that is itself out to grab you, and that knows the difference between “Tell me about it” as a soothing professional solicitation and as a cynical boredom. Moreover, rhyme is a to-and-fro, an exchange, itself a form of this “I said” / “He said” business or routine.
Another rhyme that has spirit: “nonchalant” against “It’s your mind that I want” in Rita May:
Rita May, Rita May
You got your body in the way
You’re so damned nonchalant
It’s your mind that I want
You don’t have to believe him (I wouldn’t, if I were you, Rita May), but “nonchalant” arriving at “want” is delicious, because nonchalant is so undesiring of her, so cool, so not in heat.
Or there’s the rhyme in Mozambique of “Mozambique” with “cheek to cheek” (along with “cheek” cheekily rhyming with “cheek” there, a perfect fit). There’s always something strange about place names, or persons’ names, rhyming, for they don’t seem to be words exactly, or at any rate are very different kinds of word from your usual word.55
My favourite of all Dylan’s rhymes is another that turns upon a place name, the rhyme of “Utah” with “me ‘Pa’”, as if “U–” in Utah were spelt y o u:
Build me a cabin in Utah
Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout
Have a bunch of kids who call me “Pa”
That must be what it’s all about
(Sign on the Window)
That’s not a rhyme of “tah” and “pa”, it’s a rhyme of “Utah” and “me ‘Pa’” – like “Me Tarzan, You Jane”. And it has a further dimension of sharp comedy in that Dylan has taken over for his peaceful pastoral purposes a military drill, words to march by – you can hear them being chanted in Frederick Wiseman’s documentary Basic Training (1971):
And now I’ve got
A mother-in-law
And fourteen kids
That call me “Pa”
Yet there is pathos as well as comedy in Sign on the Window, for the Utah stanza is the closing one of a song of loss that begins “Sign on the window says ‘Lonely’”. But then “lonely” is perhaps the loneliest word in the language. For the only rhyme for “lonely” is “only”. Compounding the lonely, Dylan sings it so that it finds its direction home:
You’ve gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it
(Like a Rolling Stone)
Dylan knows the strain that has to be felt if you want even to be in the vicinity of finding another rhyme for “lonely”:
Sign on the window says “Lonely”
Sign on the door said “No Company Allowed”
Sign on the street says “Y’ Don’t Own Me”
Sign on the porch says “Three’s A Crowd”
Sign on the porch says “Three’s A Crowd”
(Sign on the Window)
Lonely / Y’ Don’t Own Me. No Company Allowed? Company is inherent in rhyming, where one word keeps company with another. And rhyme, like any metaphor, is itself a threesome, though not a crowd: tenor, vehicle, and the union of the two that constitutes the third thing, metaphor.
Arthur Hallam, Tennyson’s friend in whose memory In Memoriam was written, referred to rhyme as “the recurrence of termination”. A fine paradox, for how can termination recur? Can this really be the end when there is a rhyme to come?
Rhyme has been said to contain in itself a constant appeal to Memory and Hope. This is true of all verse, of all harmonized sound; but it is certainly made more palpable by the recurrence of termination. The dullest senses can perceive an identity in that, and be pleased with it; but the partial identity, latent in more diffused resemblances, requires, in order to be appreciated, a soul susceptible of musical impression. The ancients disdained a mode of pleasure, in appearance so little elevated, so ill adapted for effects of art; but they knew not, and with their metrical harmonies, perfectly suited, as these were, to their habitual moods of feeling, they were not likely to know the real capacities of this apparently simple and vulgar combination.56
Rhyme contains this appeal to Memory and Hope (is a container for it, and contains it as you might contain your anger, your laughter, or your drink) because when you have the first rhyme-word you are hoping for the later one, and when you have the later one, you remember the promise that was given earlier and is now fulfilled. Responsibilities on both sides, responsively granted.
So rhyme is intimately involved with lyric – Swinburne insisted on this, back in 1867: “Rhyme is the native condition of lyric verse in English: a rhymeless lyric is a maimed thing.” There are few good unrhymed lyrics of any kind because of the strong filament between lyricism, hope, and memory.57
Dylan loves rhyming on the word “memory” (and rhyme is one of the best aids to memory, is the mnemonic device: “Thirty days hath September, / April, June, and November . . .”). The line in Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, “With your sheet-metal memory of Cannery Row”, rings true because of the memory within this song that takes you back to the phrase “your sheets like metal”, and because of the curious undulation that can be heard, and is memorable, in “memory” and “Cannery”. And Cannery Row is itself a memory, since the allusion to John Steinbeck’s novel has to be a memory that the singer shares with his listeners, or else it couldn’t work as an allusion.
As for rhyming on “forget”: True Love Tends to Forget, aware that rhyming depends on memory, has “forget” begin in the arms of “regret”, and end, far out, in “Tibet”. The Dylai Lama. And True Love Tends to Forget rhymes “again” and “when”, enacting what the song is talking about, for rhyme is an again / when. And rhyme may be a kind of loving, two things becoming one, yet not losing their own identity.
Or there is Dylan’s loving to rhyme, as all the poets have loved to do, on the word “free”. If Dogs Run Free does little else than gambol with the rhyme (but what a good deal that proves to be). Or there are “free” and “memory” in Mr. Tambourine Man.
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
There the word “free” can conjure up a freedom that is not irresponsible, and “memory” asks you not to forget, but to have in mind – whether consciously or not – another element of the rhyme: trustworthy memory.
Dylan
