like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word.”140 On the one (iron) hand, you might be sliding one word into another because you’re a busy man, packing for your business trip, in haste and under pressure, no time for both the words in full, economy of effort in the interests of economics (Federal Express takes too long, so FedEx it) . . . Or, on the other (velvet) hand, you might be smoothly idly sliding one word into another in quite the opposite spirit, not seeing why you should be expected to go through the effort of saying both “winter” and “interlude”, given that there is an overlap of the words, one word in the other word’s lap, relax, okay?
Either way, Dylan has a feeling for how laziness – which is how we prefer to think of sloth these days, making it lighter, less sodden – can be unlazily evoked:
And yer train engine fire needs a new spark to catch it
And the wood’s easy findin’ but yer lazy to fetch it
(Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie)
Off-hand, the off-rhyme of catch it / fetch it; you catch it, even if he couldn’t quite bring himself to fetch it. “And the wood’s easy findin’” – no excuse, really – “but yer lazy to fetch it”. Two ways of putting it, collapsed into one: You’re disinclined to fetch it / You’re too lazy to fetch it. Then we can hear the reducing of the effort down to the minimum. But you are too lazy to fetch it. Reduced to But you’re too lazy to fetch it. Further reduced, not just you’re to yer but too lazy to lazy. Can’t be bothered to say too right now, since I’m going to have to say to in just a moment. “But yer lazy to fetch it”.
All the Tired Horses
There is comedy in the thought that someone as up and about as Dylan might settle for what Keats called “summer-indolence”. Such comedy is in the air, even if the air is thick and heavy, in the first song on Self Portrait: All the Tired Horses. The wish to take the day off, surlily glad of the excuse of the heat (which even gets to the animals, you know), comes up against the faintly guilty acknowledgement that some activity or other does have a claim on you. The song consists of two lines of words, followed by a musing hmm sound that might be one line or two:
All the tired horses in the sun
How’m I s’posed to get any ridin’ done
Hmm141
– or rather
hmmmmmmmm hmmmm hmm hmm-hmm
This sequence arrives gradually from silence, and departs gradually into silence, and you hear it fourteen times. It’s that and that only. Oh, the orchestration of it varies and does some mock-pompous clowning around, but nothing changes, it’s just a matter of shifting weight while having to rest rather restlessly.
Dylan, who believes every word of it, doesn’t sing a word of it. With endearing effrontery, he leaves it to the back-up singers – except that it doesn’t make sense to call them back-up singers in the absence of any full frontal voice of his. Dylan has not backed down exactly or backed out, but he has backed away – from the very first song on an album called, of all things, Self Portrait. Where is Dylan’s self now that we need it? But then you don’t need it. The song gets on very beautifully without him, thank you. A good Self Portrait may begin with Self Abnegation. Of a kind. Or, if you think putting it like that is too grand, the man is still on holiday – not back for this opener of a song, one that turns upon mildly cursing that the day isn’t sheer holiday.
Not away for long, though: in the two songs that follow, Alberta and I Forgot More than You’ll Ever Know, Dylan gets some writing done (as he had hinted he would like to), though not all that much, since Alberta is a traditional song slightly adapted by him.142 Some writing done, and some singing, too, with backing from the serene women. After that, he is on his own, in Days of ’49. The women will never again on the album find themselves left frontless. Our man wouldn’t want to make a habit of such amicable sloth.
Genial relaxation hangs about All the Tired Horses, this plain-spun plaint, in some other respects, too. Attributed to Dylan on the album, the song doesn’t make it into the Lyrics 1962–1985. Someone couldn’t be bothered, was slothered?
And then again, with that receptiveness of leisure that may amount to creative sloth, the song cocks an ear for coincidences, or at any rate might not resent our wondering (mustn’t be heavy) about a possible coincidence or two. That word “tired”, for instance. It just happens that this is the word crucial to the musical drowsiness of The Lotos-Eaters:
Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tir’d eyelids upon tir’d eyes.
Tennyson on how to pronounce “tir’d” there: “making the word neither monosyllabic nor disyllabic, but a dreamy child of the two”.143 This dreaminess in The Lotos-Eaters is from within the “Choric Song”, and there is something about song that often finds itself drawn to such relaxation in the sun. Dylan, dawdling drawlingly into “All the tired horses in the sun”, wouldn’t have to have known this; all he would have needed was to be in sympathy with its sympathies. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first definition of “in the sun” is “free from care or sorrow”. The phrase “in the sun” likes to close the line when figuring in a song. In The Pirates of Penzance, there is an instance within a song that finds pleasure in contemplating the leisure of another: “He loves to lie a-basking in the sun”. A good old tradition, this, for in As You Like It the three-word phrase (likewise in conclusion) had been at play in a song that happily invoked the person “Who doth ambition shun / And loves to live i’ the sun”. In Twelfth Night there is a song of which we hear before we actually hear the song itself, one woven by those who weave, “The spinsters and the knitters in the sun”. Dylan’s “All the tired horses in the sun” is interknitted with such a feeling for it all, placing and timing. A very different feeling from the energetic aggression that can be felt in It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue:
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun
Crying like a fire in the sun
Marlowe staged a parade of the Seven Deadly Sins in his Doctor Faustus. And what is the first thing that Sloth wants to tell you? “I am Sloth. I was begotten on a sunny bank, where I have lain ever since.” And the last thing he wants to say? “I’ll not speak a word more for a king’s ransom.”
A word more: perhaps in the recesses of the song’s few words there is something else that is worth a king’s ransom. Or am I alone in flirting with the thought that if we had a crossword clue, All the –––– horses (5), the word we might wish we could ink in would be King’s?144 Dylan, who loves to make play with nursery rhymes, might enjoy playing the energetic pointlessness of “All the King’s horses and all the King’s men” (pointless because How were they s’posed to get any repairs done? whereas the Dylan women are all getting the singing done) against the unenergetic pointedness of
All the tired horses in the sun
How’m I s’posed to get any riding done
A good question (with no question-mark), though not exactly a question, really. A quasi-querulousness, rather, the weary aggrievance of someone who can’t muster the energy to mount an argument, let alone a horse. How’m I s’posed . . .: So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold. (To invoke the music of Browning’s A Toccata of Galuppi’s.)
