is drawing on the same sources of power, when he sings in Abandoned Love:
I march in the parade of liberty
But as long as I love you, I’m not free
– as was John Milton when he protested against irresponsible protesters:
That bawl for freedom in their senseless mood,
And still revolt when truth would set them free.
Licence they mean when they cry liberty.
(Sonnet XII)
Licence is different from liberty, don’t forget – and Milton makes this real to us, by rhyming “free” with “liberty”. Licence is not rhymed by Milton (though it grates against “senseless”), and is sullen about rhyming at all. Does it rhyme? In a word, no? But whatever Milton’s sense of the matter, my sense is that he would never have sunk to poetic licence, though Dylan could well have risen to it.
What did Milton himself mean by “Licence they mean when they cry liberty”? That true freedom acknowledges responsibility. The choice is always between the good kind of bonds and the bad kind, not the choice of some chimerical world that is without bonds. That would be licence. D. H. Lawrence warned against idolizing freedom, happily alive to rhyming in his prose even as poetry is: “Thank God I’m not free, any more than a rooted tree is free.”
Milton described his choice of blank verse for his epic as “an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming”. But he knew that there are such things as good bonds, and he valued rhymes all the more because he knew that their effect could be all the greater if not every single line had to rhyme. T. S. Eliot began the final paragraph of his Reflections on “Vers Libre” (1917): “And this liberation from rhyme might be as well a liberation of rhyme. Freed from its exacting task of supporting lame verse, it could be applied with greater effect where it is most needed.”59
A particular pleasure attaches to rhyming on the word “rhyme”.60 Keats:
Just like that bird am I in loss of time
Whene’er I venture on the stream of rhyme
(To Charles Cowden Clarke)61
The beginning of Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands is superb in what it does with its first three rhyme-words, as simple as can be in the mystery of such spells, three by three, with the triple rhymes interlacing assonantally with the triple “like” (eyes like / like rhymes / like chimes):
With your mercury mouth in the missionary times
And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes
And your silver cross, and your voice like chimes
Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?
“Times”, “rhymes”, and “chimes” are rhymes because they are chimes that come several times. (“And your eyes like smoke”: a chime from Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.) “Your prayers like rhymes”: rhymes being like prayers because of what it is to trust in an answer to one’s prayer. With his voicing, Dylan does what the seventeenth-century poet Abraham Cowley did with different rhythmical weightings for this same triplet of rhymes in his Ode: Upon Liberty. “If life should a well-ordered poem be”, then it should avoid monotony:
The matter shall be grave, the numbers loose and free.
It shall not keep one setled pace of time,
In the same tune it shall not always chime,
Nor shall each day just to his neighbour rhime.
Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands uses the rhyme on rhyme poignantly. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go uses it ruefully, in singing of “Crickets talking back and forth in rhyme”. For all rhyme is a form of talking back and forth, something that crickets are in a particularly good position to understand, rubbing back and forth, stridulating away. “I could stay with you forever and never realize the time”: that is Dylan’s rhyming line upon rhyme, and this is the way in which the loving thought is realized. “Forever” is so entirely positive, but then so, on this occasion, is the negative word with which it rhymes, “never”.
Even as a yearning is realized – which is not the same as a hope being realized in actuality – in Highlands:
Well my heart’s in the Highlands wherever I roam
That’s where I’ll be when I get called home
The wind, it whispers to the buckeyed trees in rhyme
Well my heart’s in the Highlands
I can only get there one step at a time
The whisper here rises to a determination when “time” comes, in due time, to consummate the rhyme with “rhyme”; and furthermore when “roam” finds itself not only rhyming with “home” (“roam” takes you away – “wherever I roam” – but “home” calls you home again) but when “roam” is rotated into “rhyme”, a tender turn. But then rhyme, too, works “one step at a time”, the feet being metrical. Hopkins:
His sheep seem’d to come from it as they stept,
One and then one, along their walks, and kept
Their changing feet in flicker all the time
And to their feet the narrow bells gave rhyme.
(Richard)
Like Hopkins, Dylan fits together rhymes in favour of rhyme. In the seventeenth century Ben Jonson notoriously, in mock self-contradiction, gave the world A Fit of Rhyme against Rhyme. Dylan is well aware of the hostility that rhymes can evoke, in readers (or listeners), and between the rhymes themselves. For although there is a place where rhymes can whisper (think of it as the Highlands), there are ugly places where rhyme needs to grate hideously, to make you yearn to break free, to change:
You’ve had enough hatred
Your bones are breaking, can’t find nothing sacred
(Ye Shall Be Changed)
Dylan can be a master of war. The friction of “hatred” against “sacred” sets your teeth on edge, or makes you grit them. “You know Satan sometimes comes as a man of peace.”
Rhyme can give shape to individual lines and to a song or poem as a whole, which is where rhyme-schemes come in. A change in the rhyming pattern can intimate that the song or the poem is having to draw to a close, is fulfilling its arc. Life is short, art is long: true, but art is not interminable. Think back to early days with Dylan’s endings, and to how he chose to end Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues. The last two lines:
I’m going back to New York City
I do believe I’ve had enough
End of song. And it feels like a due ending for the perfectly simple reason that, in this final verse (one that, in closing, starts out “I started out”), all the lines
