well”.) But plainly this should then be puffed out with “to puff out” (The Oxford English Dictionary quotes “His lady looked like a frightened owl, with her locks strutted out”). Moreover, there is “to walk with an air of dignity” (this, particularly “of a peacock or other fowl”). And given Dylan’s full phrase, “Can strut their feathers well”, there is the performing art: to strut one’s stuff = to display one’s ability.95 The young Dylan strutted his stuff as Blind Boy Grunt.96 I don’t know whether there enters into this tribute to Blind Willie McTell any shade of Dylan’s ruefully remembering this. It is sure, though, that the song takes blindness seriously, tragically. The first word of Blind Willie McTell, inviting us to trust that it is not being insensitive, is “Seen”. There is a shape given to the senses throughout the song. The first verse’s opening, “Seen”, moves to the third verse’s opening, “See” – and then to the last verse as it nears its ending: “I’m gazing out the window”. The second verse brings us to our sense, the one that brings us Willie McTell and which brought him, in his blindness, so much of what fostered him: “Well, I heard”. And this is the sense of which we hear tell in the fourth verse: “I can hear them rebels yell”. The word “yell” is in a different register from the other words in the song (even from “bootlegged whiskey”), and, like a sudden yell, it bursts in on us like Tennyson’s use of the down-to-earth word “scare” in the high heavenly world of his classical poem Tithonus: “Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears?”
But it is the third verse, there at the centre of the song, that is moved to a celebration of the senses’ riches, even while almost all of what the senses yield is a sad business, the wages of sin, the South’s sin, though not the South’s alone:97
See them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
See the ghosts of slavery ships
I can hear them tribes a-moaning
Hear the undertaker’s bell
Nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
In this verse, the movement See / Hear is extended into See / hear / Hear, hearing being of its very nature the sense that matters most to song and to Blind Willie McTell. The stroke of genius, it strikes me, is the sudden arrival, wafting in along the way, of “Smell that sweet magnolia blooming”. The eye and the ear have been known to put on airs, too confident that they are the two senses that rule; how good that the sense of smell puts in its unexpected claim. Good, too, that the smell of burning does not overpower the sweet magnolia. It is a rich moment, snuffing the air. As Dylan put it in 2001, “There’s a secret sanctity of nature.”98 Even within tragedy the life that is nature may reassert itself. The tragedy could be that of Strange Fruit.99 Smell the sweet magnolia after the lynching:
Pastoral scene of the gallant South, the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh, and the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Strange Fruit invokes the magnolia to point a moral; Dylan, to adorn a tale, hauntingly. “See them big plantations burning”.
The fresh flesh of the magnolia, which incited the poet William Empson,100 anticipates the sudden arrival of the four lines about the “woman by the river” and “some fine young handsome man”, no tragedy now but a pastoral moment that thankfully gratifies the remaining two senses (touch and taste, the bodies and the whiskey) that we had not been sure of – a moment that is not rescinded, though it is changed, by what immediately follows, the return of tragedy: “There’s a chain gang on the highway”.
The tragedy of blindness is not lessened, it is widened, in the tradition that sees the blind poets as inspired by their suffering. There is Homer. There is Milton, who calls up as his inspiration not only Homer but three other poet-prophets, and who prays that through his blindness he may “see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight”. And, perhaps even more darkly, there is the cruelty that inflicts blindness upon birds in the belief that they will sing the better. A hideous castration for the caged bird-chorister. This is the suffering behind the lines that open a poem by Dylan Thomas:
Because the pleasure-bird whistles after the hot wires,
Shall the blind horse sing sweeter?
– a question that may have combined with a nursery rhyme101 to prompt two moments in Dylan:
This is the blind horse that leads you around
Let the bird sing, let the bird fly
(Under the Red Sky)
The Cuckoo is a pretty bird, she warbles as she flies
I’m preachin’ the Word of God
I’m puttin’ out your eyes
(High Water)
Our pity for the blind horse and for the blinded bird might serve to remind us how free of self-pity is the art of Blind Willie McTell. Dylan:
What made the real blues singers so great is that they were able to state all the problems they had; but at the same time, they were standing outside of them and could look at them. And in that way, they had them beat. What’s depressing today is that many young singers are trying to get inside the blues, forgetting that those older singers used them to get outside their troubles.102
They could look at them: true of Blind Willie McTell.
Ballads love myth, including the myth of love, the blindfolded archer Cupid. Ballads respect legends, including those of the master-bowman: Robin Hood, or (on Desolation Row) “Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood”, Einstein who had no time for Time’s Arrow. Eddington: “I shall use the phrase ‘time’s arrow’ to express this one-way property of time which has no analogue in space.”103 The maidens have their feathers; style in literature has been characterized as the feather in the arrow, not the feather in the hat.
The first words of Blind Willie McTell are “Seen the arrow”. Does this arrow point to the man who gave the world the most famous of all arrow anecdotes? William Tell’s arrow hit the apple on the head of the apple of his eye, his son. Since Mc means “son of”, the son of William Tell may be living in another country under another name: William, or Willie, McTell. There are filaments, strings.
The story of William Tell’s skill in shooting at and striking the apple which had been placed on the head of his little son by order of Gessler, the tyrannical Austrian bailiff of Uri, is so closely bound up with the legendary history of the origin of the Swiss Federation that they must be considered together.104
It seems that the Tell story is first found in a ballad written before 1474, within an oral ballad tradition apt enough to the world of Blind Willie McTell. And “legendary history”, like tyranny, ripples out, too. Not just to McTell himself as legend and as history, but to the cruelly unjust world of the song, tyranny, and dismay at power and greed.
Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying, this land is condemned
Psalms 11:2: “For, lo, the wicked bend their bow, they make ready their arrow upon the string”. The bow is a stringed instrument, like the guitar
