Читать книгу Dylan's Visions of Sin - Christopher Ricks - Страница 11
ОглавлениеCovetousness
Gotta Serve Somebody
There is a story of a country squire who, leaving church after having heard tell (once more) of the Ten Commandments, took some comfort to himself: “Well, anyhow I haven’t made a graven image.”114
Only one of the seven deadly sins is granted one of the Ten Commandments to itself. For although anger may lurk within “Thou shalt do no murder”, and lust within “Thou shalt not commit adultery”, these Commandments neither identify nor identify with one particular sin. But the sin of covetousness has its very own Commandment, the Tenth, no less. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his servant, nor his maid, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is his.” Do not covet his wife or his maid, even though you may happen to find your pleasure in somebody’s mistress or in having women in a cage. Do not covet his servant, and do remember that you yourself are going to have to serve somebody. You may be this, that, or the other,
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil, or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
The Old Testament concurs with the New Testament in the warning against covetousness that is Gotta Serve Somebody. “Lay not up for yourself treasures upon earth,” Christ urges in the Sermon on the Mount.115
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other, or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?
Might like to wear cotton, might like to wear silk
Might like to drink whiskey, might like to drink milk
Might like to eat caviar, you might like to eat bread
May be sleeping on the floor, sleeping in a king-sized bed
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
The Victorian provocateur Samuel Butler put in a word against the word of the Lord, that we cannot serve God and Mammon.
Granted that it is not easy, but nothing that is worth doing ever is easy. Easy or not easy, not have only we got to do it, but it is exactly in this that the whole duty of man consists.
If there are two worlds at all (and about this I have no doubt) it stands to reason that we ought to make the best of both of them, and more particularly of the one with which we are most immediately concerned.116
Gotta Serve Somebody is unrelenting, and this in itself presented its creator with a challenge. How do you vary the unrelenting? And how, once you have started on the infinite possibilities of You may be anything-you-care-to-name but you’re gonna have to etc., will you ever be through with instances and remonstrances? You are assuredly characterizing all these people most vividly, with no end of styptic scepticism, but you’re gonna have to serve notice on the song sometime.
But the first thing of which to take the force is the combination of the song’s inexorable speed with its radiating deftness of sidelong glances, sly touches and chances. Take the opening verse, which opens, very diplomatically, on to the summit of the social world:
You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You might be a socialite with a long string of pearls
What’s going on here? Everything.
“An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” Such was the straightfaced definition given by the seventeenth-century ambassador Sir Henry Wotton. An ambassador is a servant of his country (as a minister is supposed to be), and the word “ambassador” is from ambactus, a servant. To England or France: old sparring partners, and – in their European culture – constituting a rival to the United States of America as to who should be the heavyweight champion of the world.
So to the second line, where at once we can’t help wondering whether the move has immediately been to two other very different worlds and Yous, or whether there aren’t mischievous intimations that the second line has not lost touch with the first.
You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
Being an ambassador is a bit of a gamble, for you and for your country, and it often asks a poker face. Moreover, you had better like to dance all right, not just because of all those social occasions at the Embassy but because the diplomatic soft-shoe shuffle is one name of the game. Anyway, “gamble” makes its way smilingly across to “dance” on the arm of gambol. “You may like to gamble, you might like to dance”: one “You” after another, presumably, and yet the two halves of the line are perfectly happy either to be dancing partners or to form a onesome. The world of the song is socially gathering:
You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You might be a socialite with a long string of pearls
England and France have become the world – but then these are the two countries that were (formerly) the ones most in danger of supposing that they were the world. Not just the social world, although the social world is there as the string that connects the ambassador and the long string of pearls. The heavyweight with a long string of successes117 turns into the socialite with a long string of pearls, lite on her feet. The long string of pearls helps to reinforce, with a glint, the point that she is a socialite, not a socialist.118 She is a lightweight champion of her world, not with a towel but with pearls around her neck.
Dancing, whether on the international ambassadorial stage or in the ring, turns now to prancing, bringing on some more of the worldly successes who keep forgetting something:
May be a rock ’n’ roll addict prancing on the stage
Money, drugs at your command, women in a cage
The initiating ambassador has given way to a rock ’n’ roll performer, but then a performer – like a heavyweight champion – is often presented as an ambassador of a kind. (Never forget that you are an ambassador for our way of life, representing your country abroad . . .) The “rock ’n’ roll addict” is apparently addicted to his own rock ’n’ roll (the fans are another story), though not only to rock ’n’ roll: “Money, drugs at your command”. Is it truly the case that, thanks to money, the drugs are at his command, or is he at theirs? As printed in Lyrics 1962–1985, the next line was straightforward, “You may be a business man or some high degree thief ”, but I hear what he sings as askew and buttonholing: “You may be in business, man”, with a sudden addressing of “You”, and with the further suggestion that things are proceeding apace, you’re in business, that’s for sure, man, you’re not just some business man.
You may be in business, man, or some high degree thief
They may call you Doctor or they may call you Chief
The high degree is wittily succeeded by “They may call you Doctor” – now, there’s a higher degree for you, not just a high degree (of whatever). “If I were a master thief”, Dylan had sung in Positively 4th Street. But even a Master thief would have to yield to a Doctor thief.
You may be a state trooper, you might be a young Turk
May be the head of some big TV network
You may be rich or poor, you may be blind or lame
May be living in another country under another name
From England or France, things have dwindled (or not, given states’ rights) to a state trooper, with the geographical allocations then receiving a comic twist from “a young Turk”. (You might be an ambassador to Turkey or France? Or even to “another country”?) Meanwhile, the state trooper is keeping communications open with both the ambassador and the rock ’n’ roller addict prancing on a stage, each of whom is a trouper in his way.
May be a construction worker working on a home
Might be living in a mansion, you might live in a dome
You may own guns and you may even own tanks
You may be somebody’s landlord, you may even own banks
This starts by coming a long way down the social ladder from that ambassador (slumming?), with the two successive work-words here establishing the daily grind: “May be a construction worker working on a home”. “Worker working”: that is what it feels like (work, work, work), with the redundancy not being of the luxurious kind, simply repetitive and a bit blank. But up the scale again, at once, into that “mansion” and into “you might live in a dome”. Living in a dome is a combination of the grand and the offhand. The usual thought is that it is very nice to have a dome over one’s head again.
Perhaps this verse seems for a moment tamed, compared with its predecessors, but not for long, for it swings into a different kind of action as it makes a place for the word that until now has exerted its energies only within the refrain, the word “somebody”. The power here is felt in the momentum from the verse into the refrain:
You may own guns and you may even own tanks
You may be somebody’s landlord, you may even own banks
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes you are
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil, or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
Every somebody is a nobody in the eyes of the Lord, or of the devil, come to that.
You may be a preacher, Mr Dylan, and it may be necessary to take this bull, whether papal or not, by the horns.
You may be a preacher preaching spiritual pride
May be a city councilman taking bribes on the side
May be working in a barbershop, you may know how to cut hair
You may be somebody’s mistress, may be somebody’s heir
As printed in Lyrics 1962–1985, it was “You may be a preacher with your spiritual pride”, but what Dylan sings, “a preacher preaching”, is much more telling, as adopting – and adapting – “a construction worker working”, and as suggesting that the preacher not only has spiritual pride but preaches it. He may think that he is preaching against pride, but this is not what actually happens as soon as he opens his ripe and fruity mouth.
And then there is scattered another flurry of darts. Preacher is in touch with councilman, because of what council is. Taking bribes is in touch with cut, because of what it is to take a cut (my usual percentage, I trust?). Taking bribes on the side is in touch with somebody’s mistress, because of what The Oxford English Dictionary knows carnally about on the side: “surreptitiously, without acknowledgement. (Freq. with connotation of dishonesty: illicitly; outside wedlock.)”. “What would some of you say if I told you that I, as a married man, have had three women on the side?” (1968). In the momentum from this verse into the refrain (a mounting momentum now), there is twice a “somebody” before hitting the refrain:
You may be somebody’s mistress, may be somebody’s heir
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil, or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
The verse that follows is both the seed of the song and – because of the Sermon on the Mount – its flower.
And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
“Might like to wear cotton, might like to wear silk”: Dylan sings this quatrain most elegantly, with an equable commitment to its being so pat, rhythmically and vocally and syntactically, so symmetrical. The bed may be king-sized but it is a perfect fit. The danger of the fit and of the pat could not be better intimated (complacency completely self-satisfied), intimated delicately to the point of daintiness, but without palliation. For the “But” is biding its time.
Might like to wear cotton, might like to wear silk
Might like to drink whiskey, might like to drink milk
Might like to eat caviar, you might like to eat bread
May be sleeping on the floor, sleeping in a king-sized bed
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody . . .
And so the song moves to its moving on. The turn that finally releases it from its perpetual motion is its decision to switch from what you may be, and what they may call you, to what you may call me – and thence to what little difference this could ever make, given the inescapable truth of our all having to serve somebody. Earlier the song had dangled titles and entitlements: “They may call you Doctor or they may call you Chief ”. They may call you these things servilely, but don’t forget that you, too, are gonna have to serve somebody. “They may call you . . .” now returns, from the opposite direction, as “You may call me . . .”
You may call me Terry, you may call me Timmy
You may call me Bobby, or you may call me Zimmy
You may call me R. J., you may call me Ray
You may call me anything, no matter what you say
You’re still gonna have to serve somebody, yes
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil, or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
On every previous occasion, not only the last line of the refrain but its first line had crystallized in an opening obdurate “But”. Dylan has always respected the patient power of life’s most important little insister, “But”, which will not be cheated or defeated. To bring the song to an end, while urging us not to forget the unending truth of its asseveration, there is this time no opening “But”, only the conclusive one.119
You’re gonna have to serve somebody. You may not like the thought, but there are forms of the thought that ought to do more than reconcile you to it. At Morning Prayer, the Second Collect, for Peace:
O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom; Defend us thy humble servants in all assaults of our enemies.
Thy humble servants, thou whose service is perfect freedom. It is perfectly paradoxical, like so much else.
Meanwhile, the crasser forms of covetousness keep up their assaults. The artist seeks to defend us against them.
You can’t take it with you and you know that it’s too worthless to be sold
They tell you, “Time is money” as if your life was worth its weight in gold
(When You Gonna Wake Up?)
It is one of the most enduring of proverbial reminders, You can’t take it with you. In the different accents of St Paul:
For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and raiment let us be therewith content. But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
(1 Timothy 6:7–10)
They tell you, “Time is money” as if your life was worth its weight in gold
Not that any of these matters are as simple as the confident repudiation of covetousness would like to believe. The realist Samuel Butler would again like to say a word: It is only very fortunate people whose time is money. My time is not money. I wish it was. It is not even somebody else’s money. If it was he would give me some of it. I am a miserable, unmarketable sinner, and there is no money in me.120
Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
Sad to say, there has been many a sad-eyed lady. One of the most haunting, and haunted, is Dolores, she whose very name means sadness.121 Swinburne’s Dolores (1866) opens with her hidden eyes, and soon moves to her flagrant mouth, all this then issuing in a question:
Cold eyelids that hide like a jewel
Hard eyes that grow soft for an hour;
The heavy white limbs, and the cruel
Red mouth like a venomous flower;
When these are gone by with their glories,
What shall rest of thee then, what remain,
O mystic and sombre Dolores,
Our Lady of Pain?
He covets her, even as she covets so much.
Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands opens with the mouth of our lady of pain, and soon moves to her eyes, all this then issuing in a question, one that is on its way to further questions:
With your mercury mouth in the missionary times
And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes
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 in our ears (very beguilingly, of course).
The 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 to hold tears; applied by archaeologists to those small phials of glass, alabaster, etc., which are found in ancient Roman tombs” (The Oxford English Dictionary). “Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?”
“Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes”: the phrase “no man” comes more than once in the Book of Ezekiel, and there is a gate nearby. Ezekiel 44:2: “This gate shall be shut, it shall not be opened, and no man shall enter in by it.” (Similarly, 14:15: “that no man may pass through”.) “No man” is heard again and again in the Bible. Isaiah 24:10: “Every house is shut up, that no man may come in. There is a crying for wine in the streets; all joy is darkened, the mirth of the land is gone. In the city is left desolation, and the gate is smitten with destruction.” Isaiah is another of the prophets who toll the words “no man”. As printed in Lyrics 1962–1985, the refrain is always “the sad-eyed prophet says”; in singing, Dylan moves from this to “the sad-eyed prophets say”.
“The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me,” William Blake recorded, straightforwardly, “and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell).
“Moreover the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Son of man, take up a lamentation upon the king of Tyrus” (Ezekiel 28:12). In chapter 26 of Ezekiel, the pride of Tyrus is brought low, for Tyrus will be set “in the low parts of the earth” (26:20), the low lands. A king of kings “shall enter into thy gates” (26:10). And the city’s music will have a dying fall. “I will cause the noise of thy songs to cease; and the sound of thy harps shall be no more heard” (26:13).
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands
Where the sad-eyed prophets say that no man comes
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums
Should I leave them by your gate
Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?
– and then, scarcely waiting:
The kings of Tyrus with their convict list
Are waiting in line for their geranium kiss
Should I wait? At which point we wait only a moment to hear (two lines later) that they are waiting in line, “The kings of Tyrus with their convict list” – Tyrus, the city of Tyre, having been found guilty by the judgement of the Lord (convict: proved or pronounced guilty, as in “convict to eternal damnation”).131
Guilty of what? Of being not only covetous but the cause of covetousness in others, of gratifying the covetous and of profiting from their covetousness. “With your pockets well protected at last”: glad to hear it, but their pockets are in need of protection.
Guilty of what would now be called conspicuous consumption or consumerism, a fast-fed greed that supposes that it can float free of the terrible ancient verb “consume”, a verb that utters its fierce condemnation throughout Ezekiel.
Guilty of such a commodification as exults in its wealth of modifications. Tyrus is “a merchant of the people for many isles” (27:3). This one chapter includes among Tyrus’s world trade splendours its shipboards of fir trees of Senir; cedars of Lebanon to make masts; oaks of Bashan for oars; ivory from Chittim for benches; and fine linen from Egypt for sails. (Where are the Arabian drums?) It deals in silver, iron, tin, lead, and brass; ivory and ebony; emeralds, and fine linen, and coral, and agate; honey, and oil, and balm; wine and wool; iron, cassia, and calamus; precious clothes; lambs, and rams, and goats; all spices, and all precious stones, and gold; blue clothes, and broidered work, and chests of rich apparel. (Rich apparel, precious clothes, blue clothes, a cut above our modern world and “your basement clothes”.) The recurrent tribute in this chapter of Ezekiel, a tribute full of peril, is “. . . were thy merchants”. All this, with a sense that we haven’t even started yet. With your, and with your, and with your.
These chapters of Ezekiel, with an unmisgiving redundancy that apes the extravagance that it sets down, marvel repeatedly at the city’s “merchandise” and its “merchants”. Tyrus is “thy merchant by reason of the multitude of all kind of riches; with silver, iron, tin, and lead, they traded in thy fairs” (27:12). But wait, there is a force that can outwait the kings of Tyrus: the Lord, he who speaks, through his prophet Ezekiel, of the doom to come: “And they shall make a spoil of thy riches, and make a prey of thy merchandise” (26:12). The prophet speaks unto the prince of Tyrus, a warning delivered (should I leave it by your gate?) against covetousness and this sin’s compact with its fellow-sin, pride:
with thy wisdom and with thine understanding hast thou gotten thee riches, and hast gotten gold and silver into thy treasures: by thy great wisdom and by thy traffick hast thou increased thy riches, and thine heart is lifted up because of thy riches: therefore thus saith the Lord God; Because thou hast set thine heart as the heart of God; behold, therefore will I bring strangers upon thee, the terrible of the nations. (28:4–7)
With thy wisdom and with thine understanding were these riches gained, whereupon wisdom and understanding forgot the Lord God, and so precipitated their own folly and destruction.
What is Tyrus but one huge warehouse of hubris? Its wares are of every kind. Tyrus is “thy merchant by reason of the multitude of the wares of thy making” (27:16), a lavish phrase that is repeated two verses later, as though itself a gesture of conspicuously luxurious consumption. Thy wares, and the multitude of the wares of thy making: where better to see them all than by looking deep in my eyes, “My warehouse eyes”? Warehouse eyes, taking a turn for the worse, can become whorehouse eyes. “Thou hast opened thy feet to every one that passed by, and multiplied thy whoredoms” (Ezekiel 16:25).
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums
Should I leave them by your gate
I can see how someone can leave his drums by your gate, and I can sense the pulse that throbs from “eyes” to “drums” via the disconcertingly different drums that are eardrums.132 But his eyes? Forget about should he leave them by your gate, how could he? The surrealistic glimpse is of body-parts and parcels.
If we try to understand the way in which the phrase “my warehouse eyes” may be not only a riddle but a mystery, we are likely to ask ourselves in what circumstances of language a noun (rather than an adjective) may be found preceding the noun that is “eyes”. Say, a noun with a sense, perhaps, of an occupied space, something that pertains to a house?
Ah, I guess I know with what eyes he gazes upon the sad-eyed lady, even as her eyes look alive with what Ezekiel calls “the desire of thine eyes”: his bedroom eyes. See The Oxford English Dictionary, 3b, from W. H. Auden (1947), “Making bedroom eyes at a beef steak”, flanked by “Italians are bedroom-eyed gigolos” (1959), and by “George’s wife had bedroom eyes” (1967).
The song engages with what it is to be queasily grateful for yet more gifts than wise men bring – or have brought to them. If there is one invitation even more covetable than the glad eye, it is what the lady gives him: the sad eye. As for him:
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums
Should I leave them by your gate
Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?
You think he’s just an errand boy to satisfy your wandering desires.
