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If people have any poetry in their lives, if they’ve been moved from time to time by the triple magic of the sound, arrangement, and meaning
of words (what Coleridge defined as “the best words in their best order”), it’s hardly thanks to modern poets. Having decamped to the well-tenured halls of the
Academic-Industrial Complex, our contemporary poets have methodically alienated their reading public with bloodless, head-scratchingly abstruse versification while turning the
enterprise of poetry into a Ponzi scheme called Creative Writing Programs.
No, if people enjoy poetry at all it’s because of modern troubadours–and none greater than Bob Dylan. (Only The Beatles loom larger as
an entity in the Rock 'n' Roll firmament, but to be fair, there were four of them.)
On October 13, 2016, the Swedish Academy finally got around to formally recognizing America’s greatest poet since Walt Whitman. Rock’s
Poet Laureate is now a Nobel Laureate. It’s nothing most of us didn’t think for a long time–you don’t need the Swedish Academy to know which way the wind
blows.
Naturally, grumbles emanated from a few dusty corners that Dylan somehow doesn’t deserve a Nobel in Literature, that he’s a Folk singer
and a Rock musician but not a poet (a particularly shrill protest stung the ears of many a terrier in the foggy Highlands when a Pop novelist awoke to find that the Swedish Academy
had poured sour milk over his haggis.)
And there’s Dylan’s success–somehow his popularity, his commercial appeal and resultant wealth belie his artistic excellence; the
spiders who weave this twisted web would have us believe that Nobel laureates ought to be penniless, obscure, and read in translation years after they die.
It’s funny, we regard William Shakespeare as the greatest writer of them all, but no one knocks the Bard of Avon for having been immensely
popular and financially successful in his own lifetime. Then again, even Shakespeare had his critics, whoever they were.
Like Shakespeare, Dylan has crafted a sprawling oeuvre. Along with startling verbal facility, his mind has always been various, encompassing worlds,
his influences as disparate as the Bible and the Beats, making a Dylan concordance truly encyclopedic.
With some choice examples, the Dylan songbook includes:
Covers of traditional arrangements: “In My Time of Dyin' ”
and “House of the Risin’ Sun”
Folk ballads or “protest songs”: “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “The Lonesome Death
of Hattie Carroll,” “The Times They Are
A-Changin’,” and “Who Killed Davey Moore?”
Odysseys of free association: “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest,” “Maggie’s Farm,” and “I Want You”
Country classics: “One More Night,” “Peggy Day,” and
“Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”
Love songs: “If Not For You,” “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,”
and “Lay, Lady, Lay”
Parables: “Desolation Row,” “Highway 61 Revisited,”
“I Am a Lonesome Hobo,” and “All Along the Watchtower”
Polemics: “Positively 4th Street,” “Masters of War,”
and “Hurricane”
Anthems: “I Shall Be Released,” “Tangled Up in Blue,”
and “Like a Rolling Stone”
And then there are compositions so lyrically gorgeous, categorization demeans them: “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Visions of
Johanna,” and “Shelter From the Storm” immediately come
to mind.
Part of the genius of Dylan’s craft is that many of his songs effortlessly cross or transcend categories; his polemics become anthemic, his
love songs are odysseys, his odysseys parables. Long after Dylan “plugged in” and renounced his role as Folk’s anointed one, he could still fashion
“Hurricane,” as barbed a protest as has ever been whipped against injustice. And songs like “Blowin’ In the Wind” and “Mr. Tambourine Man”
sound so magisterial, so fundamentally classic that they now seem like traditional arrangements handed down from some misty morning when the Republic was still young.
The poetry has always been there. “Mr. Tambourine Man” is a poem we’ve had with us for over 50 years. As a song, the more
well-known version by The Byrds is like a sunlit drive with the top down on the Pacific Coast Highway, but at two minutes and thirty-one seconds it only has time for one of
Dylan’s four ravishingly lyrical stanzas. Like a long-lost leaf of Leaves of Grass, here are all the words of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” an American canto with
which Whitman would have happily clasped hands:
Mr. Tambourine Man
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In that jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you
Though I know that evenin’s empire has returned to sand
Vanished from my hand
Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping
My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In that jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you
Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship
All my senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip
My toes too numb to step
Wait only for my boot heels to be wanderin’
I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade
Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way
I promise to go under it
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In that jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you
Though you might hear laughin’, spinnin’, swingin’ madly across the sun
It’s not aimed at anyone, it’s just escapin’ on the run
And but for the sky there are no fences facin’
And if you hear vague traces of skippin’ reels of rhyme
To your tambourine in time, it’s just a ragged clown behind
I wouldn’t pay it any mind
It’s just a shadow you’re seein’ that he’s chasing
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In that jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you
Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In that jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you
“Timeless” describes so much of Bob Dylan’s work.
Timelessness, immortality–those are the stakes he always played for.
To future ears, some of Dylan’s recordings may sound the way those crackly ‘78s of Robert Johnson, Lead Belly, or Woody Guthrie sound to us today. But the heart of his
music has always been the words. And on the page, Dylan’s lyrics read as powerfully as ever, ready for new generations to discover and cover, interpret and internalize.
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