And your silver cross, and your voice like chimes
Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?
With your pockets well protected at last
And your streetcar visions which you place on the grass
And your flesh like silk, and your face like glass
Who among them do they think could carry you?
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums
Should I leave them by your gate
Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?
He covets her, even as she covets so much. The seductive “mercury mouth” may be a death-dealing poison (thanks to a particular plant), or it may be a health-dealing antidote (thanks to a compound of the metal).122 Swinburne has “Red mouth like a venomous flower” (and “eyelids that hide like a jewel”); Dylan has “eyes like smoke”, and then “like rhymes”, “like chimes”.123 The first question (within a song that puts so many searching questions), “Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?”, might summon the goddess who is summoned in Dolores, “Libitina thy mother”. For she is the Roman goddess of burials, who since ancient times has been identified – in a sad misguidance – with the goddess of love, Venus herself.
Dolores moves in time to that of which it speaks, “To a tune that enthralls and entices”, as does Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. Throughout, Dolores sings of sins. Like Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, it insists upon listing – sometimes directly, sometimes to one side. It retails all of her energies, her incitements and excitements, her accoutrements, her weapons, her pockets of resistance well protected at last, moving inclusively through all these with an indeflectibility that runs parallel to Dylan’s “With your . . .”, the obdurate formula of his that sets itself, all through the song, to contain her and her properties, her wares. “With your sheets like metal and your belt like lace”, “With your childhood flames on your midnight rug”, “With your holy medallion which your fingertips fold” . . . Part inventory, part arsenal, these returns of phrase are bound by awe of her and by suspicion of her, alive not only with animation but with animus. The more times the initiatory “With your . . .” recurs, the more pressure it incurs, both as threat and as counter-threat.
Swinburne’s “thy”, in comparison, loses terror in archaism, and it lacks the pointed needling of “With your . . .”. The run within Dolores, 205–67, soon starts to feel of the mill: thy serpents, thy voice, thy life, thy will, thy passion, thy lips, thy rods, thy foemen, thy servant, thy paces, thy pleasure, thy gardens, thy rein, thy porches, thy bosom, thy garments, thy body . . .
But again like the song, Swinburne’s poem has recourse to questions that are stingingly unanswerable:
Who gave thee thy wisdom? what stories
That stung thee, what visions that smote?
Wert thou pure and a maiden, Dolores,
When desire took thee first by the throat?
What bud was the shell of a blossom
That all men may smell to and pluck?
What milk fed thee first at what bosom?
What sins gave thee suck?124
These are no streetcar visions, but they, too, take flesh. Dylan’s song, for its part, is given form by its questions and by their specific shape.
Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?
Who among them do they think could carry you?
* * *
Who among them can think he could outguess you?
Who among them would try to impress you?
* * *
But who among them really wants just to kiss you?
Who among them do you think could resist you?125
* * *
Oh, how could they ever mistake you?
How could they ever, ever persuade you?
– through to the end:
Who among them do you think would employ you?
Oh, who among them do you think could destroy you?
Their credulity is matched only by yours, my dear. (From “do they think” to “do you think”.) “And you wouldn’t know it would happen like this”. Our Lady of Pain, wide-eyed as being credulous for all her worldliness, will meet her match in our gentlemen of pained surprise. “Oh, how could they ever mistake you?”
Dolores would not have to be a source for Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands (leave alone an act of allusion by Dylan) for it to illuminate the song’s art. More than decor is a tissue. Overlappings include (in the order within Dylan’s song, though neglecting singular / plural differences): “mouth”, “times”, “eyes”, “like”, “prayers”, “voice”, “visions”, “flesh”, “face”, “lady”, “prophet”, “man”, “comes”, “[ware]house”, “the sun”, “light”, “moon”, “songs”, “kings”, “kiss”, “know”, “flames”, “midnight”, “mother”, “mouth”, “the dead”, “hide”, “feet”, “child”, “go”, “thief ”, “holy”, “finger[tip]s”, “face”, and “soul”. And Dylan’s “outguess” (“Who among them can think he could outguess you?”) is in tune with Swinburne’s “outsing”, “outlove”, “outface and outlive us”.
What may be revelatory is that these apprehensions of languor and danger so often coincide in their cadences and decadences. Swinburne’s anti-prayer to his anti-madonna, an interrogation that hears no need why it should ever end, may be heard as a prophecy of the Dylan song, a song that has been sensed, in its turn, as blandishingly hypnotic.126 Hypnotic, or even (in the unlovely form of the word that F. R. Leavis liked when disliking Swinburne) hypnoidal.
T. S. Eliot – slightly to his surprise – found himself having to put in a word for Swinburne’s ways with words, his ways with all those words. (Surprise, because Eliot said of his own choice of creative direction, as “a beginner in 1908”: “The question was still: where do we go from Swinburne? and the answer appeared to be, nowhere.”127) Eliot retained his sense of humour within his puzzled respect for Swinburne. I cannot imagine a better evocation than Eliot’s of the kind of art that Dylan exercises in this song (itself unmistakably his and yet nothing like any other achievement of his), a kind that has moved some people to condemnation, Michael Gray for more than one. Gray brands the song “a failure”.
The camera shots, the perspectives: do they create more than wistful but nebulous fragments? Do they add up to any kind of vision, as the whole presentation, duration and solemnity of the song imply that they should? No. Dylan is resting, and cooing nonsense
