sitting them aside:
Wish I was back in the city
Instead of this old bank of sand
With the sun beating down over the chimney tops
And the one I love so close at hand
If I had wings and I could fly
I know where I would go
But right now I’ll just sit here so contentedly
And watch the river flow
(Watching the River Flow)
What brings this to a very different life in the singing is an unexpected cross-current or counter-current. You would never guess from the words alone that the phrasing and the arrangement would be so choppy, so bent on disrupting any easy flowing. Stroppy stomping is the note from the very start, before Dylan even hits the words – and hit them is what he does, not mollify them or play along with their sentiments or go with their flow. The third and then the last verse both kick off with “People disagreeing” – “People disagreeing on all just about everything, yeah”, “People disagreeing everywhere you look” – but then the song is thrillingly disagreeing with itself. Its rhythmical and vocal raucousness is far from flowing. More like shooting a few rapids. Bracing, really, because braced. In the singing, Watching the River Flow turns out not to be one of your usual floatings downstream. “Sweet Thames run softly, till I end my song”: this was sheer fluency in Spenser, but when T. S. Eliot incorporated the line as part of his own song, he did not leave it at that. Later in this same section of The Waste Land, his river is an old man, back in the city, who works for his living and who sweats at it.
The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Watching the River Flow is tarred with a realism that qualifies and complicates the lure of the lazy, though never to the point of abolishing what the words express a hope for: some relaxing, please, if at all possible. For, whatever the abrupt music may say, the unruffled words have a right to be heard. Independence, yes, but interdependence, too, some balance and sustenance of alternate tones and claims.
right now I’ll just sit here so contentedly
And watch the river flow.
Right now this is the right thing, young man Dylan sitting by old man river. (“But this ol’ river keeps on rollin’, though”.) No hurry. It’s got to be done sometime, why not do it then . . . You can muse as long as you like, for now at least, murmurously imagining (that, at least) that you might repeat yourself as a river contentedly does. To the unbitter end.
Watch the river flow
Watchin’ the river flow
Watchin’ the river flow
But I’ll just sit down on this bank of sand
And watch the river flow
The right kind of sloth, a good-natured indolence that acknowledges a realistic feeling for what life is like, had better be no more than a mood, something that must not harden into habit or addiction. So Baby, I’m in the Mood for You understands the link between being in the mood for you and being, sometimes, in the mood for vacancy:
Sometimes I’m in the mood, I ain’t gonna do nothin’ at all
But then again, but then again, I said oh, I said oh, I said
Oh babe, I’m in the mood for you
As printed in Lyrics 1962–1985, eighteen lines of the song each begin with “Sometimes I’m in the mood”, but this one, “Sometimes I’m in the mood, I ain’t gonna do nothin’ at all”, is the only one repeated. Very apt, too. “I ain’t gonna do nothin’ at all” – except just maybe say this again before long. This doesn’t happen as released on Biograph, where there are only four verses (plus an elaborated refrain at the end), in a different order and with different wording but with one excellent stroke, I must say: “Sometimes I’m in the mood, I’m goin’ to give away all my sins”. The innocent exuberance of the song ought to warn us against taking any of these moods other than lightly. Scarcely any sloth to give away, that’s for sure, despite “Sometimes I’m in the mood, I ain’t gonna do nothin’ at all”.
How light at heart the song is, to be sure, and what a contrast to the context within which A. E. Housman once imagined what a relief it might be to do (and perhaps feel) nothing at all. His characteristic letter is dated Boxing Day, 1930:
Between a Feast last night and a dinner-party this evening, I sit me down to thank you and your wife and family for their Christmas greetings and wish you all a happy New Year. Rutherford’s daughter, married to another Fellow of Trinity, died suddenly a day or two ago; the wife of the Emeritus Professor of Greek, who himself is paralysed, has cut her throat with a razor which she had bought to give her son-in-law; I have a brother and a brother-in-law both seriously ill and liable to drop dead any moment; and in short Providence has given itself up to the festivities of the season. A more cheerful piece of news is that I have just published the last book I shall ever write, and that I now mean to do nothing for ever and ever. It is one of my more serious works, so you will not read it.138
Housman’s is a stoically doleful challenge. The playful challenge is to convey a pleasure in leisure without being too too leisurely about it all. The word “lazy” – the only everyday term hereabouts – agrees to make light of the matter, easy-coming and easy-going. (Sin? “I say, ‘Aw come on now’”.)
Flowers on the hillside, blooming crazy
Crickets talkin’ back and forth in rhyme
Blue river running slow and lazy
I could stay with you forever
And never realize the time
(You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go)
“Running slow”: it is good of “slow” to be both an adjective and an adverb (The Oxford English Dictionary is no slouch in these matters), for this means that “slow” can preserve the proprieties and at the same time can keep the adjective “lazy” company. Not itself lazy, this, for all the predictable casualness by which “crazy” ushers in “lazy”. For there is plenty quietly going on: in the invoking of rhyme itself,139 and of the crickets working their little legs or wings off (for nature is not slothful, nor is the sloth); in the equable paradox of “running slow” (how slow would it have to be to no longer be running?); and in the assonance that is itself a form of staying, when “lazy” finds itself talking, three words later, with “stay with”. Laziness is prudently acknowledged and very prudently shifted: you’re not to think, my dear, that I’m the one that’s lazy, it’s the river that’s lazy. “And never realize the time”? But always realize the art, with honestly deceptive ease.
Winterlude, waltzing along on its skating rink, likewise takes its ease, but again not selfishly, since the song is in the unbusied business of giving ease, too, not just taking it. “My little daisy” effortlessly rhymes with “Winterlude, it’s makin’ me lazy”, and the ludic trick upon which the whole song turns – the telescoping
