The Poetry of Bob Dylan [vol.1, no.6 Poetry Central]

-Bob Dylan, from the liner notes for Bringing It All Back Home, 1965 

In an article in 2005, a CBS News correspondent asked the question, “Does Bob Dylan write songs with memorable lyrics, or poetry set to music?”  It’s not a trivial question, and one that folk music aficionados as well as poetry buffs have argued about for decades.  When I first started to listen to Bob Dylan, I didn’t play along with the record or try to figure out the tablature on my guitar (although I have since downloaded reams of Dylan tab music).  Rather, I’d sit with a piece of paper and feverishly try to write out the lyrics.  For me, in the turbulent Sixties, it was what Dylan had to say about war and poverty, civil rights, romance and beauty, that made me sit up and listen.  I was pretty serious about it.  I still am. 

Yet, with all the identification of an iconoclast generation, Dylan consistently maintained that he never set out to change the culture with his music or his message.  That's been an impressive statement to me, personally, coming out of that culture, and having it affect me in the way that it did.  I can still remember buying my first Dylan album, and just about every single album subsequently.  Dylan recently reiterated this same sentiment in a brilliant American Masters PBS retrospective which aired in September, 2005, entitled, No Direction Home.   Yet, I wonder if a Yeats or a Whitman ever said or thought similarly.  There is something alluring in that kind of storytelling, that doesn’t take itself as seriously as the never-ending entourage of critics and essayists that follow behind, trying to assess the artist’s stature.

Christopher Ricks, an Oxford professor and poetry scholar, recently wrote a book entitled “Visions of Sin,” where he carefully analysed Dylan’s poetry from unique and insightful perspectives.  Ricks unabashedly placed Dylan on the same level as a Keats or a Milton.  I’m not so sure I’d make the same comparison, but it’s not hard to make a case for putting Dylan in the upper echelons of American poetry.  To do this, I would suggest, one has to look at the lyrics as much removed from the melodies as possible.  For some, that will not be a challenge.  For many, though, reciting stanzas from, say, Blowing in the Wind, without also hearing the simple and elegant melody in your mind's eye, is a virtually impossible task.  Still, it’s a good exercise, and I think a profitable one.  What I’ve done below is to cull through nearly all of Dylan’s published lyrics (over 700 songs) and come up with just a few representative stanzas from what I consider to be superb examples of his hard-driving, lyrical, witty and expressive poetry.  I've purposefully chosen poems from his early years, as I think it forms a better, more unified basis to critique; but I'm not saying that his middle or later period has been any less monumental.  I hope you can chime in and help me fill in the blanks with some of your own favorite excerpts in your comments below. 

With your mercury mouth in the missionary times,
And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes,
And your silver cross, and your voice like chimes,
Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?
With your pockets well protected at last,
And your streetcar visions which you place on the grass,
And your flesh like silk, and your face like glass,
Who among them do they think could carry you?
--from Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, Blonde on Blonde, 1966

Praise be to Nero's Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody's shouting
"Which Side Are You On?"
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row

--from Desolation Row, Highway 61, 1965

How many years can a mountain exist
Before it's washed to the sea?
Yes, 'n' how many years can some people exist
Before they're allowed to be free?
Yes, 'n' how many times can a man turn his head,
Pretending he just doesn't see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind.
--from Blowing in the Wind, Freewheelin', 1963

Farewell Angelina
The bells of the crown
Are being stolen by bandits
I must follow the sound
The triangle tingles
And the trumpet play slow
Farewell Angelina
The sky is on fire
And I must go.

--from Farewell Angelina, Bootleg, 1991

   (written in 1965)

The cloak and dagger dangles,
Madams light the candles.
In ceremonies of the horsemen,
Even the pawn must hold a grudge.
Statues made of match sticks,
Crumble into one another,
My love winks, she does not bother,
She knows too much to argue or to judge.

--from Love Minus Zero, No limit

   Bringing it all Back Home, 1965

Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rollin' high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps
"We'll meet on edges, soon," said I
Proud 'neath heated brow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.

--from My Back Pages,

   Another Side of Bob Dylan, 1964

William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
At a Baltimore hotel society gath'rin'.
And the cops were called in and his weapon took from him
As they rode him in custody down to the station
And booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder.
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Take the rag away from your face.
Now ain't the time for your tears.

--from The Lonesome death of Hattie Carol,

  Times They Are a’Changing, 1964

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

--from Times They Are a’ Changing. Title track, 1964

You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last.
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast.
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun,
Crying like a fire in the sun.
Look out the saints are comin' through
And it's all over now, Baby Blue.

The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense.
Take what you have gathered from coincidence.
The empty-handed painter from your streets
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets.
This sky, too, is folding under you
And it's all over now, Baby Blue.

--from It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue

   Bringing it All Back Home, 1965

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Written by Edward Nudelman, Books Correspondent for POETRY CENTRAL

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