soon hit the harder stuff
Everybody said they’d stand behind me
When the game got rough
But the joke was on me
There was nobody even there to call my bluff
I’m going back to New York City
I do believe I’ve had enough
The other verses rhyme only the even lines. You don’t have to be conscious of it, but it works on your ear to tell you that there’s something different about this final verse: all its lines are rhyming away. Whether or not you consciously record this, you register it. An ending, not a stopping. And (“I’m going back to New York City”) it has an allusive comic relation to his first album, where the first of his own two songs, Talking New York, has as its ending:
So long, New York
Howdy, East Orange
Why was that such a wittily wry ending? First, because of the Orange as against an apple. New York is the Big Apple, so there’s a subterranean semantic rhyming going on, sense rather than sound, Big Apple versus East Orange. But the ending depends, too, upon the fact that “orange” famously is a word that does not have a rhyme in English. Dylan was asked once about this:
Do you have a rhyme for “orange”?
“What, I didn’t hear that.”
A rhyme for “orange”.
“A-ha . . . just a rhyme for ‘orange’?”
It is true you were censored for singing on the “Ed Sullivan Show”?
“I’ll tell you the rhyme in a minute.”62
Apple, on the other hand, is easy as pie. Dylan uses the awry feeling at the particular part of such a blues song, where the last throw-away moment throws away rhyme, and goes in instead for a sloping-off movement. “Howdy, East Orange”. So long, rhyme.
The reason that Andrew Marvell’s lines about the orange are so delectable is that the poetical inversion is not lapsed into, but called for:
He hangs in shades the orange bright,
Like golden lamps in a green night.
(Bermudas)
The inversion of “the orange bright” is justified by there not being a rhyme for orange anyway, and if Marvell had said, “He hangs in shades the bright orange”, he’d have had to set out for a mountain range a long way from Bermuda. (That’s right, Blorenge, in Wales.) Even the great rhymester Robert Browning never ventured to end a line of verse with the word “orange”.
There’s a deft comedy that Dylan avails himself of here, in making something from the simple fact that some words do and other words don’t rhyme. True, the voice that exults in forcing “hers” into rhyming rapport with “yours” (“I don’t wanna be hers, I wanna be yers”) is one that never rests when it comes to wresting and wrestling, but there are limits . . .
Emotionally Yours: the phrase signs off, the usual formula unusually worded and unusually used. The song takes the great commonplaces of rhyme and makes them not quite what you would have expected. But then love is like that in its comings and goings. The first rhyme in Emotionally Yours is find me / remind me – itself a reminder that every rhyme is an act of finding and of reminding (that’s what a rhyme is, after all). Later there is rock me / lock me, this not locked into position (no feeling of being trapped), and with “rock me” – “Come baby, rock me” – having the lilt of a lullaby, not the drive of rock. It’s a song about how someone can be indeed “emotionally yours” but not yours in every way (not domestically, for instance – not available for marriage, for who knows what reasons?). Every verse signs off, as if in a letter at once intimate, cunning, and formal, “be emotionally yours”. Dylan sings it with a full sense that it is a deep pastiche of a good old old-time song, with stately exaggerated movements of his voice, especially at the rhymes – and he makes it new.
And how does this song, A Valediction: forbidding Mourning, like John Donne’s great poem about absence, end so that we are “satisfied”? Satisfied that though the song ends, the gratitude doesn’t. Again it’s the rhyming that realizes the song’s story. After a clear pattern:
find me / remind me
show me / know me
rock me / lock me
teach me / reach me
– after these:
Come baby, shake me, come baby, take me, I would be satisfied
Come baby, hold me, come baby, help me, my arms are open wide
I could be unraveling wherever I’m traveling, even to foreign shores
But I will always be emotionally yours
Shake me / take me: this is unexpected only in the benign impulse recognized in “shake” there. And unraveling / traveling: this is unexpected only in its sudden twinge of darkness. “As he lay unravelling in the agony of death, the standers-by could hear him say softly, ‘I have seen the glories of the world.’”63 But hold me / help me? How easily “Come baby, hold me” could have slid equably into “come baby, fold me”, with “my arms are open wide” simply waiting there to do the folding. But “Come baby, hold me, come baby, help me”: the rotating of “hold me” into that unexpected calm plea, at once central and at a tangent, “help me”. The turn has the poignancy of Christina Rossetti, who thanks the Lord For a Mercy Received:
Till now thy hand hath held me fast
Lord, help me, hold me, to the last.64
To the last. Will always be more-than-emotionally Yours. The thought lightens her darkness and ours.
In the lightness of a Doonesbury strip there was an exchange that enjoyed its comedy not exactly at Dylan’s expense (Jimmy Carter is the one who is quoted) but on his account:
– “An authentic American voice!” Can you beat that, Jim? I mean, I just want it to rhyme, man.
– Now he tells us.
Not so much “Now he tells us” as How he tells us, or rather How he does more than just tell us. Show and Tell. Anyway, Dylan himself has been happy to convey the ways in which rhyme, among the many things that it can be, can be fun.
Is rhyming fun for you?
“Well, it can be, but you know, it’s a game. You know, you sit around . . . It gives you a thrill. It gives you a thrill to rhyme something you might think, well, that’s never been rhymed before.”65
an’ new ideas that haven’t been wrote
an’ new words t’ fit into rhyme
(if
