Hope
Index of Dylan’s Songs and Writings
Sins, Virtues, Heavenly Graces
Of the seven deadly sins, Roger considered himself qualified in gluttony, sloth and lust but distinguished in anger.
Kingsley Amis, One Fat Englishman
Any qualified critic to any distinguished artist: All I really want to do is – what, exactly? Be friends with you? Assuredly, I don’t want to do you in, or select you or dissect you or inspect you or reject you.
Maybe so. Anyway, Bob Dylan has made it clear that he is not favourably disposed towards critics in general (for all his being a favourite of so many of them), and – in particular – not favourably disposed towards critics who “dissect my songs like rabbits”.1
Pulling rabbits out of hats, on the other hand, provided that he provides the hats: this may on occasion be something else.
As a student at Cambridge long ago (1928?), the young William Empson impressed his teacher, the not much older I. A. Richards, by his spirited dealings with a Shakespeare sonnet. “Taking the sonnet as a conjurer takes his hat, he produced an endless swarm of rabbits from it and ended by ‘You could do that with any poetry, couldn’t you?’” But only if the poetry truly teems, and only if the critic only seems to be a conjurer. What, then, is the critic’s enterprise? To give grounds for the faith that is in him, in us, in those of us who are grateful. It is a privilege.
Dylan is not the first artist to clarify his responsibilities as he does: “I’m the first person who’ll put it to you and the last person who’ll explain it to you.”2 William Empson himself had a comically modest turn of phrase for the thing he needed first of all: the right handle to take hold of the bundle. Dylan handles sin. Manhandles it, sometimes, as burly burlesque.
Jeremiah preached repentance
To those who would turn from hell
But the critics gave him bad reviews
Even threw him to the bottom of the well
(Yonder Comes Sin)
Jeremiah’s in the well. “And they let down Jeremiah with cords. And in the dungeon there was no water, but mire: so Jeremiah sunk in the mire” (Jeremiah 38:6).
She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me, written by an English poet from the fourteenth century: Handling Sin.3 Handling sin is for me the right handle to take hold of the bundle. My left hand waving free.
“Fools they made a mock of sin.”4 Dylan’s is an art in which sins are laid bare (and resisted), virtues are valued (and manifested), and the graces brought home. The seven deadly sins, the four cardinal virtues (harder to remember?), and the three heavenly graces: these make up everybody’s world – but Dylan’s in particular. Or rather, his worlds, since human dealings of every kind are his for the artistic seizing. Pride is anatomized in Like a Rolling Stone, Envy in Positively 4th Street, Anger in Only a Pawn in Their Game . . . But Dylan creates Songs of Redemption (Allen Ginsberg’s phrase), and so – hearteningly – Justice can reclaim Hattie Carroll, Fortitude Blowin’ in the Wind, Faith Precious Angel, Hope Forever Young, and Charity Watered-Down Love.
What, in Dylan’s eyes, are the words of his to which people have mostly turned a deaf ear? “The things I have to say about such things as ghetto bosses, salvation and sin, lust, murderers going free, and children without hope –”5
“The glamour and the bright lights and the politics of sin”: this wide-sweeping fiercely lit line was held aloft by an interviewer. The line is from Dead Man, Dead Man. Interviews can be a form of living death, and Samuel Beckett once declined to be interviewed, saying to his friend: Not even for you, and in any case I have no views to inter. The politics of sin?
It just came to me when I was writing that’s the way it is . . . the diplomacy of sin. The way they take sin, and put it in front of people . . . the way sin is taken and split up and categorised and put on different levels so that it becomes more of a structure of sin, or “These Sins are big ones, these are little ones, these can hurt this person, these can hurt you, this is bad for this reason and that is bad for another reason.” The politics of sin; that’s what I think of it.6
But it is in Dylan’s music, not in his musings, that what he most deeply thinks of sin can be heard and felt. The word “sin” haunts the songs, with a range of insinuations such as should make us think.
People tell me it’s a sin
Because he sinned I got no choice, it run in my vein
And there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden
That hollow place where martyrs weep and angels play with sin
Where charity is supposed to cover up a multitude of sins
To the sin of love’s false security
I didn’t commit no ugly sin
I’m gonna baptize you in fire so you can sin no more
They like to take all this money from sin, build big universities to study in
Well, if you can’t quit your sinnin’ . . .7
And if Dylan can’t quit your sinnin’?
Desolation Row is a masque of the sins, worthy (in its pageant of unworthiness) of the Seven Deadly Sins who cavort in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus – Doctor Faustus, otherwise known as Doctor Filth, aided and abetted by his nurse:
She’s in charge of the cyanide hole
And she also keeps the cards that read
“Have Mercy on His Soul”
Her sin is her life-threatening officiousness. She has been preceded in the parade by Ophelia: “Her sin is her lifelessness.”
Desolation Row sees and shows a Vision of Sin. Tennyson saw and showed The Vision of Sin:
I had a vision when the night was late:
A youth came riding toward a palace-gate.
The hour is getting late. One rider was approaching. The wind began to howl:
Then the music
