The question “Which Side Are You On?” can be approached from many sides, one being the premiss that these words will strike slightly differently upon the ear. For it is the case that not even Dylan can unmistakably sing the difference between upper and lower case (not “Which side are you on?”), whereas to the eye the distinction is a Piece of Cake. It’s just that there is something that you need to know. The capital title of that unmisgiving political song.
So the central contention turns out not to be between those two heavyweight modernists, or between their high art and that of the lowly calypso, or between poems and songs, or even between the Titanic and the iceberg,43 but between two deeply different apprehensions of what it is that songs can most responsibly be. And of what the world truly is, as against the simplicities of Once upon a time. “An I see two sides man” –
It was that easy –
“Which Side’re You On” aint phony words
An’ they aint from a phony song44
Dylan didn’t like to bad-mouth a song that was in a good cause. But he knew, even back then in 1963, that this “two sides” business was averting its eyes and its ears from too much. So before long he was hardening his art. “Songs like ‘Which Side Are You On?’ . . . they’re not folk-music songs; they’re political songs. They’re already dead.”45
What does the word protest mean to you?
“To me? Means uh . . . singing when I don’t really wanna sing.”
What?
“It means singing against your wishes to sing.”
Do you sing against your wishes to sing?
“No, no.”
Do you sing protest songs?
“No.”
What do you sing?
“I sing love songs.”46
Love songs in age, as in youth.
Rhymes
“What is rhyme?” said the Professor. “Is it not an agreement of sound –?” “With a slight disagreement, yes” broke in Hanbury. “I give up rhyme too.” “Let me however” said the Professor “in the moment of triumph insist on rhyme, which is a short and valuable instance of my principle. Rhyme is useful not only as shewing the proportion of disagreement joined with agreement which the ear finds most pleasurable, but also as marking the points in a work of art (each stanza being considered as a work of art) where the principle of beauty is to be strongly marked, the intervals at which a combination of regularity with disagreement so very pronounced as rhyme may be well asserted, the proportions which may be well borne by the more markedly, to the less markedly, structural. Do you understand?”
“Yes” said Middleton. “In fact it seems to me rhyme is the epitome of your principle. All beauty may by a metaphor be called rhyme, may it not?”
Gerard M. Hopkins (On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue)47
Rhyme, in the words of The Oxford English Dictionary, is “Agreement in the terminal sounds of two or more words or metrical lines, such that (in English prosody) the last stressed vowel and any sounds following it are the same, while the sound or sounds preceding are different. Examples: which, rich; grew, too . . .”
A device, a matter of technique, then, but always seeking a relation of rhyme to reason (without reason or rhyme?), so that “technique” ought to come to seem too small a word and we will find ourselves thinking rather of a resource. Rhymes and rhythms and cadences will be what brings a poem home to us.
People have always complained that rhyme puts pressure on poets to say something other than what they really mean to say, and people have objected to Bob Dylan’s rhyming. Ellen Willis told him off: “He relies too much on rhyme.”48 It’s like some awful school report: you’re allowed to rely on rhyme 78 per cent, but Master Dylan relies on rhyme 81 per cent. Anyway, you can’t rely too much on rhyme, though you can mistake unreliable rhymes for reliable ones.
For success, there is the simple (not easy) stroke that has the line, “Oh, Mama, can this really be the end?”, not as the end, but as nearing the end of each verse of Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again. And the rhyme in this refrain is beautifully metaphorical, because it’s a rhyme of the word “end” with the word “again”:
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis Blues again?
“End” and “again” are metaphorically a rhyme because every rhyme is both an endness and an againness. That’s what a rhyme is, intrinsically, a form of again (a gain, too), and a form of an ending.
In Death is Not the End, each verse ends:
Just remember that death is not the end
Not the end, not the end
Just remember that death is not the end
And the four verses at first maintain the tolling of this severe rhyme: friend / mend, comprehend / bend, descend / lend, and then at last soften it, though not much, from an end rhyme into the assonance men / citizen. (Assonance differs from rhyme in not having the same end.) But just remember that the song has not only four verses but a bridge, and that the bridge (a bridge to the next world) is variously at a great remove from the sound of that particular rhyming or assonance on end, having instead the sound-sequence that springs from life: dies / bright light / shines / skies:
Oh, the tree of life is growing
Where the spirit never dies
And the bright light of salvation shines
In dark and empty skies
The rhyme dies / skies depends upon its distance from the end sound, just as it depends upon “dies” being, in full, “never dies”. The bridge is, then, at a great remove. And yet it is not complacently or utterly removed from the end-world, given the sound in “empty”.
“All beauty may by a metaphor be called rhyme, may it not?” asked a speaker in Hopkins’s imaginary conversation. Moreover, rhyme is itself one of the forms that metaphor may take, since rhyme is a perception of agreement and disagreement, of similitude and dissimilitude. Simultaneously, a spark. Long, long ago, Aristotle said in the Poetics that the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor, for it is upon our being able to learn from the perception of similitude and dissimilitude that human learning of all kinds depends. One form that mastery of metaphor may take is mastery of rhyme.
Ian Hamilton said of “Dylan’s blatant, unworried way with rhyme” in All I Really Want to Do that it is irritating on the page, but sung by him it very often becomes part of the song’s point, part of its drama of aggression. Many of Dylan’s love songs are a kind of verbal wife-battering: she will be rhymed into submission – but to see them this way you have to have Bob’s barbed wire tonsils in support.49
