being rhymed into submission, but that isn’t battering, it’s bantering.
Still, the rhyming can be fierce. Take the force of the couplet in Idiot Wind,
Blowing like a circle round my skull
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol
Rolling Stone reported: “It’s an amazing rhyme, Ginsberg writes, an amazing image, a national image like in Hart Crane’s unfinished epic of America, The Bridge. The other poet is delighted to get the letter. No one else, Dylan writes Ginsberg, had noticed that rhyme, a rhyme which is very dear to Dylan. Ginsberg’s tribute to that rhyme is one of the reasons he is here”:50 that is, on the Rolling Thunder Review and then in Dylan’s vast film Renaldo and Clara.
And it’s a true rhyme because of the metaphorical relation, because of what a head of state is, and the body politic, and because of the relation of the Capitol to the skull (another of those white domes), with which it disconcertingly rhymes. An imperfect rhyme, perfectly judged.
Dylan: “But then again, people have taken rhyming now, it doesn’t have to be exact anymore. Nobody’s gonna care if you rhyme ‘represent’ with ‘ferment’, you know. Nobody’s gonna care.”51 Not going to care as not going to object, agreed; but someone as imaginative about rhymes as Dylan must care, since always aware of, and doing something with, imperfect rhymes, or awry rhymes, or rhymes that go off at half-cock, so that their nature is to the point. The same goes for having assonance instead of rhyme: entirely acceptable but not identical with the effect of rhyme, and creatively available as just that bit different. The rhyme skull / Capitol is a capital one.
Dylan adapts the skull of the Capitol to the White House elsewhere, in 11 Outlined Epitaphs:
how many votes will it take
for a new set of teeth
in the congress mouths?
how many hands have t’ be raised
before hair will grow back
on the white house head?
But can it be that Dylan was guilty of baldism? A bad hair day. Time to soothe and smoothe: A Message from Bob Dylan to the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (13 December 1963) assured those of us who are bald oldsters or baldsters that “when I speak of bald heads, I mean bald minds”. You meant bald heads, and it was a justified generational counter-attack, given how the young (back then) were rebuked for their hair.
A rhyme may be a transplant.
The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense
Take what you have gathered from coincidence
(It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue)
One of the best rhymes, that. For all rhymes are a coincidence issuing in a new sense. It is a pure coincidence that sense rhymes with coincidence, and from this you gather something. Every rhyme issues a bet, and is a risk, something for gamblers – and a gambler is a better (“for gamblers, better use . . .”).
Granted, it is possible that all this is a mere coincidence, and that I am imagining things, rather than noticing how Dylan imagined things. We often have a simple test as to whether critical suggestions are far-fetched. If they hadn’t occurred to us, they are probably strained, silly-clever . . . So although for my part I believe that the immediate succession “gamblers, better . . .” is Dylan’s crisp playing with words, not my doing so, and although I like the idea that there may be some faint play in the word “sense”, which in the American voicing is indistinguishable from the small-scale financial sense “cents”,52 I didn’t find myself persuaded when a friend suggested that all this money rolls and flows into “coincidence”, which does after all start with c o i n, coin. Not persuaded partly, I admit, because I hadn’t thought of it myself, but mostly because this is a song, not a poem on the page. On the page, you might see before your very eyes that coincidence spins a coin, but the sound of a song, the voicing of the word “coincidence”, can’t gather coin up into itself. Anyway Dylan uses his sense. “One of the very nice things about working with Bob is that he loves rhyme, he loves to play with it, and he loves the complication of it.”53 A quick canter round the course of his rhyming. There is the comedy: it is weird to rhyme weird / disappeared, reckless to rhyme reckless / necklace, and outrageous to rhyme outrageous / contagious.54 And in Goin’ to Acapulco the rhyme what the hell / Taj Mahal mutters “what the hell”. There is the tension, for instance that of a duel in the world of the Western:
But then the crowd began to stamp their feet and the house lights did dim
And in the darkness of the room, there was only Jim and him
(Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts)
Once “did dim” has set the scene, the two of them stand there: Jim and him, simplicity themselves. And there is the satire: Dylan can sketch a patriotic posturing simply by thrusting forth the jaw of a rhyme with a challenge.
Now Eisenhower, he’s a Russian spy
Lincoln, Jefferson, and that Roosevelt guy
To my knowledge there’s just one man
That’s really a true American:
George Lincoln Rockwell
A true American will pronounce the proud word, juttingly, Americán. You got a problem with that?
Clearly, rhyme is not exactly the same phenomenon on the page as it is when voiced (on stage or on album). On the page, “good” at the line-ending in One Too Many Mornings is likely to be broadly the same in its pronunciation (though not necessarily in its tone, and this affects pronunciation) as the same word, “good”, at the line-ending two lines later. But in singing, Dylan can play what his voice may do (treat them very differently) against their staying the same: the word both is and is not the one that you heard a moment earlier. Or take “I don’t want to be hers, I want to be yours” (I Wanna Be Your Lover). On the page, no rhyme; in the song, “yers”, which both is and is not a persuasive retort to, or equivalent of, “hers”, both does and does not enjoy the same rights. The first rhyme in Got My Mind Made Up, long / wrong, has an effect that it could never have on the page, since Dylan sings “wrong” so differently from how he sang “long”. There is something very right about this, which depends upon comprehending the way in which the multimedia art of song differs from the page’s poetry.
Other favourites. The rhyme in Talkin’ World War III Blues, “ouch” up against “psychiatric couch”.
I said, “Hold it, Doc, a World War passed through my brain”
He said, “Nurse, get your pad, the boy’s insane”
He grabbed my arm, I said “Ouch!”
As I landed on the psychiatric couch
He said, “Tell me about it”
Ouch: no amount of plump cushioning can remove the pain that psychiatry exists to deal with – and that psychiatry in due course has its own inflictions of. (There’s a moment in the film Panic when the doleful hit-man played by William H. Macy is asked
