishing between them, unites them in a way which should prevent the narrator criticising her when he is as guilty.

Finally, there’s a double similarity between husband and wife in the line:

‘Anger and jealousy’s all that he sells us’

The narrator is clear not only that his wife is going to be every bit as angry and jealous as he is, but that she too is under the influence of the magician. He should realise then, one would have thought, that if her anger and jealousy doesn’t result in violence, then neither should his.

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6. First And Second Person

It’s curious that the narrator suddenly switches from using the second person to using the first. This happens when having said:

‘Your conscience betrayed you when some tyrant waylaid you’

he continues

‘I’d have paid off the traitor and killed him much later’

The significance is two-fold.

First, just as the narrator fails to see and act on similarities, so he creates differences where there are none. The effect is to enable him to treat the owner of his conscience as a different person, thereby seeming to exonerate himself from guilt.( It was your conscience, not mine, that did the betraying.) It’s the same technique he used when treating the magician as a separate character.

Secondly, it allows the owner of the conscience to actually be a different person – his wife. In this case he’s not merely exonerating himself from guilt, but criticising her by telling her what he’d have done in her position (paid off the traitor etc).

7. The Narrator As A Unity

A fundamental concern of the song is the need for a person to operate as an integrated whole, rather than a duality. The narrator’s moral weakness arises from his conception of himself as a combination of individuals. The point is reinforced by way of a pun on ‘eyes’:

‘I’ve seen all these decoys through a set of deep turquoise eyes’

The ‘eyes’ are ‘I’s – different autonomous individuals he sees as comprising the one person. And these I’s are themselves decoys, serving to divert him from what he’d achieve as an integrated whole. The point is made by way of splitting the single word ‘decoys’ so that it becomes two parts of the expression ‘deep turquoise‘.

The idea is represented in the seventh verse by the phrase:

‘Where the lion lies down with the lamb’

(Isaiah 11.6) which presents an ideal coming together of conflicting attributes. Within a human being, two conflicting aspects will act as a restraints on each other once they become reconciled.

A similar idea is present in the allusion to ‘the missing link’ in verse four. Just as there’s supposed to be an evolutionary stage between monkeys and humans which involves aspects of each, so there needs to be a link between the primitive and higher attributes of a person to ensure that the primitive can’t take control.

The narrator’s mistake is to deal with his more primitive side in isolation. He tries either to give it full reign, as when he supports the ‘magician’, or to crush it, as when he later decides that ‘pleasure’ is to be resisted. Both approaches contribute to his destruction. Although he comes to recognises what he’s done:

‘You’ve murdered your vanity, buried your sanity’

it’s significant that it’s parts of himself he sees as having being murdered, rather than himself as a whole. By contrast the ‘lovers’ think in terms of the whole:

‘They’re not even sure you exist’

8. Self-Deceit

Part of the narrator’s moral weakness is a tendency towards deliberate self-deception. This, too, is the result of treating himself as a duality in which one half deceives the other. That he’s deceiving himself, rather than others, is apparent from the fact that he’s addressing himself throughout.  Perhaps the most obvious instance of self-deception is  when he convinces himself that he’s a creature of destiny:

‘… destiny fools you’

To know you’re being fooled is not the same as actually being fooled. By continuing to believe he’s being fooled even after recognising the fact, he must be guilty of deliberate self-deception.

Self-deception would also seem to be present in the constantly repeated wording of the title – ‘No time to think’. On several of the nine times it occurs, it’s being used as an excuse –  for example, for not combating his mercurial side, represented by the magician, or for not thinking about whether he’s actually being fooled by destiny. Never does he back up his claim that there’s no time to think.  On the contrary, he’ll find time to ‘play deaf and dumb’ and to find solace in drink.

He claims to be a ‘soldier of mercy’ but this too seems to be self-deception.  Although we don’t know if he carries out his plan for revenge, there’s little evidence of mercy in the song. At best it presents only half the truth given that in the same line he admits to being ‘cold’ and delivering ‘a curse’.

Similarly, his claim to have been pitied immediately gives us reason to doubt that it’s true. The pity came:

‘In secret, for pieces of change’

implying it came from a prostitute, who one assumes might have found it expedient to an act. It seems unlikely he would have overlooked this.

Finally, there is self- deception in the claim that he can’t help being like he is:

‘But that’s just the way that I am’

In fact there’s a double deceit here since he seems to be contradicting what he’s just said in the previous line:

‘I’d have paid off the traitor and killed him much later’

Given that he doesn’t actually pay off the traitor and delay killing him, he must be deceiving himself when he says without qualification that doing those things represents the way that he is. He knows full well that the way that he is, is more prominently represented by his mercurial side.

All this self-deception is highly ironic given his comment in the penultimate verse:

‘But no, you will not be deceived’

Where he himself is the deceiver, it would seem he is all too easily deceived.

9. Pessimism

A deficiency in the narrator’s outlook lies in his unwillingness to accept reality. A reality of his life is his association with prostitutes, and this he gives up for no moral reason and despite the detrimental effect on his mental well being.

There’s another way in which his unwillingness to accept reality comes out. This is his pessimism. Again, the effects are detrimental in causing the depression which develops into insanity. In the second verse he complains:

‘You fight for the throne, and you travel alone,
Unknown as you slowly sink’

The long vowels, internal rhyme and assonance all contribute to a tone of despondency. Why is he despondent, especially when there’s a ‘throne’ to fight for. Why is he resigned to travelling alone? Why doesn’t he stop himself sinking? If it’s a slow sinking, it’s clearly not the case that there’s no time to think. One feels that another person in a similar situation, instead of being so pessimistic, might well relish the opportunity it provides.

The empress  – a Tarot figure associated with nurture and sustenance – would appear to be a source of further hope. But not for him:

‘The empress attracts you but oppression distracts you’ ⁴

The narrator pessimistically assumes that his oppression must prevent  him from embarking on new life with the empress.

Thereafter negatives abound:

‘You can’t find no salvation’,

‘You know you can’t keep her’ – presumably his wife,

and, on release from prison:

‘You’re stranded, but with nothing to share’

Absurdly, the ‘but’  following ‘stranded’ makes having nothing to share sound like a pleasing contrast. If only the narrator would adopt a similarly positive outlook in the more auspicious circumstances he finds himself in!

10. Violence

Throughout the song the narrator has been presented as a realistic human being with recognisable faults. However, it might seem that his attitude to violence represents a departure from this. On a superficial interpretation he might even seem obsessed with violence. Certainly he makes a number of direct references to it. For example, about his sense of oppression he says:

‘…  it makes you feel violent and strange’

and when contemplating suicide:

‘Bullets can harm you …

There are also a number of indirect references, where violent expressions are used metaphorically such as in:

‘You’ve murdered your vanity’

and in the reference to blood in ‘thicker than blood’.

It would be wrong to see the narrator as a born psychopath, though. His thought processes show how his violent character developed gradually, and how one thing led to another.  It’s not particularly his fault, even that he feels ‘anger and jealousy’. It’s a common reaction in circumstances like his. And although he doesn’t deal with his impulsiveness well, he can’t be blamed for having impulsive tendencies in the first place. His feeling ‘violent and strange’ starts only after the onset of ‘oppression’. And his first violent action would seem to be a matter of breaking someone’s jaw, rather than murder. It’s only after his release from prison that he seems to have decided to use a gun.

Conclusion

We don’t know what happens at the end of the song, and we don’t need to know. We know what might have happened, but what the song is concerned about is why. The narrator isn’t to be dismissed as some sort of weirdo  who ought to have been locked up for longer. He’s us – a typical person. He’s unfaithful, and when he succeeds in not being unfaithful it’s for the wrong reason and only furthers his mental decline. He’s pessimistic, prone to self-deception and too readily finds excuses for acting without sufficient thought – all common human failings.

‘There’s no time to think’ – but there should be. The reason there isn’t is the narrator’s propensity to conceive of himself as a conglomeration of separate parts rather than as an integrated whole. He casts his mercurial side separately as ‘the magician’, and it’s the magician he blames for an impulsive, cruel attitude.. Had the narrator operated as an integrated whole, he’d have been able to keep his more reprehensible qualities in check. He’d have remained a flawed human being, but avoided becoming a tragic one.

1 The only indications of his wife’s unfaithfulness are the narrator’s response and that she sleepwalks, presumably – like Lady Macbeth – as a result of an inability to deal with guilt. There is no explicit mention of her lover.

2 As far as I can tell there’s little agreement on what the various Tarot cards symbolise. Accordingly I’ve confined my comments to what tends to appear in the pictures on cards. On the whole what the figures represent in the song is best worked out from the song itself. It’s significant, though, that some writers see the Magician as influenced by Mercury, and the Empress as representing growth and fertility. The narrator’s attraction to the empress might then be seen as an attraction to fatherhood.

3 There’s an illusion here to infidelity and betrayal. Although ‘game’ primarily refers to the magician’s business or raison d’etre (which I’ve loosely rendered as ‘existence’) it also has connotations of prostitution, as in ‘on the game’. The magician then can be seen not just as making the narrator renege on his feelings about revenge, but as responsible for his changing attitudes to sex.

4 See note 2.

New Pony

Introduction

On one level the song is a story of guilt and redemption. A girl, Miss X, shoots her pony following its breaking a leg. She acquires a replacement pony but is overcome with feelings of guilt for what she did to the original. Her guilt is accompanied by fear, which in turn becomes the instrument of her reform.  This reform is made apparent  by her declaration of love for the replacement pony. The replacement pony can even be seen as the dead pony having returned thus enabling the girl to turn back the clock and begin again.

On another level things are more straightforward. Rather than there being a replacement pony, there is just the one which gets shot.  On this view the second, third and final verses are flashbacks to a time before the shooting, and there’s no happy ending. The girl thinks she’s bewitched, and ends up racked with guilt and fear.

It’s not the case that we need to choose between the interpretations. Both are valid and equally so. But each is consistent with a different outcome for the girl.

The narrator in the majority of verses is Miss X.  Verse two, however, although it can be Miss X referring to the pony, can also be taken as the thoughts of the original pony prior to its being shot. And verse four (which is not included on Street Legal) can be interpreted as either from this pony’s perspective, or from the girl’s.

The meaning will vary considerably depending on which narrator is deemed to be involved.

Miss X

Miss X, the pony’s owner, is the main focus of attention. Her character is shown to be complex, and in keeping both with her feelings of guilt and possible redemption.

There are two sides to her. On the surface she seems humane and caring. She claims to have suffered as a result of her pony’s being put down. She’s seems appreciative of her replacement pony’s skills and appearance, and at the end she claims to love her pony.

The first verse alone, however, makes it clear that all is not what it seems. Striving to create a favourable impression, her words do little more than betray the guilt she’s trying to hide:

‘She broke a leg and she needed shooting’

Straightaway, under no pressure, she’s unaccountably making an excuse for the pony’s death. Furthermore, her manner of doing so is itself cause for suspicion.  Why say ‘she needed shooting‘? It puts the blame on the pony, unlike, say, the more natural sounding ‘the only option was to have her put down ‘.  And why ‘she needed shooting‘ ? It seems odd to specify the method, especially when the girl expects us to believe she found the episode distressing.

In fact it’s not clear at all that she really did find it distressing. We only have her word for it:

‘I swear it hurt me more than it could ever have hurted her’

Why should we believe her? Like the original excuse, the announcement is gratuitous, unprovoked. It seems not so much an expression of pain as a means of averting criticism – criticism which, for all we know, might be justified. And why, one wonders, was it necessary to swear to the amount of pain? It clearly implies the girl expects to be disbelieved. And this in turn suggests that there might be good reason to disbelieve her.

The same announcement seems designed to give the impression that the pony’s suffering can’t have been excessive. Contrasting the pony’s suffering with the girl’s seems like a ploy to make light of it. One’s tempted to think that if the pony’s pain hadn’t been unduly severe, there’d have been no need for the girl to bother insisting that she herself had been hurt more.

Clearly Miss X is protesting too much.

If the second verse is taken to represent the pony’s thoughts about the girl, we have further reason to doubt Miss X’s character. While the pony seems determined to put her in the best possible light, referring to her as ‘poor girl’ and giving her the benefit of a ‘sweet disposition’, it nevertheless lets us know she’s disturbingly unpredictable:

‘I never know what the poor girl’s gonna do to me next’

The pony may even be anticipating its fate at her hands.

The real reason for the pony’s death becomes apparent in the third verse.  Here Miss X is presented as taking excessive pleasure in the pony’s abilities and appearance. In fact she seems particularly fixated on anything to do with its gait:

‘… she knows how to fox-trot, lope and pace’
She got great big hind legs’

Accordingly, when the pony breaks its leg, it ceases to interest the girl. Finding too little to recommend it, her response is to have it shot.

Guilt:

The girl is scared. Her fear starts in verse four. It’s not a replacement pony she’s addressing, but the original returning from the dead in order, she assumes, to exact revenge:

‘ … I seen your shadow in the door
Now I don’t have to ask nobody
I know what you come here for’

She jumps to the conclusion that a mysterious form of black magic is being used to punish her:

‘They say you’re using voodoo, your feet walk by themselves
They say you’re using voodoo, I seen your feet walk by themselves’

That she’s suffering from a hallucination caused by guilt is made obvious by the absurdity of her claim in verse five to have seen the pony’s feet ‘walk by themselves’. That the pony’s skills should be in evidence without the pony being there to demonstrate them, is in one way as absurd as the Cheshire Cat’s grin surviving the Cheshire Cat. But in another it’s poetic justice – an appropriate punishment for the girl’s having valued the pony’s walking skills above the pony itself.

It’s significant that in the lines quoted above, Miss X begins by reporting a rumour, but then claims to have had first-hand experience:

 ‘They say you’re using voodoo …’

gives way to

‘I seen your feet walk by themselves’

Given her need to refer to rumour, that she’s seen this bizarre event with her own eyes seems implausible. What’s actually the case is that her feeling of guilt is so strong that she’ll believe anything which seems to corroborate it. Like Macbeth after the death of Banquo, she convinces  herself she’s being haunted by an avenging ghost. As she despairingly puts it to herself:

‘Oh, baby, that god you been praying to
Is gonna give ya back what you’re wishing on someone else’

Whether or not she realises it, the god she’s been serving is herself. And now her own conscience is paying her back.

Unlike Macbeth, however, the girl can be taken as responding to her shock, and her sense of guilt, by an apparent change of heart. At least this is so if her ‘But I love you’, in the final verse, is taken at face value.

Redemption

Although Miss X’s guilt causes her to assume the pony has come back to haunt her, there is another way of interpreting events. According to this the new pony of verse three, in addition to being a replacement for the dead original, is the dead original in resurrected form. As such it is implicitly being identified with Christ. In declaring her love for the Christ-pony Miss X is able to make amends, literally. Since the new pony is the resurrected original, a refusal to mistreat the new pony will be a refusal to mistreat the original.

That the new pony is in fact one and the same with the old one is supported by an inconsistency  in the use of tenses in verse four:

‘Well now, it was early in the morning, I seen your shadow in the door
…
Now, I don’t have to ask nobody
I know what you come here for’

The past tense used in the first line suggests the pony is remembering how Miss X arrived under cover of darkness to shoot it. The final two lines, however, are in the present tense. This tells us that Miss X is now in the doorway, just as she had been on the previous, fatal occasion. Further, the use of ‘now’ in both the first and third lines (‘Well now…’/’Now I don’t …’) serves to conflate the past and the present so that they become one. Whereas in the past the girl had ‘come here’ to shoot the pony,  in the present it’s to express her love for it – as we discover in the final verse. Given the identity of the two times, the earlier and later arrival of the girl in the doorway, there can only have been one outcome. If the girl is expressing her love for the pony, then there never was a shooting.*

Spiritual Death

While the expression of love for the pony in the final verse might seem to have clinched Miss X’s redemption, her choice of wording makes it far from certain:

‘But I love you, yes I do’

Once again she’s protesting too much. The addition of ‘yes I do’, rather than simply reinforcing the sentiment being expressed, has the unwanted effect of implying that it needs reinforcing. And that casts some doubt on the veracity of her claim.

That she might be bypassing the chance of redemption becomes even clearer if the pony in the final verse is taken to be the original pony, for then the incident it alludes to must be a flashback to a time before its death. And at that stage, the girl clearly does not love the pony.

Furthermore, the phrase ‘one time’ in the girl’s exhortation:

‘Come over here pony, I wanna climb up one time on you’

would mean ‘one more time’ – that is ‘one more time before I shoot you’! If all she wants to do is exploit the pony before killing it, then there’s no love – and no redemption.

Identity Of  Pony And Girl

On the happier interpretation, not only has the pony acquired new life through its resurrection, and through the girl’s change of heart, but so has the girl by way of spiritual renewal. This might suggests that the pony and the girl are in some sense identical; the pony brings about the girl’s salvation by providing her with a second chance, yet the girl brings about her own salvation by seizing the chance.

Their identity is further corroborated in a number of ways.

First, the pony has some of Miss X’s moral qualities. It too has a ‘sweet disposition’ as is shown when it generously refers to Miss X as the ‘poor girl’, and in its just accepting its fate calmly without any hint of recrimination:

‘Now I don’t have to ask nobody
I know what you come here for’

Secondly there’s the fact that the fourth verse can be seen as being the words of both the girl and the pony. It could be the girl expecting revenge, and it could be the pony anticipating death.

Thirdly, the pony is described by the girl in language with human, sexual connotations:

‘She got great big hind legs,
And long black shaggy hair above her face’.

Combined with the fact that the girl is Miss X, a name which likewise has sexual connotations (Miss Sex), this makes us identify the pony and the girl. Added to that is the fact that its fox-trotting ability is something one would more usually expect to find in a human being.

Fourthly, the lines:

‘Oh, baby, that god you been praying to
Is gonna give ya back what you’re wishing on someone else’

can equally be applied to both. They can be the girl addressing herself in words which serve to spur her reform, or the girl warning the pony that its dabbling in voodoo will rebound on itself. In her mind, the pony which started out as Lucifer has become an avenging demon.

In addition, both the girl and the pony are female.

And finally, both verses two and four can be seen as from either the pony’s or the girl’s perspective which helps to suggest they’re the same.

If the two are in a sense identical, this suggests a number of things. It confirms that the pony’s suffering is just as much the girl’s suffering, despite what she assured us. And it enables the death she inflicts on the pony to be her own spiritual death. But there again, if the pony is resurrected then, by virtue of their identity, so is she.

Conclusion

The song is about human frailty and potential . Frailty is represented by the reprehensible behaviour of the protagonist, Miss X, who in consequence faces spiritual death, and potential is that same protagonist’s capacity for redemption. Because much of the song is open to a range of interpretations, there is no clear outcome for her. We’re left with the impression, as in real life, that things could go either way.

The lack of a particular resolution is made plausible by giving the protagonist a suitably doubtful character. This comes across in two ways. First her pony’s thoughts provide us with an ambivalent view of her, and secondly we can make judgments based on what she says, particularly if we’re prepared to read between the lines. Without meaning to, she lets on that she’s less upright than she’d like us to believe, and has reason to be so consumed by feelings of guilt that she thinks the dead pony has returned to punish her.

The different, but non-mutually exclusive, interpretations open to us are made possible through various techniques. These include the order of events not necessarily matching the order of the verses, the narrator of some verses not being restricted to one character rather than another, and the inconsistent use of tenses to give the impression that present actions can undo the moral failings of the past. At the same time the identity of the girl and her pony allows the death or the resurrection of the one to be the spiritual death or spiritual resurrection of the other.

*The Street Legal version omits this verse. Instead a female chorus repeatedly sing variants of the question ‘How much longer?’.

Changing Of The Guards

Introduction

The song covers the life of Christ, from before his birth to after the resurrection. Its primary concern is Christ’s institution of a new order to replace the covenant between Moses and God –  the ‘last deal’ which has failed or ‘gone down’*. This need results from the continuing prevalence of corruption represented in the song by:

‘Merchants and thieves, hungry for power…’

Although the song makes reference to incidents connected with the life of Christ, in themselves these are of secondary significance. Of more direct importance is the speech he gives at the end which makes it clear that his audience have a stark choice between life and ‘elimination’. Nevertheless the earlier part is important for the use it makes of a number of stylistic innovations including such things as deliberate anachronism and the inconsistent use of personal pronouns. These innovations serve to present life and existence generally as a unified whole. The implication is that those who don’t acknowledge this unity, and set themselves apart, are as good as dead. Accordingly, the events alluded to in the earlier parts of the song indirectly help to establish the main theme, the choice between life and death.

Although Christ’s resurrection is a defeat for the old order, it’s only a partial victory for him. While there’s a hint that complete  victory will eventually be accomplished, the song ends with an implicit threat of a further battle.

Theme: A New Order

The main theme of the song is, then, Christ’s institution of a new order and its upshot. We learn this in the final two verses. For reasons which will become clear, it’s apparent that the speaker in these verses is Christ. In his divine capacity he reproaches the representatives of the old order, implying that it’s worthless:

‘I don’t need your organisation …’

He then speaks as man:

‘… I’ve shined your shoes,
I’ve moved your mountains …’

He’s making it clear that under the new regime there’ll be no place for status, and no place for his audience if they don’t conform. Just as he has believed in himself by having faith to move mountains (Matt 17:20) and gone out of his way for them, they too should be prepared to believe in him and go out of their way for others. The anachronistic shoe-shining reference, though emphasising the role of Christ as servant rather than master, is of particular relevance in that it reminds us of Christ’s standing in the eyes of John the Baptist who considered himself ‘not worthy to untie the strap of his sandal’ (John 1.27) . Christ’s use of it suggests that he wants his hearers to adopt a similarly humble role.

Theme: Unity v Division

A second, but essentially related, theme is the superiority of unity over division. This is introduced in the first verse with a contrast between ‘banners united‘, and:

‘Desperate men, desperate women, divided‘

Not only is the existence of division made explicit by the word ‘divided’, but it’s emphasised by the men and women being referred to separately. The line could, for example, have been ‘Desperate people divided’ which would have obviated the need for ‘desperate’ to be repeated. It’s clear that division, in being associated with desperation, is being looked on as negative.

Despite this, throughout the song there are unities where one would expect division. The narrator, the listener (‘you’), Dylan himself**, the Good Shepherd, the divided people, the Captain, Apollo, Jupiter, Christ, Mary and God are all identified one with another so that they seem to be being treated as instantiations of the same being.

The overall effect is to establish that in instituting a new order Christ, far from attempting to bring about further division, is concerned to bring to the surface an inherent underlying unity.

Pronouns And Gender

The song is notable for an extraordinary use of personal pronouns. ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘her/she’, and ‘he/his’ each gets assigned to more than one person by the narrator. ‘I’ in verse two might be both Dylan himself and the Captain (or God), and in verse four Christ. ‘You’ in verse four seems to refer to the Captain’s ‘beloved maid’, mankind and perhaps the reader. ‘She’ or ‘her’ refers to Christ in verses four and five, and to God in verse six. ‘He’ or ‘his’ refers to the Captain in verse three and to Christ in verses seven and eight. The overall effect is that no one person, including the narrator, seems ultimately to be distinct from any other. They participate in an overall unity and so help illustrate this theme of the song.

The theme of unity versus division is pursued in a different way in verse eight. Here a speech begins simply:

‘ “Gentlemen,” ‘

The audience, it’s implied, is entirely male – suggesting a patriarchal society in which women are separated off as inferior. This divisive outlook contrasts with the speaker’s implied approval of unity when he speaks inclusively of himself and his audience, saying peace will bring ‘us’ no reward.

This approach to gender can be taken as representing the new liberal outlook which is replacing the harsh gender distinctions of the old order. The male/female separation referred to in the first verse, and implied again in the eighth, is presented as having been overcome under the new order.

This new approach can also be the reason for the apparent exchange of gender between Christ and God as the song progresses. The exchange suggests that, with respect to them, gender distinctions up till now have been misapplied . It further suggests that with respect to people, distinctions based on gender should not be made.

Time And Eternity

The anachronism ‘Gentlemen’ points to another unity – between the modern era and Christ’s. Other anachronisms which have the same effect include two in verse five. These are the distinctly modern stitches and heart-shaped tattoo apparently borne by Christ.

After a third-person account of the resurrection in verse seven, which follows a first person account of it in verse five, there’s a further temporal unity in which past and present become one:

‘He’s pulling her down, and she’s clutching onto his long golden locks’

The risen Christ (‘he’) is pulling God (‘she’) down – presumably to the earth at his incarnation – so that he and God form a united whole. However,  since the incarnation is obviously prior to the resurrection, and because the incarnation is referred to in response to a question about ‘what measures he now will be taking’, the past (the incarnation) seems to be being fused with the present (the resurrection) to constitute another, this time eternal, whole.

That under the new order temporal divisions are to give way to unity becomes apparent at the outset:

‘Sixteen years
Sixteen banners united …’

First, it seems as if sixteen years are to be experienced spatially, and therefore non-temporally, in the manner of banners.

Then:

‘… the Good Shepherd grieves’

might also imply that Christ’s existence is eternal since, if the temporal setting of the first verse precedes that of the third, an account of the incarnation, the adult Christ (the Good Shepherd) is being active at a time preceding his birth.

A similar point might be made about Christ wearing a veil over ‘her’ shaved head since this shows Christ anachronistically conforming to a Pauline injunction from decades later concerning correct dress for women (1 Cor 11:6).

It’s apparent, then, that there are at least five occasions in which temporal distinctions give way to an underlying, eternal unity.

The Captain And The Maid

The identities of two people need to be established. These are the Captain and, it would seem, a woman. We’re told in the third verse:

‘The Captain waits above the celebration
Sending his thoughts to a beloved maid
Whose ebony face …’

Since the battle is between the old order and the new, the Captain – the one in charge – would seem to have to be God ***. The ‘beloved maid’ would be Christ’s mother, and the thoughts she receives are therefore of God’s intention that he should father her child. She seems to be being presented as a ‘Black Madonna’ – perhaps to make clear the new order’s commitment to social unity in its opposition to racial elitism. But in addition the ‘beloved maid’ is also Christ himself – the word ‘beloved’ reminding us of the voice at Jesus’ baptism saying ‘This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased’ (Matt 3.17). The Captain’s love is not, then, just for Mary but is the sacrifice of his son, and – given his identity with Christ – Christ’s own self-sacrifice for mankind.

The verse ends:

‘The Captain is down but still believing that his love will be repaid’

Previously the Captain had been ‘above’ the celebration, so in addition to referring to his mood, ‘down’ might well indicate his coming down from heaven at Christ’s incarnation. His belief that his love will be repaid is a belief that people will accept the demands of the new order.

The word ‘down’ recurs in verse four:

‘… I couldn’t help but follow,
Follow her down past the fountain where they lifted her veil’

Given the previous use of ‘down’ in connection with the Captain, we can assume that these lines are a first person account by him of the same event – his arrival on earth from heaven at the incarnation.

God, Christ, Jupiter, Apollo

The theme of unity versus division continues in verse four after the unexpected appearance of two Graeco/Roman gods. A woman, later identified as Christ, has been, we’re told:

‘… torn between Jupiter and Apollo’

‘Torn’ – as in torn apart – amounts to division. The event appears to have been the crucifixion, described from a purely human angle.

Jupiter and Apollo, while father and son, are themselves mutually separate pagan gods who on one level seem to be associated with further division – the tearing apart of Christ. By contrast, their Christian equivalents God and Christ, while also father and son, are identical with each other in line with the song’s theme of unity.

This might seem to set the two camps at loggerheads – the divided Jupiter and Apollo on one side, the united God and Christ on the other. However such a conflict between Christian and pagan deities is avoided by a further identity. This is the identity of Christ with Apollo.The identity becomes apparent in a line from verse seven:

‘He’s pulling her down and she’s clutching onto his long golden locks’

God is pulling Christ down – presumably at the incarnation when the two become united on earth. What’s important is that Christ’s having ‘golden locks’ makes him sun-like, or like Apollo the sun god. In other words Christ is taking on the qualities of Apollo.  The result is that the old order is being subsumed rather than challenged. And just as Christ subsumes Apollo, so Jupiter (now Christ’s father) is subsumed by God. The new order is being instituted without setting up an unnecessary conflict with the old.

This identity between Christ and Apollo in turn leads to a further identity and a further division. Since being torn between Jupiter and Apollo seems in part to be a representation of Christ’s crucifixion, his being torn or destroyed between Jupiter and Apollo is equivalent to his being destroyed – crucified – between two thieves. His identity with Apollo, then, is the equivalent of his identity with one of the thieves – the so called ‘good’ thief (Luke 23:29-43).

Further, since ‘merchants and thieves’ were the cause of the corruption, and hence a need for a new order, his being identified with a thief would suggest the job of getting rid of corruption is at least half done.

War

Although an unnecessary conflict between the old pagan and new Christian orders has been avoided, there still needs to be a war. This is the war between the new order and those who resist its implementation and who Christ warns in the penultimate verse.

The song begins with ‘banners united over the field’. ‘Banners’ and ‘field’ both have military connotations, and in a military context ‘united’ would imply a prospect of victory – presumably Christ’s. If that is so, it might explain why there’s a ‘celebration’, and why a ‘Captain’ should be on hand. Later militaristic references include ‘destruction in the ditches’ and ‘dog soldiers’, while the song ends with the promise of peace and the surrender of death, but with a hint of a further battle to come given that death has only surrendered and its ghost retreated. That battle would presumably be Armageddon (Revelation 16:16).

The reference to ‘dog soldiers’ occurs in the sixth verse whose lack of a finite verb makes it particularly obscure:

‘The palace of mirrors
Where dog soldiers are reflected
The endless road and the wailing of chimes
The empty rooms …’

The effect, though, is to suggest the apparent permanence of the conflict, and to create a sense of hopelessness by the use of words such as ‘endless’, wailing’ and ’empty’. The reflections too, by implying repetition, suggest that the war is destined to go on without resolution****. Since the permanence of conflict seems to be being  alluded to even after an account of the resurrection in verse five, the sense of hopelessness is enhanced.

There is a hint here that all is not lost though. While ’empty rooms’ sounds desolate, the expression can remind us of the empty tomb and its significance. This significance becomes apparent in the verse seven in which the resurrection signals the return of hope.

Following a second account of the resurrection in verse seven, Christ announces:

‘Peace will come…
But will bring us no reward when the false idols fall”

The idols are presumably the wealth and power pursued by the merchants and thieves of verse two , and which are no longer to be valued. That peace will ‘bring us no reward’ is either because it is not going to come in the lifetime of his hearers, or because reward itself would be a false idol. That there’s no immediate prospect of peace has already been suggested by the messenger  (presumably of death) carrying a ‘black nightingale’ rather than a dove.

It’s implied, however, that ultimately there will be a reward. This will be when the final battle is won. Although the song ends before that happens, an earlier reference to ‘the celebration’ implies that, from an eternal perspective, it has already been won.

Christ: Good Shepherd, Paschal Lamb, God

The grieving Good Shepherd of verse one is, of course, Christ (John 10.11). And the lost sheep over which he grieves would be the divided men and women who cannot achieve salvation without help. The second verse, however, represents Christ differently – either as one of the lost sheep or as a sacrificial lamb (John 1.29):

‘She’s smelling sweet like the meadows where she was born’

Christ is represented, then, in three ways –  as the Good Shepherd, as the lost sheep and as the sacrificial Paschal lamb. Later, as we’ve seen, he’s also represented as God.

A further way in which this identity is made clear occurs in verse four. After beginning with an apparent reference to the passion of Christ:

‘They shaved her head’

it ends with

‘… they lifted her veil’

The description is echoing accounts of the crucifixion in which the veil in the temple was torn to reveal the presence of God (Matt 27.51), and implies that the face revealed is not just Christ’s but God’s.

The Resurrection

It’s curious that there appear to be two accounts of the resurrection. The first, in verse five, is from Christ’s perspective, and the second  (in verse seven) is from that of a third-person. The accounts are characterised by a marked difference in tone. The first, in the past tense, is of someone who has been thoroughly disillusioned, and who perhaps doubted his divinity:

‘I struggled to my feet
I rode past destruction in the ditches,
With the stitches still mending beneath a heart-shaped tattoo
Renegade priests and treacherous young witches
Were handing out the flowers that I’d given to you’

The focus is negative throughout – struggle, destruction, unhealed wounds, reneging and treachery.

The stitches would be a reference respectively to Christ’s wounds, and the heart-shaped tattoo is perhaps a sign of his killers’ contempt in much the same way as was the taunting notice on the cross which called him king of the Jews.

The contemptuous attitude perhaps continues with the ‘renegade priests and treacherous young witches’ distributing flowers intended for ‘you’, where the flowers perhaps represent Christ’s message, and  ‘you’ is literally the listener. The  priests and witches are perhaps a fifth column within the new order who are subverting it. Either way, there’s little indication that Christ feels he has successfully instituted a new order.

A second account of the resurrection occurs in verse seven. Whereas Christ’s own account in verse five had made him seem totally human, this third-person account unites him with God:

‘He’s pulling her down, and she’s clutching onto his long golden locks’

– ‘he’ being Christ, and ‘she’ God.

The verse begins:

‘She wakes him up
Forty-eight hours later …’

It’s no longer a merely human Christ who has to rely on his own resources to get to his feet as in verse five. Christ is being raised by God. The tone now is up-beat. The phrase ‘forty-eight hours later’ is the distance between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, and the latter is traditionally associated with Christ’s triumph. Then we’re told:

‘… the sun is breaking
Near broken chains, mountain laurel and rolling rocks’

Here ‘sun’ can be read as ‘Son’ and so he’s implicitly being treated as the son of God. The chains being broken symbolise the restrictions which prevented the disillusioned people of the first verse from achieving salvation. And ‘rolling rocks’ puts us in mind of the miraculous rolling away of the stone sealing Christ’s tomb (Matt 28.2).

The Christ presented here is the successful Christ of the Christian religion, whereas the Christ of verse five is a man believing he’s been defeated.

Tarot

The change brought about by Christ, the replacement of an old, divisive system by a new, inclusive one, is seen in terms of the first of two references in the song to the Tarot. Christ is described as having been born:

‘On midsummer’s eve near the Tower’

The Tower is a Tarot card emblem associated with overwhelming change. (The tower reference could, of course, also be to the biblical Tower of Babel which might be seen as representing a shortcut to salvation, and therefore something to which Christ would be opposed.)

The other Tarot reference, in the final verse, is to ‘the King and Queen of Swords’ who, while representing unity, and therefore support for the new order, seem at risk of being divided. It’s ominous that they represent a refuge for the ghost of death – spiritual death – who, having divided (‘come between’) the opposition, is in a position to prepare a second sally.

That they are united is apparent from their being referred to as ‘the King and the Queen of Swords’ rather than ‘the King of Swords and the Queen of Swords’, the sort of formula used in the first verse to represent men and women as divided.

Conclusion

At the end of the song we’re left in the present day. The new order has been with us for two millennia, but the final battle has yet to occur. Death has been temporarily vanquished but has yet to be finally defeated at Armageddon.

At least that’s the case from our temporal perspective. From an eternal perspective the last battle has taken place and – judging by the celebration – been won. We can assume that from this same eternal perspective some people have chosen to reject being part of an undivided whole comprising God and humanity. These are those who remain loyal to the old order and who Christ warned to expect ‘elimination’ if they refused to adjust and so accept his ‘changing of the guards’.

Minor revisions 4.12.2016

* The theme is superficially similar to that of T.S.Eliot’s The Journey Of The Magi .

**See for example Seth Rogovoy: Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet, Scribner 2009. Rogovoy, amongst others, suggests that the phrase ‘sixteen years’ with which the song cryptically opens, might refer to the time Dylan had been performing up to the album’s release. If so it’s plausible that ‘I stepped forth from the shadows to the marketplace’ could also refer to Dylan starting out at the beginning of his career.

***Compare  Robert Johnson: My Last Fair Deal Gone Down where ‘my Captain’ is blamed for the narrator’s misfortune

**** The reflection of the soldiers in the Palace of Mirrors is reminiscent of the scene in which Macbeth is shown Banquo’s descendants  which ‘stretch out to th’ crack of doom’ (Macbeth IV.I.122). In the song it’s the war represented by the soldiers which stretches out to the crack of doom – Armageddon and the end of the world.

.

It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue

The first thing to say is that there’s little reason to see It’s All Over Now Baby Blue as ‘about’ an event in Dylan’s life, such as his adopting a new musical style around the time it was written.  Essentially it’s about the mental state of someone trying to renew their life following what they see as a calamity – the breakup of a relationship. Although the woman concerned is being addressed by the narrator, it makes sense to see her for most of the time as addressing herself.  As such the song can be taken as her thoughts as she comes to terms with the change in her life and perhaps achieves some sort of spiritual renewal.  It traces the development of her mental outlook from the realisation of her situation at the beginning, to her purposeful response to it at the end. Along the way this outlook moves from depression, back to reality and finally to optimism.

Spiritual Death

From the outset the woman’s state of mind is associated with death and whether her life has been of moral value:

‘You must leave now, take what you need you think will last’

Taken literally, she is doing no more than deciding on a course of action following the departure of her lover and, presumably, the end of their relationship. However, from what follows in the first verse (in particular the reference to the orphan’s gun) this opening line would also seem to imply that there’s a danger of imminent death at the hands of her child. The imminence of the danger, and the need to ‘leave now’ is enhanced by her death being presented as having already occurred – the child is an ‘orphan’. The orphan need not be a literal child, and the death need not be a literal, physical death. The child is best seen as the consequences of the woman’s past life which will in some sense destroy her if she doesn’t turn her back on them. The term ‘orphan’ perhaps implies a lack of concern for others, an orphan having been deprived of parental care. The woman’s death, then, (if it were to occur) would be spiritual death resulting from a failure to reform. Reforming needn’t require a total rejection of her past. There are things ‘you think will last’  – things of eternal value, which can be a basis for spiritual renewal. The urgency of a need to reform is further enhanced by the phrase ‘you think…’. There’s no time to decide whether the things to be taken will actually last.

It’s on this interpretation that the fifth lines of both this verse and the second verse make sense. First she’s warned (or warns herself):

‘Look out, the saints are coming through’

and then she becomes aware that she’s no longer on earth:

‘The sky too is folding under you’

Again the woman’s no longer merely anticipating death, but imagining she’s already dead. She’s imagining, in traditional Christian terms, that she’s on the threshold of heaven, but has little chance of being admitted. Instead she’s in danger of being mown down by a horde of saints. Since she’s not actually dead, nor in danger of literal death, the images involving the sky and the saints can be seen as an expression of the woman’s fears of spiritual death. This fear of spiritual death gets addressed as the song progresses.

Spiritual Renewal: Orphan And Vagabond  

If she’s to avoid spiritual death she needs to act responsibly. It’s in this context that the vagabond mentioned in the fourth verse becomes relevant. The implication seems to be that she can achieve spiritual renewal by assisting the vagabond.

Caring for the vagabond would represent the exact opposite of her behaviour so far. There’s an obvious similarity between vagabonds and orphans in an uncaring world. A vagabond, like an orphan, is someone in need. In a sense the vagabond and the orphan are one and the same at different times – the latter representing past failure to care for others, and the former a new opportunity to do so. This identity is supported by a similarity in the ways they’re described. In each case, perhaps to represent their helplessness, they’re shown to be immobile – standing :

‘Yonder stands your orphan …’

and

‘The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore’

It’s not just the orphan and the vagabond who are one and the same. That the vagabond is dressed ‘in the clothes that you once wore’ suggests that he and the woman are identical. She, too, was in the vagabond’s position, in need of help from others. The vagabond represents an opportunity for the woman to help someone else in the same position as she had once been in.  In addition, improving the vagabond’s physical wellbeing will amount to improving her own spiritual wellbeing.

This improvement in her spiritual wellbeing is represented in the song by her substituting one form of love for another – her love for her lover (eros) by her love for the vagabond (agape). That the one is to be seen as a direct replacement for the other is clear from a similarity in the language used in describing their behaviour:

‘The lover who just walked out your door‘

is replaced by

‘The vagabond who’s rapping at your door‘

However, that the vagabond is still ‘at’ the door, and has yet to walk through it, indicates that the woman has yet to help the vagabond. Her spiritual welfare is still in the balance.

Religious Imagery

Traditional religious concepts play a part in representing the woman’s spiritual renewal. One way in which this is so is in the use of fire and sun imagery. When the orphan is described as:

‘Crying like a fire in the sun’

the woman seems to be dismissing his misery, represented by fire, as insignificant compared with her own, represented by the much vaster sun.

In the final verse, however, things have changed. The sun is no longer a representation of her misery, but is associated instead (by way of a sun/Son pun) with Christ.  Accordingly the exhortation to:

 ‘Strike another match, go start anew’

can be seen as an exhortation to start a fire and so take  the first step towards bringing the much vaster fire – the sun or Christ – into her life. This will be done by kindness, literally striking another match (a love match of sorts) with the vagabond.

The advice to ‘forget the dead you’ve left’ can also be interpreted in a religious way. It is similar to Christ’s exhortation to ‘let the dead bury the dead’ (Matt 8.22; Luke 9.60) – perhaps meaning that to prosper spiritually one needs to engage with the living. The ‘dead’ to be forgotten are her past moral failings.

Religious imagery is also present in the expression ‘something calls for you’ in that ‘calls for’ has a religious air. This is perhaps because it reminds us of ‘vocation’ in its original sense. In this sense, by heeding the call to act selflessly for the sake of others, the woman would be beginning a process of spiritual renewal.

The Title And The Refrain

The words constantly at the forefront of the woman’s mind are those of the title, which are repeated in the refrain:

‘It’s all over now, Baby Blue’

There are two, conflicting, ways in which this claim can be taken.

The first is negative. In envisaging a time – a ‘now’ – after her anticipated death, she sees her life as a failure. Her life is gone, and with it both her chance of happiness and the opportunity for doing good.

The other way of taking the claim is more positive. By the end of the song it might well be the case that ‘it’s all over now’ in that her decision to help others will have brought about the end their misery, and with it her own.

Interpreted in this way the word ‘now’ no longer refers to the period following her death, but to the present moment – the moment she decides to reject her previous selfish outlook and be more openhearted.

This is also the sense of ‘now’ in the first and final verses:

‘You must leave now …’

and

‘… now something calls for you’

where the woman sees immediate action as a way of ending her present misery. The present is being seen not only as a time of misery, but as providing a means of ending that misery. It’s by action in the present that she can deal with her pain so that it really is ‘all over now’. It’s perhaps because she realises this that she ceases to project herself into the future, and sees the need to turn her back on the past:

‘Leave your stepping stones behind …’

– the stepping stones perhaps representing her hitherto more self-centred approach to life – in particular, those she’s exploited.

Mental Turmoil: Sheets, Sky, Blankets, Carpet

The woman’s distraught mental state in the early part of the song would seem to be as a result of rejection by her lover. That she’s distraught is suggested by the lines:

‘The empty-handed painter from your streets
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets’

The expression ‘crazy patterns’ not only suggests the appearance of crazy paving, and therefore creases in the sheets,  but that these creases have been caused by her writhing around in her mental agony as if she’s indeed crazy. The ‘painter’ responsible for them is therefore her. That the painter is ’empty-handed’ also suggests that the patterns are creases because they cannot be the result of actual drawing.

The woman’s mental turmoil is further seen in the realistic way one thought gets sparked off by another. That her thoughts should move in this way is made plausible by their running from one flat, laid out thing to another. They run from her sheets to the sky, then from her lover’s blankets to the carpet, and finally (simultaneously with the latter) from the sky to the carpet.

So:

‘The sky too is folding under you’

is a reappearance of her imagining that she’s dead suggested by the previous reference to sheets:

‘The empty-handed painter from your streets
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets’

In particular the creases, or folds in the sheets seem to have suggested to her the idea of the sky ‘folding’. Such is her mental state that something fairly normal is giving rise to a bizarre thought about being dead and in heaven.

The same thing happens a little later. We’re told, matter-of-factly, that the lover:

‘Has taken all his blankets from the floor’

This is immediately followed by:

‘The carpet, too, is moving under you’

Taken literally this is ludicrous, but in her mind, the removal of the blankets has become the removal of the carpet. This perhaps suggests that the woman can’t help associating her lover’s leaving with her whole life falling apart, even to the extent of her losing the carpet. His rejection of her is again turning her into a vagabond, and thus reflecting her own rejection of others.

Since the lover is unlikely literally to have taken the carpet, the carpet’s moving is an illusion, created in her distraught state – probably by her walking across it unaware of what she’s really doing. It’s not dissimilar to her illusion about the sky folding, a fact emphasised by a similarity in the language used in each case. Just as the carpet is said to be moving ‘under you’, so the sky was said to be folding ‘under you‘. However, the repetition also serves to draw our attention to a difference between the cases which might suggest her mental state is improving. At least if the carpet is under her, it’s in its rightful place, whereas the same cannot be said about the sky.

If she is walking across the carpet, this might be seen as a sign of hope for her. She at least is being active, and this makes a favourable contrast between her situation and those of the orphan and vagabond whose desperation is represented by their simply ‘standing’.

Hope

The song is a fine representation of someone’s mental state as they oscillate between decisive action and despair. The opening lines of verses one, two and four are all positive, as are the song’s final couplet, suggesting the woman is determined to put her immediate past behind her. The passages in between are essentially negative, as her thoughts start to dwell on her situation.

***

These negative thoughts include:

‘All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home
Your empty handed army is all going home’

They are presumably ‘your’ sailors and ‘your’ army, in that they represent the woman’s approach to life up to now. The militaristic metaphors suggest that she sees the successful formation of relationships as a matter of making conquests. Her strategy has failed, however. Not only are her sailors ‘seasick’, the last thing sailors should be (thereby suggesting her methods are not up to the job), but her ‘army’ – returning ’empty handed’ – has conquered nothing. Her lover has left.

In addition to her defeat, the battle has left her mentally scarred. The destruction of the woman’s mental resources is represented by the fate of her ships. They’ve been sunk. We’re not told this explicitly, but it can be inferred from the sailors’ rowing – they’re in lifeboats. And since the military metaphors cannot help but remind us of the orphan’s gun, it may be that her depression runs further. She may be thinking that those like herself who live by the sword, die by the sword.

Despite this, there is hope. Literally it would be absurd for sailors to be rowing home. But the word ‘home’, used in connection with both army and the sailors, is important. It suggests a return to where they belong, to where they can do no more harm. In other words it suggests the bellicose approach they represent will no longer comprise the woman’s approach to forming relationships.

It may be significant too that the army is ‘going home’ – departing. This negative description contrasts it with the saints who are ‘coming through’. ‘Coming’ has connotations of being welcome. Thus the ‘going’ of the army, in line with the ‘coming’ of the saints, can itself be seen as reflecting the woman’s determination to change her spiritual outlook.

***

Hope is again implied in the second verse, which shows the woman confronting the problem of how to survive in her changed world. She accepts that what befalls one is a matter of chance:

‘The highway is for gamblers …’

A ‘sense’/’cents’ pun in:

‘… better use your sense’

tells us that she can only afford low stakes (‘use your cents’), but also that she recognises the need to act wisely (‘use your sense’) in selecting which risks to take. The same pun suggests how she might achieve spiritual renewal, for with the beggar at the door she has an obvious use for her cents.

All this leads up to a final suggestion of hope in the penultimate line, an apparent willingness to:

‘…  go start anew’

Conclusion

As with so many Dylan songs, It’s All Over Now Baby Blue is a masterpiece of economical writing. The four verses cover a range of issues. These include the way the addressee’s state of mind develops as she tries to come to terms with the vicissitudes of her life, her spiritual development, and the relationship between helping others and saving herself.

Although the refrain at the end of each verse always remains unaltered, it would seem to reflect her despair only at the end of the first three verses. By the end of the song, it can be taken as expressing new-found hope in that the woman no longer seems intent on dying, and seems prepared to act for the sake of others. The route to this hope has been difficult, however, as attempts to get a grip are submerged by bouts of despair and illusion.

By the end of the song it seems likely that the woman is likely to start afresh. She’ll have made up for past failings. She’ll have done so by turning away from both her past and an imagined future, instead making the most of the present moment. By focusing on those around her she’ll be not just helping them, but bringing about her own spiritual renewal – and at the same time, a return of her mental wellbeing.

Revised 11.9.2017. The revision takes into account some, but not all, of the comments made by Mr Wheeler in his reply, and in my follow-up responses, below. I’ve discarded my original suggestions about the woman’s having thoughts of suicide, and the orphan’s being an actual child, in favour of one in which the woman feels her spiritual wellbeing is under threat unless she makes radical changes in her outlook.

Revision to ‘Hope’ section, 25.02.2020.

Highlands

Introduction

The final song on Time Out Of Mind is again in the form of a monologue presenting the narrator’s thoughts. Things have moved on, though, in that the narrator is no longer obsessed by his failed relationship. His former lover isn’t even mentioned. His intention now is to arrive at a state, represented by the Scottish Highlands, which will make him happy.

It’s made clear, however, that his approach is wrong. It leads him increasingly to withdraw from the world, with the result that there’s no lifting of his former depression.  It also becomes clear that the spiritual fulfilment he craves will only be achieved by his engaging more fully with those around him.
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The Narrator’s Character

A number of character traits in evidence on earlier songs are just as apparent here. The narrator’s earlier indecisiveness is shown in a ludicrously exaggerated way in the restaurant. Not only can’t he decide what food to order, but he can’t even decide whether he knows he can’t decide! Furthermore his former relationship and his reaction to its break up seem to be mirrored in his rather arbitrary choice of food and his response when it isn’t available. In each case he doesn’t even consider alternatives open to him, but responds by wandering around aimlessly.

An excessive concern for material wealth also seems to be in evidence here, as it was on Million Miles and Cold Irons Bound. In this song he sees even his conscience only in terms of monetary value:

‘What would I do with it anyway? Maybe take it to a pawn shop’

There’s no recognition that spiritual fulfilment requires acting in accordance with one’s conscience.

Similarly, any impression that his declaration:

‘I don’t want nothing from anyone’

is an expression of commendable self-sufficiency immediately evaporates when he follows it up with ‘ain’t that much to take’. The highwayman of Cold Irons Bound is again in evidence.

In addition to implying he’d willingly be parasitical on others, this last comment can also be seen as an instance of his ongoing pessimism. It’s not the only one. Others include his dismissing life as a ‘rat race’ and saying he’s on ‘anything but a roll’. He says resignedly that ‘there’s less and less to say’, an impression perhaps resulting from a tendency to rely too much on himself for company. The result of his pessimism is his acting without any precise, clearly attainable objective in mind. Instead he just drifts.

In the light of all this it’s difficult to see that the narrator has made much progress. He does have the aim – albeit a misguided one in the literal sense he means it – of getting to the Highlands, but he seems to have no more idea about how to achieve this than he had about how to revive his defunct relationship. He claims to be determined to ‘figure out’ how to get there, but even so it’s notable that ‘figuring out’ doesn’t require any physical exertion. One suspects that soon the Highlands will have ceased to matter to him, in much the same way as his former lover has.

There is however some indication that he’s acquiring the self-knowledge which would be required for him to live happily. He’s clearly aware now that he thinks in monologues, something which in earlier songs had been apparent only to the listener. That might be the spur to getting him to engage again with other people. There also seems to be some cause for hope in that he’s modest enough to admit to being ‘lost’ and  to having ‘made a few bad turns’.

Finally, with respect to his character, whereas in Cold Irons Bound he’d only found it odd that he was hearing voices, there’s more indication now that he’s aware he might be on the verge of mental illness:

‘Insanity is smashing up against my soul’

The expression is ambiguous, however. It’s unclear whether it’s his soul or insanity which he thinks is being destroyed. For him to have a chance of surviving it needs to be the former; he needs to realise that insanity is close to destroying him. Even on this interpretation, though, there’s no suggestion that his realisation will result in action. By treating insanity as something external to him he can distance himself from it as if rectifying it is no concern of his.
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The Waitress

The restaurant episode is important for bringing out further faults in the narrator’s character – including the song’s main concern, an unwillingness to relate positively with others. It does so by enabling us to compare him with, as well as assess the way he relates to, the waitress.

Despite a roughness of manner, compared with the narrator the picture we get of the waitress is positive. She comes across as resourceful since she’s able to supply the pencil and paper necessary for his drawing. Not only can she supply what he can’t, but this has the effect of drawing attention to a failing which might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Pencil and paper are the very things which, as an artist, one might have expected him to have.

We’re told too that she ‘studies’ him ‘closely’, and from this we can assume her impression of him is going to be accurate. That this is so is corroborated by her being able to tell he’s an artist. He, by contrast, comes to an immediate and highly superficial impression of her:

‘She got a pretty face and long white shiny legs’.

It addition to being superficial, this observation shows him to be sexist. Although she doesn’t hear the above description as the listener does, she’s alive to this. Her later remarks

‘…”You don’t read women authors, do you?” ‘

and

‘… “you just don’t seem like you do”‘

clearly imply she sees it. The simplistic and unflattering drawing, and his adding insult to injury by insisting it’s a true likeness, are enough for her to have come to a judgement. That she’s right to see him as sexist is further corroborated by his later dismissively referring to ‘fake’ blondes, when he admits he ‘can’t tell a real blonde from a fake’, and by his reference to the young men in the park as being with ‘their young women’.

In the light of the narrator’s ongoing sexism it’s ironic that the one woman author he is able to admit to having read is a feminist.

The narrator is, then, both unresourceful and sexist.  Instead of engaging positively with the waitress, he ridicules her. His rudeness continues right up to his departure, for when she has to leave him briefly (for ‘a minute’) he impolitely just gets up and goes. It is this unwillingness to engage with others which threatens to be his undoing.
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The Highlands As Unreal

It’s made quite clear that the narrator is wrong in assuming that life in the Scottish Highlands will more than make up for his failure to engage with other people in his present surroundings. This marks a difference between the song and Burns’ short poem My Heart’s In The Highlands, the wording of whose title is borrowed by Dylan. Burns, like Dylan’s narrator, presents the Highlands nostalgically:

‘My heart’s in the highlands, my heart is not here,
My heart’s in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer,
Chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,
My heart’s in the Highlands, wherever I go’

The difference is that there’s no indication in the Burns poem that the Highlands are far from ideal. In Dylan’s song there is.

The narrator’s romanticism fools him into thinking that life in the Highlands would be significantly different from life in America. This comes across in a number of ways. The fire which we learnt took hold of his house in Till I Fell In Love With You is still present in the Highlands’ capriciously ‘blazing’ bluebells. And because they blaze despite the presence of ‘Aberdeen waters’, it seems that being on fire is likely to be no less of a problem in the Highlands than elsewhere.

That the narrator has misjudged the Highlands also comes across in his description of:

‘Big white clouds like chariots that swing down low’

While these are not rain clouds, they are still clouds, and so can be seen as representing imperfection. Furthermore, they are presumably not dissimilar to the clouds at home which failed to produce rain at the time of his house fire. And if their whiteness is the attraction, perhaps because it symbolises good, there are white things where he is anyway – notably the waitress’ ‘long white, shiny legs’.

Even if white were to symbolise good, it’s clear that there’s less white than one might expect. The lake is called the Black Swan – and black often serves to represent bad. It cannot be auspicious if the swan, the one thing one would expect to be white, is black.

Another reason for thinking he has a too rosy view of the Highlands is that it seems to conflict with what he really likes. He yearns for the wind which:

‘… whispers to the buckeyed trees in rhyme’

but his longing for the soft sounds of whispers seems to conflict with his liking loud music so much he’ll risk angering others by turning the sound up.

Similarly his romanticising the ‘horses and hounds’ seems to conflict with a readiness to avoid a dog in Boston on the dubious ground that it’s mangy.

His delusion that life in the Highlands would be perfect is also made apparent in his yearning for:

‘… the twang of the arrow and a snap of the bow’

His romantic outlook prevents his associating bows and arrows with death. As far as animal welfare is concerned, things are no better in the Highlands than in Boston where one might buy a ‘full length leather coat’ without pausing to consider where the leather comes from.
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Everday Life As Positive

It’s clear that the picture the narrator presents of the Highlands is of a place far more fault-ridden than his yearning suggests should be the case. Conversely it’s also clear that the narrator’s everyday environment has positive qualities which don’t appear in his picture of the Highlands. In Boston he sees:

‘… people in the park forgetting their troubles and woes’

It’s significant that they’re ‘in the park’ since it implies it’s not necessary to go ‘way up in the border country’ in order to forget ones troubles. That they’re succeeding in doing so suggests that their approach to life is one the narrator would do well to adopt.

Similarly whereas the only colours mentioned in connection with the Highlands (other than the blue in the bluebells) are black and white, it’s significant that in Boston people are:

‘… drinking and dancing, wearing bright coloured clothes’

The bright colours in particular are clearly an attraction the Highlands lack.

It’s not the case, then, that ‘the party’s over’, as the narrator puts it. On the contrary, everyday life seems to have at least as much to recommend it as life in the Highlands.
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Religious  Imagery

The narrator’s misguided attempt to achieve spiritual fulfilment in the Highlands is reflected in the song by the use of traditional religious images. On one level the Highlands represent a better existence which the narrator thinks is achievable by turning his back on his present surroundings. On another, they represent an ideal state – Eden before the fall, or heaven perhaps.

The heaven interpretation is supported by the narrator’s announcement that he’ll go there when he feels ‘good enough’ to do so. It’s also supported by the Highlands, like the traditional heaven, being high up.  The narrator has an affinity with things which are ‘up’ and an aversion to those that are ‘down’.  He wants the music turned ‘up‘ and he slides ‘up‘ out of his chair. Conversely he’s told to turn the music ‘down’ and sits ‘down’ in the restaurant. ‘Down’ here represents the misery he associates with engaging with others – authority figures, perhaps, and the waitress.  Nevertheless, despite their being presented as a sort of heaven, the Highlands – at least as he envisages them – are illusory. What the narrator craves is more likely to be found in ordinary, everyday, social existence.

Eggs are another religious image. Often they’re taken to symbolise new life, and particularly new spiritual life. But spiritual life is not a commodity to be obtained directly by paying for it. Accordingly their unavailability in the restaurant can be seen as representing the narrator’s inept approach to spirituality. The sun too can be seen as representing this:

‘The sun is beginning to shine on me
But it’s not like the sun that used to be’

If ‘sun’, in the first line, is read ‘Son’, the suggestion now is that the narrator’s future happiness will depend on living in accordance with Christian precepts (such as ‘love your neighbour as yourself’) which can be done only by engaging with others.

Earlier, on getting up to leave the restaurant he’d relinquished the opportunity to engage with humanity as represented by the waitress. Far from emulating Christ, he became the snake in the Garden of Eden – slithery:

‘I slide up out of my chair’
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Eternity And The Present

What the narrator hasn’t realised is that if he engages fully with the people and things of this life, he will in the process be experiencing eternal life. Eternal life, so understood, is to be seen not as an escape from time into some sort of eternal realm, but as life which is lived fully in the present.

Instead of his seeing his life as eternal, in this sense, it’s clear that the narrator sees the world in purely temporal terms – past, present and future. Yet he has some intimation that such a view is impoverished. He says, for example:

‘I wish someone would come
And push back the clock for me’

thereby showing a desire to escape from the present into the past. This desire to escape the present is misguided since it’s only in the present that he can find eternal value (a fact perhaps reflected in the song’s being written entirely in the present tense). What matters is what he does now.  Instead he tries to avoid the present. He even seems to try to convince himself that he’s not actually in the present, but either in the past or the future. So, he seems to be in the past when he says:

‘I’m listening to Neil Young, I gotta turn up the sound
Someone’s always yelling “Turn it down!”‘

Judging by the frustrated, somewhat intolerant response, ‘Turn it down,’ he seems to have regressed to his time as a (possibly annoying) teenager. The opposite is the case in the restaurant where he speaks as if he’s in the future:

‘I don’t do sketches from memory’

As the waitress points out, there cannot possibly be any reason to consult his memory. Memory is only ever of use in looking back from the future. Ironically his illusion that he’s in the future does actually show a need the clock to be pushed back. He has, as the waitress puts it, ‘chosen the wrong time to come’.

It’s not just that the narrator has chosen the wrong time (the temporal as represented by the past and future, rather than the eternal as represented by the present) in his search for a better life. He’s also chosen the wrong place – the Highlands rather than his present surroundings.

Despite these confusions, the narrator makes a curious statement which might show that he has at least some understanding of the mindset he needs to adopt. Referring to the Highlands, he says:

‘That’s where I’ll be when I get called home’

At first glance this seems nonsensical. He seems to be saying he’ll already be there when he gets called there! But in a sense this is true. If the Highlands represent eternal existence then he is already there, at least in the sense that his present surroundings can provide that eternal existence. Accordingly, in saying he’ll be there when he gets called there, the narrator seems to have a glimmering of the truth that he doesn’t need to go anywhere to find the sort of eternal life he craves.
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Failure To Engage

Despite this, the narrator shows little recognition that the Highlands as he tends to envisage them are a poor substitute for the eternal existence already available to him. In the restaurant he fails to properly notice to the waitress. As she puts it, ‘I’m right here in front of you, or haven’t you looked!’ He hasn’t looked. And he doesn’t look. If he looked, it wouldn’t be the case that he couldn’t see ‘any other way to go’ than that represented by the Highlands.

It’s not just the waitress he doesn’t see. He thinks ‘there’s nobody in the place’, ‘there’s nobody around’ and, once he leaves,  there’s ‘nobody going anywhere’.  Whether or not there actually is ‘nobody’ is unclear, but he’s so detached from the world it wouldn’t be surprising if this were an illusion.  Up to a point he recognises this detachment, when he tells us he feels:

‘… further away than ever before’

and that to him:

‘Everything looks far away’

Such recognition is of little value, however, if it’s not a precursor to doing something about it, and for that he shows little inclination. If only he realised it, his seeing what he mistakes for eternal life as ‘over the hills and far away‘ is another case of seeing as distant something in fact present to him.

While on leaving the restaurant he forgoes one chance of engaging with humanity, and so acquiring eternal life, there’s a suggestion that he’ll soon have another such chance:

‘I step outside …’

Since he’s already recognised that he can achieve eternal life ‘one step at a time’, his stepping outside indicates that he’s doing something towards that end. That there is such an opportunity becomes apparent when he sees examples of happiness which one feels could provide a model for his own spiritual wellbeing:

‘I see people in the park forgetting their troubles and woes
They’re drinking and dancing, wearing bright coloured clothes’

He also notices:

‘All the young men with their young women looking so good’

If they’re to be a model, it’s pertinent that they’re ‘looking so good‘ because he’s already recognised he can only acquire eternal life – what he mistakes for life in the Highlands – when he’s ‘good enough to go’. It’s also pertinent that he says he’d be willing to become like them ‘in a minute, if I could’. We’re reminded that it was ‘a minute’ which cost him his previous opportunity to acquire spiritual fulfilment –  when the waitress left him for that amount of time.

There are two reasons one feels he won’t seize the new opportunity. First, he’d like merely to ‘trade places’ with the people in the park – that is impose his misery on them in exchange for their happiness, rather than simply become like them. He’s seeing happiness, like his conscience earlier, merely as a commodity to be traded rather than as something of spiritual value. Secondly, as if anticipating criticism for not being more outgoing, he pompously declares:

‘Some things in life, it gets too late to learn’

– which he’s only too willing, it seems, to believe.
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Conclusion

The last verse of the song, and of the album, holds out some hope for the narrator. Whereas in earlier songs the emphasis was on night, now it’s on dawn with its suggestion of a new start:

‘Well, my heart’s in the Highlands at the break of day’

As the album has progressed there have been a few signs of improvement in the narrator’s outlook – notably on Can’t Wait where the possibility of adopting a new eternal outlook seemed to have been glimpsed. However, while this song continues the trend, it’s clear that the turnaround is far from complete. He expresses some new found optimism in thinking he’s some way towards getting the life he covets – ‘I’m already there in my mind‘ – but even this level of optimism is unfounded. The hope offered by the Highlands – taken literally as he does -is a false hope. Rather than working out how to get there physically he needs to see that physically, in the only sense that matters, he’s already there. What’s lacking is being there in his mind – in the sense that he hasn’t yet realised the importance of engaging with the people and things around him.

 

Last revision 4.10.2016

Can’t Wait

Introduction

Throughout Time Out Of Mind there has been a gradual development in the narrator’s mental state. This development not only continues in Can’t Wait, but speeds up considerably. At the beginning of the song the narrator seems desperate for his lover to return. He’s no longer kidding himself as he was on Make You Feel My Love that she hasn’t ‘made her mind up yet’. Now he accepts she has and this puts him at the end of his tether. Unexpectedly, however, by the close of the final verse his longing has all but disappeared.

The main aim of what follows is to assess various candidate explanations for this development. These are the narrator’s beginning to adopt a new perspective on the relationship, changes in his emotions and sexual desires, and the possibility of his simply having given up. There will be a little discussion of his lack of purposive behaviour, but some familiar character traits – such as his pessimism and lack of discrimination – will be taken for granted.
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Time v Eternity

The song begins with a sense of urgency – ‘I can’t wait’ and ‘It’s late’. It’s being ‘way past midnight’ suggests that something the narrator wants is long overdue. We can assume that what he’s waiting for is for his lover to return. The refrain, too:

‘And I don’t know how much longer I can wait’

constantly reminds us that the narrator feels he can tolerate only a limited amount of further delay to his desire being satisfied.

And an even greater sense of urgency might seem to be created in the final verse by the observation:

‘… the end of time has just begun’

If time itself is ending, the narrator’s hopes are doomed.

By the end of the song, however, there’s been no panic. Contrary to our expectation all sense of urgency seems to have dissipated.  The ending of time is apparently no more than ‘mighty funny’, and by this stage the narrator is capable of merely ‘strolling’ through his memories (‘the lonely graveyard of my mind’) as if he no longer has a care in the world. So  in what sense has the end of time just begun if this doesn’t demand urgent action?

One possible answer is that ‘the end of time’ refers to timelessness, or eternity. If so, action cannot be urgent because action outside time cannot exist at all. Instead ‘the end of time’ can offer consolation to the narrator in that it gives a non-temporal permanence to things which he values, but which from a non-temporal perspective are transient. What matters isn’t that timelessness, or eternity, has literally just begun (that’s to view it from a temporal perspective) but that it exists. To what extent the narrator appreciates this, if at all, remains unclear.

The possibility of non-temporal, or eternal, existence also has consequences for the way some of the narrator’s other comments are to be interpreted. Just as with ‘the end of time has begun’, the perspective – temporal or eternal – makes a difference. So for example, when the narrator complains:

‘… after all these years you’re still the one’

it’s only a plea for sympathy if interpreted temporally. He’s saying he continues to love her in the way both he and she originally loved each other. But viewed non-temporally, the years drop out. We’re left with the non-temporal permanence of their original shared love.

The same applies to the statement:

‘I left my life with you somewhere back there along the line’

This can be interpreted non-temporally if ‘back there’ is given a purely spatial reference. The effect will be that the statement now expresses a different truth. It will no longer be saying that his life with her has an existence only in the past. The way is open for it to be seen as non-temporally permanent.

The possibility of his interpreting ‘the end of time’ in this way holds out some hope for the narrator. What matters ultimately is not the future of the relationship, but its eternal (timeless) nature. In the light of this, his claim that he’s ‘standing at the gate’ might be seen as meaning he’s on the threshold of eternity.

Whether the narrator has taken on the full significance of the end of time having begun is unclear. While it’s true he’s no longer bedevilled by a sense of urgency, it’s also the case that the primary meaning of the comments just quoted is temporal. If he were fully aware of its significance, it’s unlikely he’d dismiss it as ‘funny’ or, at the end of the song, still regret not having been ‘spared’.
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Love

It’s possible, then, that by ‘the end of time’ the narrator has in mind something unconnected with eternity. It’s plausible that it’s an allusion to the effect on him of the break-up. It would be an exaggeration, but it would be in character for him to exaggerate. There’s no obvious reason why he shouldn’t have come to accept that the relationship is over and such an acceptance would in itself explain the lack of urgency evinced at the end of the song.

There is some positive reason too for thinking he might have come to accept the end of the relationship. In Cold Irons Bound he’d bemoaned that his love was ‘taking such a long time to die’. By the end of Can’t Wait it might be that it has died. This seems likely given that in the next song, Highlands, his former relationship doesn’t even get a mention. It would also explain why he sees the end of time as ‘mighty funny’. Given the emotional turmoil he’s been in since the break up, it might well seem strange that his lover doesn’t matter to him anymore.
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Sex

That he’s been able to accept that the relationship has ended would seem to be supported by a comparable change in his attitude towards sex.

When in Cold Irons Bound the narrator bemoans that his love is taking ‘such a long time to die’, he might be using ‘die’ to allude to reaching sexual climax.* His complaint would thus be about a lack of opportunity for sex as a result of his lover leaving. That that’s the case in the second verse here too is suggested by his answer to the question about what ‘keeps me loving you so’. In the very next line he says:

‘I’m breathing hard, standing at the gate’

The language is clearly sexual, suggesting that sex might his true motivation for wanting her back. The same applies to the expressions ‘the sweet love that we knew’, and even his use of the clichéd ‘honey’, given that ‘sweet death’ is a synonym for orgasm.

Support for the view that by the end of Can’t Wait his attitude towards sex has changed comes from there being an increasing lack of intensity in the sexual language he uses.  ‘The air burns’ is less intense than the equally sexual ‘burning to the sky’ found in Till I Fell In Love With You. ‘I’m breathing hard, standing at the gate’, being purely anticipatory, is less intense again. Already it would appear that a gradual diminution in intensity is underway.

Finally, towards the end of Can’t Wait, his saying:

‘I’m looking for anything that will bring a happy glow’

suggests all intensity has gone. Indeed the final quotation’s ‘happy’ and ‘glow’ both have positive connotations suggesting he no longer sees his well-being in terms of sexual satisfaction.
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Death

Another meaning the narrator might have in mind when referring to ‘the end of time’ is his own death. If at the end of the song he’s come to accept that his life is over, this would explain the lack of urgency. That he allows death to dominate his thoughts is suggested by his regular use of dark terms such as ‘night’, ‘doomed’ and ‘graveyard’. When he tells his lover:

‘… my heart can’t go on beating without you’

in effect he’s telling her that by ending their relationship she’s killing him. He might even  be interpreted as telling her that if he dies, it will be her fault. That he’d see her as the cause of his death is supported by the immediately preceding line which makes her responsible for the blow giving rise to his heart failure:

‘Your loveliness has wounded me, I’m reeling from the blow’

Since she wouldn’t literally be killing him, we’re left with the impression that the death he’s envisaging would be self imposed. Rather than having killed him literally, she’d have driven him to suicide.

On this view the narrator can end up taking one of two courses. He can either see his life in terms of eternity, and so recognise its non-temporal, permanent value, or reject it by killing himself. By the end of the song it’s still not clear which way he’s going to go.
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Lack Of Purpose

Given his early sense of the need for urgency, it’s all the more ironic that the narrator still has no plan of action beyond ‘looking for anything that will bring a happy glow’. His strategy for reviving the relationship has been merely to wait for it to happen. Now that that’s failed, he’s got nothing to put in its place. If he does act, he acts aimlessly:

 ‘It doesn’t matter where I go anymore, I just go’,

 and he’s indecisive:

‘…I don’t know what I would do’

It seems he’d allow a similar lack of purpose to dog any renewal of the relationship since he’d expect the two of them merely to ‘roam together’ rather than go anywhere in particular.

His excuse for just letting some things happen is that he can’t control himself:

‘I’d like to think I could control myself, but it isn’t true’

It’s true that he doesn’t control himself when it’s all too easy to wallow in misery, but merely not doing something is not the same as not being able to do it. The context of this quotation is the thought about what might happen if he saw his lover ‘coming’. If this is interpreted non-sexually to mean ‘approaching’, he seems to be saying much the same as In Cold Irons Bound where his reaction to seeing her was ‘One look at you and I’m out of control’. And yet on that occasion he seemed to be anything but ‘out of control’ – he did nothing. Even if ‘coming’ is interpreted sexually, it’s still seems unlikely he’d find it difficult to control himself given the waning of his sexual desire.

The narrator’s explanation for being unable to control himself is:

‘That’s how it is when things disintegrate’

– ‘things’ presumably referring either to the relationship. This is unconvincing. It’s more likely that being out of control would cause things to disintegrate than the other way round. It’s difficult to see why the disintegration of his relationship should cause him to lose control.

Although the narrator realises he needs to justify his lack of purpose, his appeals to lack of control and disintegration fail to do this.
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Conclusion

By the end of the song the urgency which the narrator showed at the beginning has waned. The refrain has become an expression of helplessness rather than one of desperation.  Although the urgency is associated with a desire to resume the relationship, including a sexual relationship, its dissipation is not obviously to the narrator’s moral credit. It’s not as a result of positive action on his part that he’s no longer so unhealthily obsessed, but simply that his love and his lust have died. He may even be seeing his own death as the most likely way of resolving his problems.

Nevertheless there are indications that a renewal of the narrator’s moral existence is a possibility. Such renewal would come about if he interpreted  ‘the end of time’ as timelessness or eternity instead of as death. Viewed as timelessly permanent, the relationship –  whose loss he bemoans when viewing it from an ordinary temporal perspective – will be seen to have a value which cannot diminish. Ultimately his moral survival will depend on whether he continues to be as aimless and focussed on death as he appears here, or whether these traits can give way to a full realisation of eternal permanence in the things he values.

* Compare Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing “I will live in thy heart, die in thy lap and be buried in thy eye”.

Make You Feel My Love

For those not very familiar with the song it’s worth pointing out a couple of things about it before beginning the analysis. It’s the ninth of eleven songs (all by Dylan, and all of whose lyrics are analysed this site) on the 1997 album Time Out Of Mind. These songs seem to share a common, fictitious narrator whose character seems to develop from song to song as the album progresses. A better appreciation of the song will be had by seeing it in the context of the others.

By this song, the narrator is in a distraught emotional state which, at least initially, gains him our sympathy. While on the surface this seems to be a highly romantic love song, as doubtless it is intended to be by the narrator, it is more than that. Throughout, as on previous songs, the narrator unintentionally exposes weaknesses in his character. In so doing he not only loses some of our sympathy, but makes his lover’s rejection of him all the more understandable.

Sees Lover As A Reflection Of Himself

The narrator’s egocentricity comes out fully in the first verse. The opening lines have him sympathising with his lover, but for being in  a situation which is near to what he sees as his own:

‘When the rain is blowing in your face
And the whole world is on your case’

‘In your face’, in its colloquial sense, might seem to apply to what she sees as him in his relationship with her, rather than the other way about. Also what, we might ask, is meant by ‘your case’? The expression has a pathological feel to it, and would therefore be more obviously appropriate to the narrator whose ‘hearing voices’ in Cold Irons Bound suggested he was becoming insane. Also, rain imagery seems more apposite to him than to her. As early as Love Sick he was complaining that the ‘clouds are weeping’, and in Dirt Road Blues he was ‘rolling through the rain and hail’. In applying his situation to her, it’s as if he’s found an opportunity to feel sorry for himself. It’s wrong, he thinks, that the sympathy he gives her hasn’t been extended to him .

Despite this, the language of the second line goes even further, by implying not just that their situations are the same but that the narrator and his lover are identical. The phrase ‘the whole world is on your case’, makes us remember that in Cold Irons Bound his lover was his world – or so he told us (‘I found my world in you’). There he also felt ‘like the universe had swallowed me whole‘ – thereby unconsciously identifying or merging himself with the universe or whole world – and therefore with her. One consequence of this mutual identity is to make apparent the wrongheadedness of the narrator’s self-centredness. By being concerned only about himself, he brings about a division between himself and his lover, whereas if he were to focus on her needs he would at the same time – given their identity – be addressing his own.

A further consequence of seeing his lover as a version of himself is that he makes her lot out to be as bad as he thinks his own is. This is presented in the song by his references to things associated with night – shadows and stars:

‘When the evening shadows and the stars appear
And there is no one there to dry your tears’

But why stars? Stars are beautiful and not a cause for tears, as the lines imply. Their inclusion is an indication of the narrator’s pessimism – his failure to recognise when things are going well. And we’ve been given no reason to suppose that his lover should be attributed with a similar one-sided outlook.

Untrustworthiness And Other Faults

It’s clear, particularly from the third verse, that the narrator is not to be trusted. First, he seems disingenuous when he says ‘I know you haven’t made your mind up yet’ because in Till I Fell In Love With You he’d referred to ‘the girl/who won’t be back no more’. In addition, the fact that she had reason to leave him makes one treat with suspicion his assurance that he’d never do her wrong. Furthermore, he says he’d known this ‘from the moment that we met’ – but why only from then? There seems to be an unconscious implication that he’d normally be just the sort of person to do her wrong. And when he tells her he’d be able to make her dreams come true, the obvious thing to wonder, if that’s possible, is why he hasn’t he already done so.

Then there’s his claim in the fourth verse that in order to satisfy his lover, there’s ‘nothing that I wouldn’t do’. Like ‘make your dreams come true’ the phrase is vague, as if the narrator is at a loss to think of things he’d actually be willing to do for her. The fact that he is reduced to repeating it in the final verse seems only to reinforce the idea that he can’t think of anything specific he’d be willing to commit himself to.

‘I could offer you a warm embrace’ he says. On the surface it sounds both romantic and caring, just as the narrator intends. But why does he say ‘I could offer you…’? If he were really overwhelmed with love for her, wouldn’t he just embrace her? The formality of an offer suggests he’s more reticent than he wants us to believe.

In addition to being oddly reticent, he seems domineering, even misogynistic:

‘No doubt in my mind where you belong’

This seems to imply that his mind is superior to hers, and the word ‘belong’ implies he thinks of her as his property. Even though he’s referring to himself, the phrase ‘I’d go black and blue’ also carries hints of a dominant temperament. One wonders why the phrase even entered his mind if he’d had no thought of physically forcing her to comply. That he wants to force her is further supported by the wording of the title, repeated in the refrain – he wants to make her feel his love.

Space And Time

In addition to being vague he has a penchant for absurd exaggeration. It’s absurd for him to say he’s known how he’d behave ‘from the moment that we met’.  It’s equally absurd when he goes to the other extreme, claiming:

‘I could hold you for a million years‘

Even if being held is what she needs, she doesn’t need it for that long. One feels that the narrator is just mindlessly expressing his own feelings. Furthermore, while in one way a million years is ludicrously long, in another it’s too short. Why the time limit? You’d expect him to say ‘I could hold you forever’, and that he doesn’t do so seems further evidence of a lack of commitment.

The phrase ‘million years’ reminds us of the phrase ‘million miles’ used in the song of that name. There he used it to refer to the distance which had grown between them. That distance, a million miles, seemed exaggeratedly long , just as here a period of a million years (compared with forever) can be seen as too short. This inability to successfully represent his relationship in spatial and temporal terms hints at an underlying non-spatiotemporal, eternal nature. That it has at least the potential for such a nature is supported by the notion implicit in the narrator’s language of unity or identity between his lover and himself. Just as this unity overrides spatial distinctions, so the inadequacy of temporal language gives the lie to temporal distinctions.

Need To Change

The narrator seems to recognise at least in principle, though, that he needs to behave differently:

‘Storms are raging on the rolling sea
And on the highway of regret’

Presumably the ‘storms’ represents the turmoil in the narrator’s mind as he contemplates the course of his life – represented by the sea and the highway. Apparently the storms have resulted in his regretting his past behaviour and in an intention to change:

‘The winds of change are blowing wild and free’

The intention seems unfocused though (‘wild and free’) as if any change or series of changes will do. His boast:

‘You ain’t seen nothing like me yet’

shows that he fails to see that change is unlikely to be worthwhile if it’s not purposeful. It looks at best as if the narrator is just going to try out a series of personas, even to the extent of demeaning himself (by ‘crawling down the avenue’). The result will be not just that his lover hasn’t seen anything like him, but that she’s not going to.

At least, though, he recognises that fault might lie with him; there’s been little indication of that up till now.

Conclusion

Like other songs on the Time Out Of Mind album, but perhaps to a greater extent, Make You Feel My Love can only be fully appreciated in the context of the album as a whole. Phrases regularly draw attention to related phrases, and so to themes, dealt with in earlier songs. As a result we see the narrator imposing his own mental state on his lover, showing inconsistency regarding his prospects of reviving their relationship, and conceiving the relationship in terms incapable of doing justice to its at least potentially unified and eternal nature. As in other songs, our sympathy for him is tempered by his constant, and unconscious, revelation of flaws in his character.

Updated 29.10.2019

Cold Irons Bound

In the eighth song on Time Out Of Mind the narrator presents himself as distressed to the point of insanity. He remains as self-centred as on earlier songs, but now appears dangerous having become newly pre-occupied with destruction. Nevertheless, while dark thoughts predominate, one instance of his behaviour suggests he has not totally lost hope.

Pessimism

That he’s hearing voices doesn’t augur well for the narrator. In Million Miles he was more positive about them – they were ‘trying to be heard’. In condemning them there as ‘mind polluting’ he seemed to be treating them as no more than the misguided attempts of others to convince him of his mistakes. In the present song there’s a subtle difference. He’s no longer just irritated by the voices  but, because there’s no one around, he sees them as a symptom of illness, perhaps insanity. It’s as if the world is winning its battle against him.

The narrator’s pessimistic outlook is in evidence from the very start. Time is passing, but he interprets this negatively:

‘Now I’m all used up and the fields have turned brown’

This colour of the fields suggests that it’s the height of summer. However rather than being enthused, the narrator  shows only that he’s aware of life having dried up. And he’s thinking primarily of his own life – or, as he puts it, ‘I’m all used up’. In fact, given that the line begins with the expression which includes ‘ up’, one might have expected it to end with ‘down’ to reflect his state of mind. As it happens, the same effect is achieved by the use of the similarly sounding ‘brown’.

In one way, however, his outlook has become slightly more positive. In the previous song, Not Dark Yet, he bemoans not hearing the murmur of a prayer. Now he acts in a more spiritually positive way:

‘I went to church on Sunday and she passed by’

The result is that he’s rewarded for his effort in going to church by a glimpse of his lover, although the line immediately following shows he doesn’t seem to appreciate this. He doesn’t, for example, take advantage of the opportunity to speak to her. Instead, he just complains:

‘My love for her is taking such a long time to die’

The expression ‘passed by’ above reminds us how, in Till I Fell In Love With You, ‘the clouds passed by‘. There the narrator was bemoaning the lack of rain instead  of acknowledging what could be seen as a blessing. It’s occurrence here likewise suggests that things are not as bad as he likes to imagine – ‘nothing but clouds of blood’.

His pessimism continues. In going over in his mind people he’s known, he seems to exaggerate:

‘I thought some of ’em were friends of mine, I was wrong about ’em all’

Them ‘all’? That suggests he was wrong about those he thought were not his friends. If he’s wrong about them, then he’s wrong to assume everyone’s got him ‘pinned up against the fence’ as he puts it in Till I fell In Love With You. Even so, there are signs of progress in that he’s rarely been prepared before to admit that he was wrong, albeit that the admission here is based on a misjudgement.

There’s a further way in which his outlook has become more positive. In Million Miles the narrator believed he was a million miles from his lover. At least now he’s become far more realistic. He’s twenty miles from her – or at least from the town where he saw her on the Sunday.

Nevertheless he still retains his earlier excessively pessimistic outlook. This is apparent from the refrain and the title which it echoes. The expression ‘cold irons bound’ is ambiguous. It could refer to his intended destination, a place called Cold Irons. Or it could be telling us he’s in chains – bound in irons – and so incapable of moving anywhere. The fact that he’s already moved twenty miles suggests that the former describes his situation better. But the place name, and the use of ‘bound’, nevertheless indicate a perverse state of mind. Even though he’s clearly capable of making progress, he’s determined to convince himself that he isn’t. Exactly the same over pessimistic outlook is present in Not Dark Yet: ‘I know it looks like I’m moving’, he says ‘ but I’m standing still’.

Egoism

‘The walls of pride are high and wide’

the narrator tells us, presumably accusing his lover of being so proud he’s unable to get through to her. The listener might well wonder, though, if it isn’t the narrator’s pride which is preventing him from admitting his own faults. That his pride is insulating him from necessary engagement with the world is perhaps suggested when he goes on to say:

‘But you can’t see in and it’s hard looking out’

This suggests that he, rather than she, is the one whose built up a wall of pride.

Pride is not the only sign of his being self-centred. He’s given little indication that he’s had the woman’s interests at heart. This is apparent when he suddenly says:

‘It’s such a sad thing to see beauty decay’

While he might be referring to beauty generally or the beauty of the relationship, the context makes it seem at least as likely that he’s referring to his lover’s physical attractiveness. If her overriding attraction to him is her beauty, the line might indicate that his interest in resuming the relationship is likely to wane once her beauty has gone. To put it another way, he seems to appreciate her for her effect on him, rather than for herself.

Self interest again seems to be the underlying motivation when he says:

‘Well the fat’s in the fire and the water’s in the tank
The whiskey’s in the jar and the money’s in the bank’

It’s tempting to think that the lines are meaningless – that they’re an attempt by the narrator to convince himself he’s achieved things when he hasn’t. Alternatively they could be taken as an attempt to reassure himself that he’s got what it takes make a good partner – to provide security or ‘protect’ her, as he goes on to put it. But the choice of expression is open to a range of further interpretation. I’ll suggest just one for each half-line.

‘The fat’s in the fire’, a common enough expression, suggests he’s taking satisfaction in the impending disaster he sees his lover as having brought on herself by rejecting him.

‘The whiskey’s in the jar’, though perhaps a way of seeking sympathy by telling us he’s got the means of drowning his sorrows, reminds us of the Irish folk song of that name in which a highwayman misjudges his lover who betrays him to the authorities. The phrase therefore suggests the narrator is likewise guilty of misjudging his lover.

Given that he’s being seen in some sense as a highwayman, ‘the money’s in the bank’ might bev taken to suggest he’s at least glad to have extorted something from the relationship (though it’s unclear what), even though the other person has suffered in the process.

And ‘the water’s in the tank’ reminds us of how in Till I Fell In Love With You he said that his house was on fire. It implies he has the means to put out the fire – whether this stands for his lust or the end of the relationship – but equally that he’s not making the effort to use it.

What’s clear is that in each of his four phrases so interpreted the narrator is unconsciously putting himself in a bad light.

Preoccupation With Destruction

Whereas in Not Dark Yet the narrator’s pre-occupation was with his own approaching death, here the possibility of death is extended to other things. His solution to his problems seems to be to destroy what he sees as their causes. However, he realises that this is impossible:

‘There are some kind of things you never can kill’

 What these things are is unclear. It might be his lover’s present disdain for him, or it might be his ‘love’ which ‘is taking such a long time to die’. Or it might be his lover herself. That it’s his lover seems likely given that ‘kill’ is normally used for the ending of life.

Similarly murderous sounding is the line:

‘It’s harder still to feel your heart torn away’

which, though on one level it refers to the narrator’s broken heart, might also be interpreted as a threat to the lover.

The fact that many murderers hear voices just as he now is suggests that he might be more likely to commit murder than most people.*

A fourth reason for seeing his lover as a potential victim stems from his claim that:

‘Reality has always had too many heads’.

It seems that what he’d really like to do is decapitate it – chop at least some of its heads off. There are two obvious candidates for such destruction – his lover and the Chicago winds.

That his lover is an aspect of reality, and so something he’d like to destroy, is apparent from his seeing her as a world:

‘I found my world … in you’

His reason for destroying her is her having destroyed him – her having ‘torn‘ his heart away.

It’s in that the winds, in his eyes, have also attempted to destroy him that they too might be taken as an aspect of reality that needs destroying. As he puts it, they’ve:

‘… torn me to shreds’.

The use of the word ‘torn’ in connection with both the lover and the winds helps establish that the narrator sees them as equally threatening to him, and so equally in need of annihilation.** But the twofold nature of the task – and presumably the impossibility of taking revenge on the wind – puts him off. It becomes an excuse for not undertaking any of it, and so his lover survives.

That he finds an excuse for inaction is fortunate in that it results not only in the survival of his lover but perhaps of himself. Inaction won’t render his lover an ongoing threat since he’s only imagining that she’s destroying him – she isn’t in any literal sense tearing his heart away. But if he’s right in seeing her as a world of which he is a part, in destroying her he really would be destroying himself. The sense in which this would be so is that, as Donne famously puts it, ‘no man is an island’.

That destroying her would lead to his own destruction is reinforced when the repetition of ‘found my world’ in:

‘I’ve found my world, found my world in you’,

makes us link what he’s saying to another claim involving repetition:

‘It’s almost like, almost like I don’t exist’

Given the near identity of the narrator and his lover, destroying her would be tantamount to bringing about his own non-existence.

Identity With God

Not only does he identify his lover with reality, but also it would seem with God:

‘Looking at you and I’m on my bended knee’

– ‘bended knee’ having connotations of genuflection. This is reinforced by his pronouncement:

‘I’ve found my world, found my world in you’

which, though addressed to the lover, has a religious feel to it. It’s what a devout Christian might say in praying to God. To the extent that the lover is both reality (the world) and God, the world and God are identified. The narrator should therefore welcome being ‘swallowed’ by the world ( ‘universe’) because that will amount to becoming one with God. As it is, he’s too self-centred to relish losing his identity in God. He wants it back so that he can pursue his selfish interests.

That he needs to take a different approach is further indicated in his observation:

‘… the road is rocky and the hillside’s mud’.

‘Rocky’ suggests the foundations of the church (cf Matt 16:18), and ‘hillside’ suggests Calvary. There’s an implicit suggestion, then, that he needs to stop idolising his lover and adopt a more Christian approach to her – that is, having dealings with her for her own sake and not just his. His saying that he ‘went to church on Sunday’ may be an indication of the beginnings of a more positive outlook.

Conclusion

The differences in the narrator’s outlook from earlier songs on the album are subtle. He is still self-centred and pessimistic to the point of seeming to contemplate a violent solution to his problems. However he’s sufficiently in control to be aware of encroaching insanity, and that his destructive approach is self-defeating. Although the language used to present his thoughts suggests a way of resolving his problems, his going to church is as yet the only sign of his taking more positive action.

 * Of course most people who hear voices are neither insane nor potential murderers. Nevertheless that there’s some connection between them suggests that the narrator’s having a propensity for murder should at least be considered.

**The double use of ‘torn’ also makes us want to link the claim about the winds with the one about the heart in another way. The fact that the former is such an absurd exaggeration suggests that the latter might be too. It’s not obvious that having one’s heart broken is worse than another’s loss of beauty.

Not Dark Yet

Introduction

The song presents the response of someone to the approach of death. Long vowel sounds mimic the slowness of age, and the negative language throughout indicates the narrator’s total loss of hope. He comes across as utterly resigned to dying as he lists the minimal achievements of his life (‘I’ve been to London, I’ve been to gay Paree’) and contemplates extinction (‘Don’t even hear the murmur of a prayer’). He’s lost faith in humanity and no longer cares about others. He doesn’t want to die, but unlike the author’s namesake he has no energy to ‘rage at the dying of the light’.

It’s a staggeringly beautiful song, both poignant and disturbing because we recognise the narrator in ourselves – he is us, and his death is our death. Nevertheless, any apparent simplicity is misleading. It’s as much about spiritual death as physical, and hints at the possibility of spiritual salvation. Furthermore, the narrator is made to seem dimly aware of this possibility. The result is a detailed presentation of a troubled mind in conflict with itself.

In addition to presenting the narrator’s reaction to oncoming death, the song follows the others on the album in detailing the narrator’s all too human response to his lost love. He’s moved on slightly from his position in the previous song, but in a way which shows him to be even more depressed than before. At the same time he comes across as self-centred, pessimistic and cursed with a Hamlet-like lassitude, all of which would seem to contribute to his failed life.

Although Dylan’s poetic technique contributes hugely to the song’s impact, I will as usual concentrate on the meaning. For the former there is of course the excellent chapter on Not Dark Yet in Christopher Ricks’ Dylan’s Visions Of Sin.*

Developing Outlook

As the album progresses, some change in the narrator’s outlook becomes apparent. What seems clear is that instead of this being the result of his own doing, he’s just allowing events to take their course. His approach remains as unpurposeful as ever.

Nevertheless, that there’s been some change of outlook is apparent from the contrast between the final verse’s:

‘Every nerve in my body is so naked and numb’

and the opening line of ‘Till I Fell In Love With You’:

‘Well my nerves are exploding’.

Neither position seems to hold out much hope for him. At least in moving from one extreme nervous state to the other one feels there’s a chance he might end up in a more moderate position, but even so there’s little indication that this would be down to anything other than chance.

A similar change of outlook is apparent in the line:

‘I’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal’.

Previously, in ‘Till I Fell In Love With You’, he’d been more upbeat:

‘Nothing can heal me but your touch’,

– the phrase ‘but your touch’ suggesting he hadn’t lost all hope. But now, the finality of the expression ‘didn’t heal’ implies he thinks all hope is gone. He’s now more miserable than ever.

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Egotism

One of the causes of the narrator’s failed relationship is almost certainly his self-centredness. This is reflected in his egotistical use of the word ‘I’ nineteen times over the space of twenty-four lines, and of ‘my’ or ‘me’ a further six times. By contrast the third-person pronouns ‘she’ and ‘her’ occur a total of just four times. This egotism is still there – by way of assonance – in the lines concerning the lover:

‘… and she wrote it so kind
She put down in writing what was in her mind‘

And the ‘I’ sounds not only occur again in:

‘I‘ve been down to the bottom of a whirlpool of lies
I ain’t lookin’ for nothin’ in anyone’s eyes‘**

but, as Ricks observes, they seem to frame the lines as if nothing is being allowed to escape this ego. One feels that if the narrator focused less on himself and more on his lover, his lot would be much happier.

One effect of this self-centredness is a failure to give the lover her due. Immediately after telling us:

‘Well my sense of humanity has gone down the drain’

he says

‘Behind behind every beautiful thing, there’s been some kind of pain’

While this might be taken to be a welcome recognition that she, too, has suffered, such a recognition wouldn’t explain his loss of a sense of humanity. Although the pain he has in mind could be hers, much more likely it’s his. If it’s his own suffering  he has in mind, the claim would be that it’s caused by what he considers inhumane treatment at the hands of a beautiful woman.

In fact just three lines after the comment about his humanity ‘going down the drain’ we’re told:

‘She put down in writing what was in her mind’

The repetition of the word ‘down’ – ‘down the drain’/’down in writing’ – makes us link the points. It’s as if we’re to think that his disenchantment with humanity has been caused of all things by her writing him a letter.

Immediately following the line ”Behind behind every beautiful thing, there’s been some kind of pain’, the word ‘kind’ appears again:

‘She wrote me a letter, and she wrote it so kind‘

The effect is to reinforce the view that he’s too focused on himself. While what he says appears generous in acknowledging the effort she’s making, his previous use of ‘kind’ in ‘some kind of pain’ suggests that what he’s really focused on his own suffering – the ‘kind of pain’ she, or her letter, has given him.***

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Pessimism

The repetitions of ‘down’ cited above can also be taken as a further indication of the narrator’s self-centredness. They suggest a determination to wallow in misery rather than take decisive action. This continues to occur when he complains:

‘I’ve been down to the bottom of a whirlpool of lies’

ironically seeming not to remember that at least some of the lies were his.****

That he considers himself at rock bottom is further apparent from the way we he keeps using the word ‘even’ for emphasis after negative words – ‘There’s not even room enough’, ‘I don’t see why I should even care’, ‘I can’t even remember’, ‘Don’t even hear’. The effect is to give the impression that things couldn’t be worse.*

A pessimistic outlook is apparent right from the start of the song.  In the first line the narrator focuses on shadows, but without acknowledging that shadows are themselves a result of a light source such as the sun. Similarly when he complains about its being too hot to sleep, he ignores the fact that it’s the sun which produces the heat. By focusing on the negative he fails to see the counter-balancing positives.

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Religious Imagery

This excessively negative attitude towards the sun appears again half way through the opening verse. The significance is now moral. The narrator could have blamed his own inadequacy for the ‘scars’ he’s been left with, but rather than blaming himself he blames the sun:

‘I’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal’

Obviously it’s absurd to blame the sun for not curing his depression. However what’s important is that the sun would be a physical cure. Since his suffering can be seen as the result of an inferior moral outlook, his refusal to engage with the concerns of his lover, his blaming the sun draws attention to his failure to go after the required spiritual cure.

This is perhaps hinted at further in the use of the word ‘sun’ since it can also be heard as ‘Son’. The role of the Son – Christ – was to make such spiritual regeneration possible. Even on this reading, though, the narrator’s complaint is inappropriate. It is no more the task of Christ to provide a moral or spiritual cure than it is the task of the sun. Therein, as Shakespeare says, the patient must minister to himself.

Other religious imagery pertains to the Old Testament. The narrator’s spiritual apathy leads him to declare:

‘Every nerve in my body is so naked and numb’

The line brings to mind the shame of Adam and Eve when on their dismissal from the Garden of Eden they first became aware of their nakedness (Genesis 3.7). Nakedness is the narrator’s punishment just as it was theirs. The comparison is also apt in that, like Adam and Eve, the narrator has difficulty admitting that what befalls him is the result of personal wrongdoing.

In another presumably unconscious use of biblical language the narrator exclaims:

‘Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear’

It’s interesting that he expresses his apparent plea for sympathy in words similar to Cain’s ‘My punishment is more than I can bear’ (Genesis 4.13). Since Cain was responsible for his own plight, the comparison with the narrator is ironically apt.*

Since Adam is the father of all men, the narrator’s association with Adam helps ensure we see the narrator as standing for us all. At the same time like Cain, – and like humanity generally which the narrator represents – he is the inheritor of Adam’s human weakness. In this sense his own failings show he’s right that ‘humanity has gone down the drain’. He needs then to take advantage of Christ’s having made humanity’s spiritual regeneration possible. In terms of the sun/Son imagery he needs to be the sun and so dispel the falling shadows. Since the sun is the Son, the narrator will then be the Son, a second Adam (cf 1Cor 15. 22 and 45) with a role in saving not just himself but humanity generally from ‘the drain’.

The Refrain: Death As Spiritual

If there’s a key line in the song, it’s the refrain:

‘It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there’

‘Dark’ may well refer to physical death which the narrator sees approaching. However, despite the narrator’s tendency to focus on the physical, and to make bleak observations like ‘Shadows are falling’, the allusion may also be to spiritual death. What suggests this is the expression ‘getting there’. Not only does this sound awkward but we’d expect the final word, following ‘getting’, to be a repetition of ‘dark’ –  ‘it’s getting dark’.* The substitution of ‘there’ is significant, perhaps, in that it draws attention to the repeated use of its opposite, ‘here’ – in ‘I’ve been here all day’, ‘I was born here, I’ll die here‘, and ‘what it was I came here to get away from’.  Since ‘here’ is vague, not seeming to pick out any particular place, it would seem to refer to refer to spatial existence generally. That would make the contrasting ‘there’ refer to eternity.  The use of a spatial term for eternity suggests that perhaps unconsciously the narrator sees eternity as something other than mere darkness. In other words he knows deep down that the end of an empty life has a negative significance which goes beyond mere extinction.

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Self-Knowledge

It’s in his failure to act that the narrator pays too little attention to his spiritual wellbeing, and the consequences for his lover’s happiness which follow from that.

He says:

‘I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from’

Although, obviously, we’re not told what it is he’s trying to escape, the context suggests it’s his depression.  Nevertheless, the phrase ‘get away’, in reminding us of its opposite ‘getting there’ in the refrain, suggests that getting away might be a matter of getting away from the eternal consequences of his failure to act.

If so, getting away amounts to running away. The narrator fails to act and then, absurdly, tries avoid the consequences by running away. It’s interesting that this is the very thing he accuses time of doing:

‘… time is running away’

While he’s not going so far as to accuse time of moral cowardice, his use of an expression just as applicable to himself suggests he has more self-knowledge than he’s prepared to admit. That, too, might be cause for hope.

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Inactivity And Spiritual Death

That it is because of his failure to achieve, or act so as to resolve his problems, that the narrator is verging on spiritual death is made apparent in a number of ways.

Proudly he informs us:

‘I followed the river and I got to the sea’

This, however, is less creditable than might at first appear. Since rivers flow into the sea, following the river is more likely to be a matter of drifting along with it. All he does is go with the flow, never asserting himself or acting decisively.

This failure is emphasised in the lines:

‘I’ve still got the scars…’

and

‘I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still’

In the first quote the word ‘still’ has a temporal sense, implying that he hasn’t yet got rid of the scars. In the second ‘still’ tells us that he’s motionless. However, the full implications of the second quote are made clear if we take ‘still’ in the temporal sense it has in the first quote. In this way the phrase ‘I’m standing still’ will have the meaning of ‘I remain standing’ or ‘It’s still the case that I’m standing’. The point is that the narrator should realise from the fact that he’s still on his feet, that things aren’t as as bad as he’s inclined to believe. He has, then, no excuse for not setting about resolving his problems.

The narrator’s culpability in this respect is suggested by another play on words – the use of ‘here’ in the line:

‘I was born here, I’ll die here…’

taken in conjunction with the use of its homophone ‘hear’ in:

‘Don’t even hear the murmur of a prayer’

He claims he’s permanently, and by implication pointlessly, ‘here‘, while being unable to ‘hear’ a prayer. The hearing of a prayer thus symbolises the spiritual renewal required to make just existing here pointless. Why, then does he not hear a prayer? He could do. All that’s required is that he say one himself. However, just as saying a prayer might symbolise spiritual renewal, so not saying one would symbolise the general inactivity which is bringing about his spiritual death.

That he’s failing to act in the required way also becomes apparent by his telling us what he’s already done: ‘I’ve been here all day’, ‘I’ve been to London, I’ve been to gay Paree’, ‘I’ve been down to the bottom’. What’s noticeable is the repeated use of ‘I’ve been…’. The use is significant. He’s ‘been’ so much, it seems, that he can no longer ‘be’. Accordingly he complains:

‘There’s not even room enough to be anywhere’

Why should all this ‘having been’ go hand in hand with there not being room enough to ‘be’? To be, to exist in a meaningful way in the present, requires having been usefully active in the past. That there’s no room to ‘be’, is because he’s done nothing hitherto to create such room. In other words, there’s no space to ‘be’ because up till now all he’s done is allowed himself to drift along. Since he cannot ‘be’, spiritually he’s as good as dead.

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Final Thoughts

‘I’ve been here all day’ the narrator tells us right at the beginning. And as Ricks points out, the song comprises twenty-four lines – one for each hour of that day. Since the day seems to represent the narrator’s life, it’s clear that the song covers the span of that life as the narrator looks back over it.

While the tone is pessimistic throughout, the narrator finding only failure to comment on, there is nevertheless ground for hope. ‘It’s too hot to sleep,’ he complains, and since that sleep is death, it would seem that death is being put off for a little while. The title, too, is optimistic. ‘It’s not dark yet’, it proclaims, and leaves it there without the complementary negativity of the refrain’s ‘but it’s getting there’. The point is that death is not yet upon him; there’s still time for him to turn his life around. And if he manages that, he’ll have staved off spiritual death. Physical death, we must assume, will continue to take its course.

Last revised: 21.8.2016

 

*Ricks is largely concerned with similarities between Not Dark Yet and Keats’ Ode To A Nightingale, but makes a variety of independent points.  Where I’ve made use of these, and I’ve made no direct acknowledgment, they’re marked with a single asterisk.

**’ I ain’t lookin’ for nothin’ in anyone’s eyes’ is one of three lines in the song apparently borrowed from Dylan’s own Marchin’ To The City where it appears without the ‘I ain’t’. The others are the pair ‘Well, I’ve been to London, and to gay Paree/I followed the river and I got to the sea’. These appear as ‘Go over to London, maybe gay Paris/Follow the river you get to the sea’.

***He, by contrast, does not make a similar effort for her. This can reasonably be inferred from his saying ‘ I see nothing to be gained by any explanation’ in Standing In The Doorway, and ‘I’m tired of trying to explain’ in Till I Fell In Love With You.

****Again, in Standing In The Doorway he says ‘You told yourself a lie/That’s alright Mama, I told myself one too’.

Till I Fell In Love With You

In part the song presents the narrator’s own account of his mental and physical state in the wake of his loss. His inner turmoil is apparent from his sometimes addressing his lover, and then sometimes himself. He describes his feelings, makes judgments about what has happened to him and its causes, makes observations about his environment and his supposed expectations for the future. Much of what he says cannot be trusted, however. He’s contradictory,  he exaggerates the effect of his troubles, he’s inconsistent and he indulges in self-deception. He’s disingenuous too, and throughout he seems to be blaming his lover for the state he’s in. Nowhere is he self-critical about his treatment of her or about his chronic lack of action.

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Contradictions

We see an instance of his unreliability as a judge of his own state in the second line of the refrain:

‘I was all right ’til I fell in love with you’

The problem is that this directly conflicts with what he says in Trying To Get To Heaven:

‘They tell me everything is gonna be all right
But I don’t know what ‘all right’ even means’

One of these claims has to be untrue. Only if he knows what ‘all right’ means is he in a position to say he was all right until he fell in love. The claims present his tendency to believe what it suits him to believe rather than what is actually the case.

Exaggeration

Even though he feels frustrated, it’s clear that the narrator enjoys exaggerating the effects of his situation. He refers to his nerves ‘exploding’, and to feeling as if the whole world is against him, and claims to feel that his eyes are ‘falling off’ his face – none of which seems remotely plausible in a literal sense. Furthermore he follows up this last remark about his eyes by ‘I’m staring at the floor’ perhaps in order to give colour to the hopelessness of his situation while not realising how pathetic such pointless behaviour makes him seem. Presumably it’s this unnecessary ‘staring at the floor’ which is actually responsible for the pathological eye condition.

His parenthetical ‘If I’m still among the living’ also seems unduly melodramatic, as if he’s determined to indulge in self-pity.

That same self-pity is present in the line:

‘I’ve been hit too hard, I’ve seen too much’

Why ‘too hard’ and not just ‘hard’? And in what sense has he seen ‘too much’? We’re not told, and the claims are exaggerated perhaps so as to provide an excuse for saying:

‘Nothing can heal me now, but your touch’.

The vaguely religious language here (cf Matt 1.40-45) puts the narrator in the position of a leper hoping to be healed by Jesus. The leprosy idea recurs when he mentions feeling his eyes are falling from his face (itself reminiscent of the line in Standing In The Doorway where he anticipates ‘the flesh falling off of my face’). Since he’s not actually a leper, the reason only her touch will heal him (as he sees it) is perhaps that he recognises his position is that of a penitent in need of forgiveness. What’s noticeable is that he doesn’t admit he’s in need of forgiveness. And this is perhaps why he presents himself as a leper, who suffers through no fault of his own, instead of as a penitent.

Inconsistency and Self-Deception

‘Well, my house is on fire, burning to the sky
I thought it would rain but the clouds passed by’

Even though we can assume he doesn’t intend the fire reference to be taken literally, but perhaps as a metaphor for the ending of his relationship, there’s something ludicrous about the narrator’s dead-pan expression here. The same applies if we interpret it sexually – with the addition that it’s even less easy to feel sympathy for his loss if the main thing he misses is sex. Despite this a literal interpretation provides an accurate portrayal of his character in that, in the face of calamity, his reaction is to do nothing.

It also demonstrates a willingness to take up inconsistent positions. In Love Sick he moans that ‘the clouds are weeping’. But he would now welcome rain if it means he can avoid having to act to put out the fire. Just as he believes what it suits him to believe at a particular moment, so his attitude to rain is the one it suits him to take at a particular moment.

His claim that ‘sweat(‘s) falling down’ seems to be an attempt to deceive himself he’s  exerting himself when he isn’t. On the contrary, he’s allowing junk to pile up – the junk ‘taking up space’ in a way which perhaps mirrors the way his inactivity has wasted time.* While his declared intention is to be elsewhere by:

‘Tomorrow night before the sun goes down’

one wonders why it has to be ‘tomorrow night. Why not tonight? Again he’s deceiving himself he’s being purposeful when in fact he’s just procrastinating.

Inconsistency and self-deception seem to be combined when he implies that he’s made an effort to get across his point of view:

‘I’m tired of talking, I’m tired of trying to explain’

In Standing in The Doorway he’d said to the contrary ‘There’re things I could say but I don’t’. And even if he has been ‘talking’ the expression sounds suspiciously vague as if he was talking without any clear purpose in mind. And ‘trying to explain’ would be all very well if an explanation was what was required – rather than, say, an apology. He mentions ‘my attempts to please you’, but this too is vague. Given his normal inactivity one might wonder if the vagueness is designed to cover up their non-existence.

Disingenuousness

In lines adapted from Dylan’s Marching To The City the narrator wistfully observes:

‘Boys in the street beginning to play
Girls like birds flying away’

He doesn’t comment directly on this, but there are two things we can note. The first is that what he notices is perhaps a reflection of his own behaviour to his lover which may have been responsible for her ‘flying away’ from him. When birds fly away they tend to be doing so from what they perceive as danger.

The second thing to note is that he also seems to associate flying away with his own behaviour because he immediately follows up with:

‘When I’m gone you will remember my name’

Accordingly, to his discredit, his own character seems to encapsulate both the irresponsibility of the boys and the timidity of the girls.

Further disingenuousness is apparent when he appeals to God:

‘But I know God is my shield and he won’t lead me astray’

The relevance of God is not at all obvious  – until one realises that the comfort the narrator takes in God not leading him astray is no more than an excuse for continuing on his present path (doing nothing) on the unlikely ground that it’s sanctioned by God. The fact that in the previous line he says ‘I’m coming to the end of my way’ – implicitly contrasting himself with Christ (‘I am the way’,  John 14.6) also shows how unlikely his approach would be to meet with God’s approval.

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Inactivity

This inclination to do nothing doesn’t just seem to be a result of his grief. It seems to characterise his life as a whole. This becomes apparent in the admonition:

‘When I’m gone, you will remember my name’

Why, one might ask, is it his name he singles out as what the lover will remember? Presumably because he has nothing else – no achievements – which he could be remembered by.

And when he tries to make himself seem an attractive proposition, he still manages to avoid any reference to genuine achievement:

‘I’m gonna win my way to wealth and fame’

Not only does this imply he’s got no intention of exerting himself, but he’s hardly likely to entice his lover back by dangling in front of her the prospect of mere uncertain future winnings. His judgment is poor – particularly since in Trying To Get To Heaven he was aware that being a gambler is unlikely to be fruitful (‘Some trains don’t pull no gamblers’).

The refrain too bears witness to the narrator’s chronic inactivity:

‘Still I don’t know what I’m gonna do’

He’s clearly got no intention of doing anything.

Conclusion

The narrator doesn’t seem to have moved forward either literally or psychologically since the previous song Trying To Get To Heaven. Instead there’s been a decline. There at least he repeatedly claimed to be ‘trying’. But that sense of purpose has now given way to utter listlessness, as borne out by the repeated ‘I just don’t know what I’m gonna do’. He’d claimed in the previous song that his lover’s memory was getting dimmer and was ceasing to haunt him. If so he’s clearly suffered a regression.

The fault clearly lies at his own door. In displaying a passivity to rival Hamlet’s, replacing action with a self-pitying exaggeration of his misery, he gives himself no chance. In fact he compounds his problems by failing to be self-critical and to accept any responsibility. For all that, our initial and perhaps abiding emotional response is one of pity. And this desire to temper criticism with compassion must be in part because in his failings we recognise our own.

 

*It’s noticeable that he blames the junk -‘Junk’s piling up’ – as if he is not responsible for it.