only thing that unites the fragments is the mechanical device of the return to the chorus and thus to the title . . . It is, in the end, not a whole song at all but unconnected chippings, and only the poor cement of an empty chorus and a regularity of tune give the illusion that things are otherwise.
In the end, whatever the song’s attractions and clever touches, they have been bundled together, and perhaps a bit complacently, without the unity either of a clear and real theme or of cohesive artistic discipline.
In a footnote added later, Gray tried to square the circle, tried to square his readers by rounding on himself:
When I read this assessment now, I simply feel embarrassed at what a little snob I was when I wrote it. In contrast (and paradoxically), when I go back and listen, after a long gap, to Dylan’s recording, every ardent, true feeling I ever had comes back to me. Decades of detritus drop away and I feel back in communion with my best self and my soul. Whatever the shortcomings of the lyric, the recording itself, capturing at its absolute peak Dylan’s incomparable capacity for intensity of communication, is a masterpiece if ever there was one.128
No one would begrudge Gray his feeling back in communion with his best self and his soul, or want him to be crippled by detritus, but there is something hollow about this claim that an ill-worded song prompted a masterpiece of voicing. For it is only at a very low level of craft that any such distinction – between what the words can do and what the singer can do with them – could operate. A masterpiece of singing needs to be precipitated by an answering masterliness or masterfulness in what is sung. Matthew Arnold repudiated, unanswerably, an inordinate praise of Joseph Addison:
to say of Addison’s style, that “in its varied cadence and subtle ease it has never been surpassed”, seems to me to be going a little too far. One could not say more of Plato’s. Whatever his services to his time, Addison is for us now a writer whose range and force of thought are not considerable enough to make him interesting; and his style cannot equal in varied cadence and subtle ease the style of a man like Plato, because without range and force of thought all the resources of style, whether in cadence or in subtlety, are not and cannot be brought out.
(A Guide to English Literature)
By the same token, all the resources of Dylan’s voice, in varied cadence and subtle ease and much else, are not and cannot be brought out except by (say) range and force of thought – and it is such qualities that are, in Gray’s judgement, missing from a song that shows such “shortcomings” in the writing. I don’t believe that the recording could be “capturing at its absolute peak Dylan’s incomparable capacity for intensity of communication” if what were communicated were compounded of “nonsense” and of “fragments” held together by “the mechanical device of the return to the chorus”, and if “only the poor cement of an empty chorus and a regularity of tune give the illusion that things are otherwise”. If Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands really is “not a whole song at all but unconnected chippings”, then it could never have been the occasion for an absolute peak of Dylan’s intensity of communication, any more than an ill-written speech in a play could be the occasion for an absolute peak (as against, at best, quite a tour de force) of an actor’s genius.
For it cannot be just a matter of how Dylan sings such a moment as this, however exquisite its timing –
With your silhouette when the sunlight dims
Into your eyes where the moonlight swims
– but of what had swum into his mind and his eyes and his ears by way of wording, wording of an inspiration that is commensurate with the voice. Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands is a masterpiece, but of a kind that Gray – trained as a literary critic in the bracing but narrow convictions of Dr Leavis – was sure to disparage: the Swinburnean. Eliot knew better:
The words of condemnation are words which express his qualities. You may say “diffuse”. But the diffuseness is essential; had Swinburne practised greater concentration his verse would be, not better in the same kind, but a different thing. His diffuseness is one of his glories. That so little material as appears to be employed in The Triumph of Time should release such an amazing number of words, requires what there is no reason to call anything but genius.
What he gives is not images and ideas and music, it is one thing with a curious mixture of suggestions of all three.129
Thy life shall not cease though thou doff it;
Thou shalt live until evil be slain,
And good shall die first, said thy prophet,
Our Lady of Pain.
Did he lie? did he laugh? does he know it,
Now he lies out of reach, out of breath,
Thy prophet, thy preacher, thy poet,
Sin’s child by incestuous Death?
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?
The possessions of the song, irrespective of where exactly they should be left, were retrieved from the warehouse that stores all such evocations – whether by Swinburne or by Keats – of La Belle Dame sans Merci:
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried – “La Belle Dame sans Merci
Thee hath in thrall!”
To a tune that enthrals and entices.
Keats does not tell you where his “pale kings” reigned. Dylan does: “The kings of Tyrus”. Why that particular city? But this can be answered only by first identifying “the sad-eyed prophet” who is held in a dance of tension, throughout the song, with the sad-eyed lady of the lowlands.
And the word of the Lord came unto me, saying Son of man, prophesy against the prophets of Israel that prophesy.
(Ezekiel 13:1)
Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands prophesies against the prophets that prophesy. Ezekiel is sad at what he sees before his eyes:
Because with lies ye have made the heart of the righteous sad, whom I have not made sad; and strengthened the hands of the wicked . . . therefore ye shall see no more vanity.
(Ezekiel 13:22)
Ezekiel is sad-eyed, and the more so because of being forbidden to weep:
And the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Son of man, behold, I take away from thee the desire of thine eyes with a stroke: yet neither shalt thou mourn nor weep, neither shall thy tears run down. Forbear to cry.
(Ezekiel 24:16)
Moved by a poem of mourning and forbearance, Thomas Carlyle said of Tennyson’s Ulysses: “These lines do not make me weep, but there is in me what would fill whole lachrymatories as I read.”130 A lachrymatory is a “vase intended
