The warning voice of the innocent boy is no longer here, because Dylan has chosen not to remain a boy. The words, the music, the tones of voice speak of regret, melancholy, a sense of inevitable farewell, mixed with sly humor, some rage, and a sense of simple joy. In this album, he is as personal and as universal as Yeats or Blake speaking for himself, risking that dangerous opening of the veins, he speaks for us all. Only the artists can help the poor land again to feel.Īnd here is Dylan, bringing feeling back home. There is no politician anywhere who can move anyone to hope the plague recedes, but it is not dead, and the statesmen are as irrelevant as the tarnished statues in the public parks. The signposts have been smashed the maps are blurred. We live in the smoky landscape now, as the exhausted troops seek the roads home. Remember that he gave us voice, When our innocence died forever, Bob Dylan made that moment into art. So forget the clenched young scholars who analyze his rhymes into dust. In the teargas in 1968 Chicago, they hurled Dylan at the walls of the great hotels, where the infected drew the blinds, and their butlers ordered up the bayonets. But of all the poets, Dylan is the one who has most clearly taken the rolled sea and put it in a glass.Įarly on, he warned us, he gave many of us voice, he told us about the hard rain that was going to fall, and how it would carry plague. He was not the only one, of course he is not the only one now. He had remained, in front of us, or writing from the north country, and remained true.
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