Dylan's Visions of Sin

by Christopher Ricks

  And what an innocent childlike pleasure alliteration may be, with “Lay, lady, lay” only too happy to move across to “big brass bed”. Among the games that the song plays, there is a number game: playing twos (two couplets as the first verse) against threes (lay lay lay / stay stay stay, plus big brass bed) against an opening alliterative foursome: lay lady lay lay. It is with the phrase “until the break of day” that something new breaks through, in that the internal rhyme is continued into this third line of the second verse:

  Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed

  Stay, lady, stay, stay with your man awhile

  Until the break of day, let me see you make him smile

  With “day”, something should dawn upon us.

  “Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed”: he sings the word “bed” king-sizedly. It’s not a monosyllable when he sings it, something happens to it by which it becomes extraordinarily wide. Yet it isn’t quite a disyllable. What he does with it is like the way Tennyson says you should register the word “tired” in The Lotos-Eaters: “making the word neither monosyllabic nor disyllabic, but a dreamy child of the two”.172 (Or a child of the two that are the one and the two.) You are to hear in your mind’s ear something that isn’t as monosyllabic as, say, tied, and isn’t as disyllabic as “tie-erd”, but is just hovering, vacillating, between the contracted and the expanded. That’s how the song makes its word “bed”, one that it likes the luxurious thought of lying across.

  Jonathan Swift had let his unhappy imagination play over A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed. More than a century earlier, John Donne had let his happy imagination play over his hope, To His Mistress Going to Bed. She is to disrobe for him: “Off with” this, and off with that. And so to “This love’s hallowed temple, this soft bed”. The poem’s opening lines are instinct with the powers that alliteration and rhyme can call upon, in touch with the same thing with the tongue:

  Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy,

  Until I labour, I in labour lie.

  Come, Madam, come: or Lay, lady, lay. Donne’s second line is alive not only with the insinuating word “lie” (chiming with “I”, twice) but with the rotation of this sound (“lie” into “labour”): “labour . . . labour”. Donne’s poem might be a source but what matters is that it is an analogue. Great minds feel and think alike.

  Donne

  Dylan

  laymen

  lay, lady

  bed

  bed

  show

  show

  seen

  see

  one man

  your man

  unclothed

  clothes

  my . . . hands

  his hands

  world

  world

  standing

  standing

  still

  still

  lighteth

  light

  Alliteration and rhyme are ways of having one thing lead to another. An opening injunction or plea, in both Donne and Dylan, makes play with all these devices of the tongue, so that there is a real likeness between the age-old urging and the long-standing urgencies of the body. Love, not lust, but physically candid. Give him an inch, and he’ll take an ell. There is many an ell in the Dylan lines, as in the Donne lines. And when Wallace Stevens in The Plot Against the Giant imagined what would really capture “this yokel”, he gave the climactic temptation to the “Heavenly labials” of the Third Girl. The First Girl was planning “the civilest odors”, and the Second Girl was planning “cloths besprinkled with colors” –

  Whatever colors you have in your mind

  I’ll show them to you and you’ll see them shine

  (Lay, Lady, Lay)

  – but it is the Third Girl on whom we should put our money:

  Oh, la . . . le pauvre!

  I shall run before him,

  With a curious puffing.

  He will bend his ear then.

  I shall whisper

  Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.

  It will undo him.

  La . . . le -ly labials: Dylan, who knows how to bend people’s ears, knows all about heavenly labials. Good on gutturals, too:

  He got a sweet gift of gab, he got harmonious tongue

  He knows every song of love that ever has been sung

  Good intentions can be evil

  Both hands can be full of grease

  (Man of Peace)

  Lay, Lady, Lay is itself a lay, “a short lyric or narrative poem intended to be sung” (a Lay of our First Minstrel), even apart from all the other puns that stretch themselves provocatively. “Lay, lady, lay”: at once, and at once an imperative. No pretence at a question, nothing along the lines of Do you come here often? or Where did you get those cute beads? or Didn’t we meet at a Ralph Nader rally? No messing.

  There are twenty-four imperatives in the song, but they amount to there being one imperative. And the power of the song as sung is a matter of its not being imperious in its imperatives. When Donne begins his poem with “Come, Madam, come”, we enjoy the privilege of deciding for ourselves just what tone those words are uttered in: wheedling? pleading? urging? enjoining? dictating? But Lay, Lady, Lay is a song, and one that is sung by its creator with his sense not only of its sense but of the senses. And from the very first chords and words, it is clear that the woman addressed is not being dressed down. She is being invited. Invited to swoon, as the music with its voice swoons and croons or even cwoons.

  It is this patience that is the calmly reassuring air of the song. No hurry. No flurry. No need to scurry. True, he has an end in view. But then, as John Donne put it in the very first words of another of his Elegies,

  Whoever loves, if he do not propose

  The right true end of love, he’s one that goes

  To sea for nothing but to make him sick.

  (Love’s Progress)

  Choppy, the waters there, unlike the leisurely sway of Lay, Lady, Lay (which has more the feeling of a hammock than of a brass bed).

  There are other ways in which the song does not allow impatience to raise its butting head.173 For instance, the promise that is made is not the self-assertive one that would say that if we make love, you will find out what is within me. Or, come to that, that I shall find out what is within you. Rather, I shall show you what is yours already (in the unspoken hope that you will be doing the same for me):

  Whatever colors you have in your mind

  I’ll show them to you and you’ll see them shine

  It is by courtesy of others that we get to see – are shown – what is in our minds. What on earth is in your mind? Colours that we are shown by our bodies, with the help of another’s body.

  These interanimations are intimate with the song’s play with pronouns, pronouns that have the singer – in a spirit altogether different from the relationship in Positively 4th Street – stand outside his shoes.

  Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed

  Stay, lady, stay, stay with your man awhile

  Until the break of day, let me see you make him smile

  His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean

  And you’re the best thing that he’s ever seen

  My bed, but your man – who is me, you know. You can rest assured on my big brass bed. Then, as the hinge, there is the comedy that has him be both first person and third person in the run of a few words: “let me see you make him smile”. Split personality, but splitting into a grin. And then there is the confident standing back from himself, to see ourselves as others see us (or as we ask that they should, or hope that they may). “His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean”. Casting himself in the third person is a way of making sure that the person addressed, the second-person you, gets to feel unquestionably the first person in the eyes of the pleading lover:

  His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean

  And you’re the best thing that he’s ever seen

 
; His hands are clean because he is innocent, free of sin: no lust, for all the honest desire, and no guile.174 And this is the moment when Dylan in singing does not abide exactly by the words as printed, for he sings, not “His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean”, but “His clothes are dirty but his – his hands are clean”. It is a lovely catch in the line, though there is no catch to it.

  One central effect in the song’s rhyming is that there are – and you are likely to have registered this whether consciously or not – two lines that don’t rhyme. This matters very much in a love song, particularly since one of these two lines ends in “love”. Dylan pairs the unrhymed lines structurally, syntactically, changing only their final three words, so that you will pick up on them:

  Why wait any longer for the world to begin

  Why wait any longer for the one you love

  The paired lines don’t rhyme, but the first one has some relation, in the sound of “begin”, to the rhyme clean / seen in the previous verse, particularly given how Dylan sounds those words. Nevertheless there isn’t a word that completes or ends the rhyme begun with the word “begin’ – that is, “begin” doesn’t fully rhyme with anything and doesn’t lead to, lead into, anything. And nor does “love”. The song intimates – urges – that the rhyme upon “love” would not be any word or any sound: it would be an action. That is, the act of love, if she will lie across his big brass bed. (A plea, without a please.) That would be the answer to the question “Why wait any longer for the one you love”, which isn’t really a question after all (Dylan doesn’t sing it or print it with a question-mark), but an invitation. “Love” doesn’t rhyme there. Yet it is comical and affectionate, and perfectly happy, because it trusts that the rhyme will be consummated by behaviour – by trust and love and acquiescence. With time to acquiesce, since the song is patient; no need for the ahquickyes of James Joyce.

  Meanwhile “the one you love” comes to more than “the man you love”, since “the one” keeps the love singular, and doubly singular: “the”, not “a”, and “one” as not just a formal or objective way of speaking but as one and only. For Donne, the mistress going to bed is “My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned”.

  Just how warm Dylan’s song is can be brought out by comparing it with a poem by Thomas Hardy that leaves the word “love” unrhymed, a deeply chilling poem. Likewise leaves it unrhymed, but how unlike.

  SHUT OUT THE MOON

  Close up the casement, draw the blind,

  Shut out that stealing moon,

  She wears too much the guise she wore

  Before our lutes were strewn

  With years-deep dust, and names we read

  On a white stone were hewn.

  Step not out on the dew-dashed lawn

  To view the Lady’s Chair,

  Immense Orion’s glittering form,

  The Less and Greater Bear:

  Stay in; to such sights we were drawn

  When faded ones were fair.

  Brush not the bough for midnight scents

  That come forth lingeringly,

  And wake the same sweet sentiments

  They breathed to you and me

  When living seemed a laugh, and love

  All it was said to be.

  Within the common lamp-lit room

  Prison my eyes and thought;

  Let dingy details crudely loom,

  Mechanic speech be wrought:

  Too fragrant was Life’s early bloom,

  Too tart the fruit it brought!

  Hardy in the first stanza rhymes only the even lines: moon / strewn / hewn.175 In the second stanza, he rhymes all the lines, alternately (with assonance at one point instead of rhyme, lawn / form / drawn). In the final stanza, he rhymes all the lines, perfectly: room / loom / bloom, and thought / wrought / brought. But in the penultimate stanza he has hauntingly violated this progression: the even lines rhyme perfectly: lingeringly / me / be, but the odd lines have an oddity: scents / sentiments / love. Love unrhymed, never to be fully rhymed (ah . . .), all the more poignantly because within the line there is that other feature of language that so often cooperates with rhyme, alliteration: “When living seemed a laugh, and love / All it was said to be”. (Dylan, likewise, on the sounds of w and l: “Why wait any longer for the one you love / When . . .”176) Just listen to, and feel acidly, acerbically, on your tongue the terrible taste of the terminations in Hardy’s final stanza, the dental dismay in those t’s, always terminating the lines, their rhymes, but appearing not only there:

  Within the common lamp-lit room

  Prison my eyes and thought;

  Let dingy details crudely loom,

  Mechanic speech be wrought:

  Too fragrant was Life’s early bloom,

  Too tart the fruit it brought!

  The sharpness of the Hardy poem makes it very unlike a few songs by Dylan that might otherwise be its kin.

  Close up the casement, draw the blind,

  Shut out that stealing moon,

  – “Shut the light, shut the shade . . .” But then I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight moves on to a less bitter injunction, “Bring that bottle over here”. Yet Hardy’s title, Shut Out That Moon, might open into Dylan’s way with titles. Hardy’s title derives not from the opening or shutting line of his poem, but from that second line: “Shut out that stealing moon”. But Shut Out That Moon: the word “stealing” has been stolen. Hardy is a hard man. Dylan’s title is harsher than the song that is Baby, Stop Crying: those words never exactly come in the song, where it is always “Baby, please stop crying”. The discrepancy is pleasingly teasing. What happened to the magic word?

  Love is a gamble, and so is inviting someone to make love. This sense of a responsible risk is playfully there in the phrase “while the night is still ahead”. This endearingly turns the tables on the phrase. Quit while you are still ahead? No, stay, you can go on winning, the night – our night of love – is still ahead.177

  William Empson memorably insisted that “the pleasure in style is continually to be explained by just such a releasing and knotted duality, where those who have been wedded in the argument are bedded together in the phrase”.178 But “wedded”, they wouldn’t have to be. The phrase and the argument might be living in sin. Which would not have to mean falling into the sin of lust.

  On a Night Like This

  In The Merchant of Venice the young lovers thrill one another (and themselves) by bandying, in loving rivalry of to and fro, a little run of words that they love: “In such a night as this”. These words are always the completion of a line and of a cadence. Or more than a completion, a consummation, and yet one that does not cease there but immediately opens into further worlds of love and lovers, worlds to which these young lovers, Lorenzo and Jessica, lay claim with all the innocently insolent rights that young love takes to itself. The opening of the scene (V, i) immediately intimates that “In such a night as this” is set to be the conclusive charm, first by at once proffering a line in two reciprocal parts, and next by having these two embrace one another in an internal rhyme: bright / night. He:

  The moon shines bright. In such a night as this,

  When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees,

  And they did make no noise, in such a night

  Troilus methinks mounted the Trojan walls,

  And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents

  Where Cressid lay that night.

  And she at once picks up his triple “night”, completing his half-line, “Where Cressid lay that night”, with the fondled word, rhyming with itself and yet happily. (Throughout the exchanges, all the classical lovers who are invoked are famous for being unhappy, and how warmly happy this makes our young couple feel, and so secure.) She:

  In such a night

  Did Thisbe fearfully o’ertrip the dew,

  And saw the lion’s shadow ere himself,

  And ran dismayed away.

  Whereupon he (trumping pathos with tragedy):

>   In such a night

  Stood Dido with a willow in her hand

  Upon the wild sea-banks, and waft her love

  To come again to Carthage.

  And she, not to be outdone (a perfectly natural inclination that will have recourse to the supernatural):

  In such a night

  Medea gathered the enchanted herbs

  That did renew old Æson.

  Not romancy,179 necromancy! Young Lorenzo had better remember that one day he may be as old as Æson. He (thinking to win the game by having the night be this very night, and by speaking not only to her but of her, stealing a pun on her):

  In such a night

  Did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew,

  And with an unthrift love did run from Venice,

  As far as Belmont.

  But she has no intention of being beguiled by his sly self-deprecation – “an unthrift love”, indeed. She (if stealing is what is at issue . . .):

  In such a night

  Did young Lorenzo swear he loved her well,

  Stealing her soul with many vows of faith,

  And ne’er a true one.

  Her soul, not her body, he is mock-sternly reminded. At which point his dignity requires that he retort with mock-indignation. Time to tame his shrew. He:

  In such a night

  Did pretty Jessica (like a little shrew)

  Slander her love, and he forgave it her.

  The condescension of the man! Forgive her, forsooth. She is all set for another round of wrestling (“I would out-night you”), but the game has to be called off, and neither they nor we will ever know who would have won. Not (and this is the sweet thought) that it matters in the slightest, for no one has been slighted. She:

  I would out-night you, did nobody come:

  But hark, I hear the footing of a man.

  There is no reason to think that Dylan set himself to out-night “In such a night”, and probably, for all its currency, it wasn’t in his mind. Yet there are overlaps beyond the refrain: “kiss” taking up “this”, “wind” / “winds”, “run”, “away”, “old”, “far”, “pretty”, “like”, plus the relation of “hand” to “fingers”, and of “hark” to “listen”. The opening in Shakespeare, “The moon shines bright. In such a night as this”, has an affinity with Dylan’s prompt move from “On a night like this” to “Hold on to me so tight”. Anyway, whether source or analogue, to have the one love scene keep the other company may cast some light (or is it moonshine?) on why On a Night Like This sure feels right.