The Storm and a Shelter
Suddenly I turned around and she was standing there
With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair
She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns
“Come in,” she said, “I’ll give ya shelter from the storm.”
(Bob Dylan, “Shelter from the Storm”)
http://vimeo.com/66527863
Above is the title and the epigraph of the paper. Below is page
4. How could you use personal voice to introduce this paper?
Oh my name it means nothin'
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I's taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that land that I live in
Has God on its side
(Dylan, “With God on Our Side”)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfHLYIms97A
The words were not ended ("nothin'"), the pronouns were improperly used ("my name it", "I's")
and the argument began to convince me. In the song, Dylan writes about all the wars of the
United States as if God had ordained them. The irony of this began to penetrate the propaganda
in my head. The social and political songs of Bob Dylan became a window for me. Through that
window, I began to recognize the violence, racism and cruelty inherent in my culture. These
things were not taught in school or on TV.
Thus, my first experience with the poetic songs of Bob Dylan was with his idealistic,
issue-oriented music of the early sixties. These songs provided a counter-point to the things I had
been learning about life and society through schools and other institutions. It was a counter-point
that became clearer as I grew older, read the existentialists, and learned of the horror of
America's action in Vietnam and other places. By the time I reached college, I had begun to
recognize the technocracy that America had become. Through Dylan, I came to see the "pursuit
of truth" through the college education that I had been programmed for as "a matter of machinetooling the young to the needs of our various baroque bureaucracies, corporate, governmental,
military, trade union, educational" (Roszak 16). In college, I chose a major that prepared me to
fit either the corporate or educational bureaucracy; had I dropped that pursuit for even one
quarter, I would have been drafted by the military bureaucracy. My friends (female and male)
gradually began to learn that we were grist for a giant mill; Dylan's words explained our
situations. In "Ballad in Plain D," he sings:
Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask onto me,
"How good, how good does it feel to be free?"
And I answer them most mysteriously
"Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?"
http://vimeo.com/64007692
Dylan's image "chains of the skyway" extends beyond the boundaries of social and
political control into the realm of love relationships between men and women. The song, "Ballad
in Plain D" is a song about unhappy love; the young lovers (the speaker of the song and his
young girlfriend) are separated from each other by the girl's mother and sister. The mother and
sister are conventionally repressive. The failure of the love relationship is described in the
following lines:
And so it did happen like it could have been foreseen
The timeless explosion of fantasy's dream.
At the peak of the night, the king and the queen
Tumbled all down in pieces.
(Dylan, “Ballad in Plain D")
The failure of this love relationship "could have been foreseen" because it takes place in a culture
that is well prepared to accept unhappy love. Denis deRougement argues that unhappy love is the
fantasy dream of Western culture. He writes:
Love and death, a fatal love--in those phrases is summed up,
if not the
whole of poetry, at least whatever is popular, whatever is universally moving in
European literature, alike as regards to the oldest legends and the sweetest songs.
Happy love has no history. Romance only comes into existence where love is
fatal, frowned upon and doomed by life itself. What stirs lyrical poets to their
finest flights is neither the delight of the senses nor the fruitful contentment of the
settled couple; not the satisfaction of love, but its passion. And passion means
suffering. (15)
The lovers in "Ballad in Plain D" are culturally fated to end unhappily. The image of lovers as
"king" and "queen" hints at the courtly love tradition that lies behind deRougemont's
generalizations. The male lover is rejected and alone. He describes himself and his idealized lost
love in these lines:
The wind knocks my window, the room it is wet
The words to say I'm sorry, I haven't found yet.
I think of her often and hope whoever she's met
Will be fully aware of how precious she is.
(Dylan, "Ballad in Plain D")
If my generation could expect an alternative to conventional understandings about social
and political realities from Dylan, could we not also expect an alternative to conventional view
of romantic love? Yet, "Ballad in Plain D" presents an unhappy love story in which the main
character is a rejected male who experiences pain as a result of his love. And while the rejected
male character doesn't actually enjoy his pain, he is at least independent and emotionally intact.
"Ballad in Plain D" is like many early Dylan love songs in its attachment to the
traditional conception of romantic love. The ballad, "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" presents
the stereotypic male wanderer who leaves a woman and a failed relationship behind. One can
almost imagine a Byronic wanderer bound for the darkly unknown in these lines:
I'm walkin' down that long, lonesome road, babe
Where I'm bound, I can't tell
But goodbye's too good a word, gal
So I'll just say fare thee well.
(Dylan, "Don't Think Twice, Its All Right")
http://vimeo.com/39267368
The male lover does the rejecting in this song, while he admits that the woman has treated him
kindly, he asserts that she has "Kinda wasted my precious time." At the end of the song, the male
is free to leave.
Other early love songs imply that the rejected lover, who is still the main character,
desires revenge on an idealized and aloof woman. "Like a Rolling Stone" from the famous
Highway 61 Revisited album presents such a picture. The song is apparently related from the
point of view of a rejected male. The subject of the song is a woman who has fallen from a high
position--perhaps a position powerful enough to reject a male suitor. The speaker describes the
woman's past power in these lines:
Once upon a time you dressed so fine
You threw bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?
People'd call, say, "Beware, doll,
You’re bound to fall"
You thought they were all kiddin' you.
http://video.bobdylan.com/desktop.html
But this woman has fallen; she no longer has a voice--"Now you don't talk so loud," nor does she
have her pride--"Now you don't seem so proud/About having to be scroungin' for your next
meal." The song strongly implies that male characters were used to hanging out in the streets,
alone, scrounging for meals; women "have to get used to it." Getting used to it involves
compromising with male characters such as "the mystery tramp" and "Napoleon in rags." This
compromise is sexual.
The speaker's desire for revenge is clear in the taunting refrain. The speaker asks the
woman,
How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone
The aloof, rejecting woman has been debased, stripped of her power and forced to live on the
streets like a man. She must now live in a world which Susan Griffin calls "the world of
pornography." This world "is a world of male gestures and male language and a male ethos. It is
an atmosphere which belongs to men's clubs and locker rooms, to the lobbies of brothels, to the
private male conversation, to fathers and sons." (52) This is the male street world of "Like a
Rolling Stone." If early Dylan social and political songs reject the world of the fathers, the world
of sons like the "mystery tramp" and "Napoleon in rags” is equally reductionist toward women.
The same kind of formerly-aloof-now-fallen woman is described by an unhappy lover in
the song "Just Like a Woman." This woman, named "Baby," has new clothes but the speaker
realizes, "her ribbons and her bows/ Have fallen from her curls." These lines imply a loss of
innocence or grace. The woman in this song is reduced to a baby and a little girl. The speaker
describes her fallen state with these lines:
She takes [later fakes] just like a woman,
She makes love just like a woman,
And she aches just like a woman
But she breaks just like a little girl.
(Dylan, "Just Like a Woman")
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIBxQ1SAXe0
The woman in this song is left alone "With her fog, her amphetamine and her pearls." Like the
woman portrayed in "Like a Rolling Stone," she is an image drawn from the pornographic male
mind. She is a broken woman; the rejected lover has his revenge.
I can remember nights of intensely believing that the image of love presented in songs
like these was an image of reality. Perhaps I too felt rejected by a woman, or worse yet, feared
such rejection too much to act. It seems clear, however, that Dylan was under the influence of
cultural images of romantic love. The women in these early songs are dominated, broken, fallen
from power. The speaker of these songs is the rejected lover of the courtly love tradition. Men in
these songs, according to Emily Toth, "are mobile, dominant and exploring... concerned with
keeping power over women" (?). If Dylan had provided an enlightening view of the repressive
oppression of the American technocracy, he had not presented a concomitantly liberating view of
romantic love.
But there is another kind of woman character in Dylan's music. She is not so common in
the early work, but she can be glimpsed there. In the song "To Ramona" from Another Side of
Bob Dylan, a different view of romantic love begins to emerge. The speaker of this song is a
male who tenderly advises a woman he has parted from. He says,
Ramona, come closer,
Shut softly your watery eyes.
The pangs of your sadness
Shall pass as your senses will rise.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr4WBR2xUng
The speaker advises Ramona to awaken her sensuality and to trust it. She is unhappy, not so
much because of rejection in love, but because she has to live in a city. The speaker describes the
city in these lines:
The flowers of the city
Though breath-like, get death-like at times.
And there's no use in tryin'
T' deal with the dyin'
Though I cannot explain that in lines.
The city appears, "breath- like," to contain life; it contains instead death. Ramona is out of place
in the city. The speaker says,
But it grieves my heart, love,
To see you tryin' to be a part of
A world that just don't exist.
It's all a dream, babe,
A vacuum, a scheme, babe,
That sucks you into feelin' like this.
In this song, the male speaker does not actually reject the woman; rather the woman rejects the
city, the society of the city and symbolically, the technocracy. The speaker advises her to return
to the country, to nature. She is not a dominated woman who pays a price for rejecting a male
suitor. She is a woman who understands the evils of society.
This kind of woman figure grows stronger in Dylan's later, more imagistic, more surreal
work. She appears as an enlightening presence in "Love Minus Zero/No Limit." This is not a
song about failed love; it is a song where man learns from the enlightening understanding of a
woman. The speaker describes his lover with these lines:
My love she speaks like silence,
Without ideals or violence.
She doesn't have to say she's faithful,
Yet she's true like ice, like fire.
People carry roses,
Make promises by the hours
My love laughs like the flowers,
Valentines can't buy her.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xneaNKGqTm8
The speaker's beloved is beyond the confines of the male-dominated technocracy; she has
avoided two of its most dangerous tenets--idealism and violence. The lack of idealism may
sound at first like a negative trait, but it is a rejection of idealism in the Platonic sense. The
woman in this song rejects the patriarchal notion that the "real" is inferior to a dreamed
abstraction called the "ideal." She is, therefore, a realist. Like Ramona, she is linked with nature,
and unlike the reduced woman in "Like a Rolling Stone," she is not for sale.
This woman not only rejects Platonic idealism, she also rejects the system of reasoning
that supports such belief. She reduces logical reasoning--the reasoning of technocracy--to
absurdity; this reduction is clear in these lines:
In the dime stores and bus stations,
People talk of situations.
Read books, repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall.
Some speak of the future,
My love she speaks softly.
She knows there is no success like failure
And that failure's no success at all.
To the visionary beloved in "Love Minus Zero/No Limit," conclusions, supported by quotations
drawn from reading are equivalent to graffiti on a bathroom wall. Planning for a future in the
technocracy is absurd. Success, one of the patriarchal technocracy's prime values, is true failure
and therefore, also absurd.
This woman's character represents a shift away from the aloof beloved of the courtly love
tradition. She does not reject her lover because "She knows too much to argue or judge." Rather,
she rejects logical reasoning, the ideal/real dichotomy and the values of patriarchal, technocratic
society. The lover in these songs does not seek revenge--he is not the aggressive, posturing male
of the romantic tradition. He is confused. He looks to his beloved for a vision of life liberated
from the absurdity that grows out of the conventions of society.
The lover in later, surrealistic Dylan love songs is like the "60's" male described by
Robert Bly as a counter-point to the male of the "50's.” Bly writes:
During the 60's, another sort of male appeared. The waste and anguish of the
Vietnam war made men question what an adult male really is. And the women's
movement encouraged men to actually look at women, forcing them to become
conscious of certain things that the 50's male tended to avoid. As men began to
look at women and their concerns, some men began to see their own feminine
side and pay attention to it. (37)
The male character that emerges from Dylan's more mature love songs appears to have some
understanding of his feminine side. He does not lust after revenge; he is thoughtful and gentle,
but he is not free of the chains of technocratic society. He is something of a lost soul who cannot
find a way out of his dilemma; he relies on his beloved for direction.
One of Dylan's most challenging and mature love songs, "Visions of Johanna," brings the
conflict between the real and the ideal into sharp focus. The male lover's ideal is Johanna--a
vision removed from him. Reality is the province of Louise--earthy and female. The setting of
the song invokes the starkness of existential alienation. The first verse reinforces these points
with these lines:
Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're tryin' to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it.
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin' you to defy it.
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there's nothin', nothin' really to turn off.
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7KzB16Ik&list=RDi8z7KzB16Ik#t=6
Louise represents a real woman entwined physically with the body of her lover. The male
speaker of the song seeks the ideal, which is a creation of the male mind. The speaker's ideal
woman, like the venerated ideal of the courtly love tradition, does not exist.
Male images in the song are "little boy lost," who "takes himself so seriously./ He brags
of his misery and likes to live dangerously." This little boy is like the traditional romantic lover-the lover of earlier Dylan songs. He is out of place here: "He's sure got a lot of gall to be so
useless and all/Muttering small talk at the wall." The speaker of this song has no time for this
kind of posturing. He is seriously lost. He laments: "How can I explain? /Oh, it's so hard to get
on/And these visions of Johanna, they kept me up past the dawn."
The third male presence is "the peddler" of the last verse. He affects understanding of the
"real" world, but is deflated by Louise's rebuke in these lines:
The peddler now speaks to the countess who's pretending to care for him
Sayin', "Name me someone who's not a parasite and I'll go out and say a prayer for
him."
But like Louise always says,
"You can't look at much, can ya man?"
The implication is that Louise can look at anything; she lives in the real physical world. The
males in the song, who may be facets of the same male persona, live in an unreal world--the
world of ideals. Ideals are a male invention, and they are not satisfying.
The male speaker in "Visions of Johanna" is alienated from the physical world and from
his dream lover. He is lost in the storm of the world, and he does not know how to find meaning
in his life. Louise advocates absorption in physical reality, but she is not the beloved. She
possesses understanding herself, but she is unable to lead the speaker of the poem to any
understanding.
The image of the beloved as a visionary leader who provides mind-pathways to a new
way of living emerges most strongly in the classic ballad, "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands."
This twenty-five minute song has been an enigma to rock critics since it was written. Much of
the speculation around it centers on who the sad-eyed lady really is. Did Dylan mean to portray
Jackie Kennedy? Or Joan Baez?
This kind of speculation is beside the point. Dylan has created an image of woman as
visionary leader, capable of showing the way away from the restrictive and violent values of the
patriarchal technocracy. This woman is mysteriously beautiful and completely unmoved by the
machinations of traditional males. The opening stanza addresses and describes her.
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?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-VIygLO4Is (Joan Baez version)
The images in this stanza suggest spirituality: a spirituality which cannot be buried by male
missionaries.
The song contains two types of refrain. The refrain that appears at the end of each verse
defines the role of the male suitor. This male needs to be led away from the destructive values of
society. He is, however, in awe of the sad-eyed lady. He can see that she rebuffs all advances
made by traditional men. Thus, the refrain after each verse contains these lines:
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 images of spirituality continue. The beloved in this song possesses a spirituality that is
beyond reach of traditional men. The lover does not know whether to be active or passive in
pursuit of love and spirituality. The second type of refrain is repeated twice in each verse. This
one-line refrain illustrates the scope of the sad-eyed lady's rejection of society. Each line begins
with the phrase, "Who among them." "Them" of course, means traditional societal males. None
among them could ever hope to "bury," "carry," "outguess," "impress," "persuade," "employ," or
"destroy" the sad-eyed lady. Society may want her, but she wants nothing to do with society. She
is a visionary who knows a better way.
The fourth verse provides the clearest images of both the woman's rejection of society
and the values inherent in the new society that she can lead men to. In this stanza, economic
leaders try to approach the mysterious lady in these lines:
Oh, the farmers and the businessmen, they all did decide
To show you the dead angels they used to hide.
But why did they pick you to sympathize with their side?
Oh, how could they ever mistake you?
They wish you'd accept blame for the farm,
But with the sea at your feet and the phony false alarm
And with the child of the hoodlum wrapped in your arms,
How could they ever, ever persuade you?
Farmers and businessmen, agents of a destructive and deadly economy, have killed spirituality
and hidden the corpses. Their destructive view is rejected completely. This lady is far beyond
them, linked with nature, helping things to grow. She has no time for the destructiveness of
technocracy. It is a mistake to think that she does. Her world involves "gentleness now, which
you just can't help but show;" she has a "saint- like face" and a "ghost-like soul." She cannot be
destroyed.
The two types of love songs of Bob Dylan involve two different views of men and
women. In the earliest, least mature songs, traditional love and suffering are linked. Men seek
revenge against rejecting, aloof women. Men are free and active; women are reduced to the
dominated woman of the male pornographic fantasy. But the later, more complex songs present a
different view of both women and men. If the old social and political songs recognize the evils of
technocratic society and despaired about the individual's places in such a world, these later love
songs recognize the same evils. They do not, however, despair. These songs provide for a way
out of the existential malaise that accompanies the recognition that your society is destructive
and brutal. Women lead the way to rejection of patriarchal ideals. Women become proud and
dignified--almost goddess-like. Males are lost in the dregs of the patriarchy; they find that the
patriarchal ways of acting they have learned are inadequate. They need to be led to a new kind of
life. The bonding of the female/male love relationship provides the impetus and the energy for
the journey away from the technocracy.
This journey is not easy and the end of it is not clearly seen. But the journey must be
made. In the song "Shelter from the Storm," Dylan chronicles the difficulties and ambiguities of
moving away from the destructive "world of steel-eyed death and men fighting to be warm." The
positions of the male speaker of the song and his female love are defined in the first verse:
T'was in another lifetime, one of toil and blood
When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud,
I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form.
"Come in," she said, "I'll give ya shelter from the storm."
The male is lost in the values of a male dominated society; these values offer no hope, nor do
they provide substance or form for the male. He seeks shelter in a female realm, a place where it
is "always safe and warm."
The storm of male repressiveness and violence swirls on throughout the song. Males, like
the preacher, the deputy and the undertaker are hopeless creatures:
Well the deputy walks on hard nails, and the preacher rides a mount,
But nothing really matters much, it's doom alone that counts
And the one-eyed undertaker blows a feudal horn.
"Come in," she said, "I'll give you shelter from the storm."
Our society, descended from feudal, courtly and patriarchal traditions has but one result--doom.
Shelter from this doom can be reached only through the female.
But what kind of salvation does female shelter give? The speaker carries the comparison
between himself and Christ throughout the song into the ninth verse. There, he says, "In a little
hilltop village they gambled for my clothes/I bargained for salvation and she gave me a lethal
dose." Following the visionary female, it seems, can lead the male to salvation--and death.
The last verse places the sheltering woman on the same level as the male deity. The song
ends with these lines:
I'm livin' in a foreign country, but I'm bound to cross the line,
Beauty walks a razor's edge, someday I'll make it mine.
If I could just turn back the clock to when God and her were born.
"Come in," she said, "I'll give ya shelter from the storm."
The male must live in a foreign country of the mind if he rejects the violent and destructive
values of his culture. Following the lead of the female, visionary, goddess-like woman is
dangerous, but it must be attempted. The wish at the end of the song is for harmony, beauty.
The female beloved in Dylan's love songs has grown from a reduced and dominated
figure to a revolutionary goddess who can take men away from the "crown of thorns" that is
their patriarchal birthright. The male has grown from a self-assured, posturing dominator to a
suffering lost soul. The suffering and alienation are direct results of the male recognition that he
has been and still is closely involved with a brutal society. If he is to find peace and shelter, he
must follow the lead of women, and work for balance and unity in life. Thus, both the social
action songs of Bob Dylan, and his love songs ultimately seek alternatives to male-dominated
societal fantasies. Violence, racism, economic brutality and domination over women are
patriarchal and technocratic values that must be undermined and destroyed. If men are to be
anything more than "old men with broken teeth, stranded without love," then they must follow
where women lead them. If Dylan cannot see the result of such a journey clearly, at least he
knows that it must be made. He knows that the male-dominated technocracy is the most violent
and destructive storm in the world; he knows that women hold the key to the shelter.
WORKS CITED
Bly, Robert. Interview. "What Men Really Want?" By Keith Thompson. New Age, May, 1982,
31-51.
deRougement, Denis. Love in the Western World. New York: Harper, 1956.
Dylan, Bob. "Ballad in Plain D," Another Side of Bob Dylan, Columbia, CL 2193, 1964.
Dylan, Bob. "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Columbia, CL
1986, 1963.
Dylan, Bob. "Just Like a Woman," Blonde on Blonde, Columbia, C 2 S 841, 1966.
Dylan, Bob. "Like a Rolling Stone," Highway 61 Revisited,
Columbia, CL 2389, 1965.
Dylan, Bob. "Shelter From the Storm," Blood on the Tracks, Columbia, PC 33235, 1974.
Dylan, Bob. "With God on Our Side," The Times They Are A--Changin', Columbia, CL 2105,
1964.
Griffin, Susan. Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revenge Against Nature. New York: Harper
Colophon Books, 1981.
Roszak, Theodore. The Making of Counter-Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and
Its Youthful Opposition. New York: Anchor Books, 1969.
Toth, Emily. ??