it in words such as occur, and leaves it to be disentangled and evolved by those who have more leisure to bestow upon it.83
No, I do not feel that good
When I see the heartbreaks you embrace
If I was a master thief
Perhaps I’d rob them
It must be granted that if these lines induce queasiness, they do make a point of saying “No, I do not feel that good”. So an unsettling rhyme such as problem / rob them might rightly be hard to stomach, especially given the tilting “Perhaps”. And given what a problem is: not just “adifficult or puzzling question proposed for solution; a riddle; an enigmatic statement” (the song takes care to couch these “problem”-lines enigmatically, riddlingly), but a forcible projectile, “lit. a thing thrown or put forward”. The song throws out and puts forward its weaponry.
But again, “Perhaps I’d rob them”: what does this enigmatic phrase mean? “I’d steal them” (these heartbreaks)? Then what would you do with them? And wouldn’t that have to be “I’d rob you of them”? Rid you of them? Not rob them, the heartbreaks, presumably – except that rob is sometimes used to mean “to carry off as plunder; to steal” (The Oxford English Dictionary, 5, “Now rare”), as in “rob his treasure from him”, or “Passion robs my peace no more”,84 so Dylan wouldn’t have to be taking or stealing much of a liberty. Especially as there may be a suggestion of heart-breaking and heart-entering (or exiting). And yet the lines, like nothing else in the song, continue to rob my peace. Not that the song offers itself as a peace-maker. A truce at most.
On and on and on and on the song weaves, and yet with a left and a right or a shifting of weight all the time pugnaciously, combatively. But we can sense that the round must be drawing to an end, or may be nearing a knock-out, when the pattern of the opening re-emerges. There, the line “You got a lotta nerve” had opened two successive quatrains, and now the reminder that even this vituperation must come to an end is brought home to us when we hear, as we have not heard along the way, such a repetition again at the head of two successive quatrains: “I wish that for just one time” / “Yes, I wish that for just one time”. (Relentless, this pressing home twice the words “just one time”.) But then there is a further compounding of the shape in which the tireless tirade had been launched, for back then it had been only a matter of repeating the first line, whereas now that there is to be a complete dismissal of the ex-friend, it is not one but two lines that will be repeated to begin the excommunication:
I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
And just for that one moment
I could be you
Yes, I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
You’d know what a drag it is
To see you
Usually the idiom about wishing that someone could stand inside your shoes is a movement inviting sympathy (see it my way, please); here it swings round into antipathy. And Dylan gives voices to these feelings so that at the end of each verse – and consummately at this very end – the few syllables are held, stretched on a rack all the more frighteningly for there being nothing of a scream at this end.
Until this unpalliated ending you feel that Dylan could have gone on pounding for ever (Eternal Circle of hell), so that the challenge was to arrive at a conclusion that could bring proof and reproof to an end. And then, for the only time in the song (truly “for just one time”), there is a shrewd little tilting of the stress within the disyllabic rhyme, with “be you” not having exactly the same measured pressure as “see you”, the first asking slightly more emphasis upon “you” than does the second:
And just for that one moment
I could be yóu
You’d know what a drag it is
To sée you
There is a famous poignancy in Hardy’s poem The Voice:
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me; yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
F. R. Leavis brought out how Hardy’s rhythms escape the “crude popular lilt” that might endanger the poem: “you that I hear” is set in contrast with the hope “Let me view you then”, asking that there be some emphasis on “view”, whereas in the line that rhymes with this, the antithesis is of “now” as against “then”, so that there has to be a touch tilting it away from a lilt. As Leavis saw and heard, “The shift of stress (‘víew you then’, ‘knew you thén’) has banished the jingle from it.”85
Positively 4th Street was never going to succumb to a jingle, or even to a jingle jangle, but it is the deadly precision of the emphasis that consummates the act of banishment, giving the unanswerable last word to this song that is not I and I but You and I.
It has the hammering away at words, and with words, that characterizes a quarrel, and one word above all others: know. About this friend or “friend” we know nothing except what the song declares through and through. If I now quote something that Dylan himself said, it is not in order to invoke whatever biographical facts might exist outside the song, or to adduce Dylan’s own character – it is the character of his songs that matters to me. But Positively 4th Street is an act of retaliation, and it gives some warrant for stressing know in the song that Dylan makes much of the word in this context. “I’m known to retaliate you know; you should know I’m known to retaliate.”86 You know; you should know I’m known . . .
You say I let you down
You know it’s not like that
You had no faith to lose
And you know it
I know the reason
That you talk behind my back
With the one who tries to hide
What he don’t know to begin with
When you know as well as me
You’d rather see me paralyzed
And now I know you’re dissatisfied
With your position and your place
You’d know what a drag it is
To see you87
It’s all over, then. Envy has shown itself to be one of the corrosive agents (but only one, for this is a song that compacts a good many bad impulses).
And now I know you’re dissatisfied
With your position and your place
Don’t you understand
It’s
