Richard Thomas - Why Dylan Matters

He may not study poetry, but the ancient footsteps that are everywhere on “When I Paint My Masterpiece” are also on “Lonesome Day Blues,” one of the songs from the new album that the reporters had just been listening to, and the one that echoes the lines he had adapted from the Roman poet Virgil:

I’m gonna spare the defeated—I’m gonna speak to the crowd

I’m gonna spare the defeated, boys, I’m gonna speak to the crowd

I’m goin’ to teach peace to the conquered

I’m gonna tame the proud.

Dylan, however, was not going to spell things out more than he had already done. That’s not his style. The journalists would have to make that connection for themselves. The interview ended with applause from the twelve satisfied and grateful reporters. “Now I’m gonna go see the Colosseum,” he told them. In reality, this was a highly unlikely proposition, though a drive-by could have happened. In 1965 he and Sara could just have pulled off a visit, but in 2001 Dylan would have been mobbed in such a public and open space. As is often the case with Dylan, he was visiting the song in that moment and in his mind’s eye.

The second verse of “When I Paint My Masterpiece” has the singer in the Colosseum, reusing the rhyme he had come up with for “Goin’ Back to Rome”:

Oh, the hours I’ve spent inside the Coliseum

Dodging lions and wastin’ time

Oh, those mighty kings of the jungle I could hardly stand to see ’em

Yes, it sure has been a long, hard climb

Train wheels runnin’ through the back of my memory

When I ran on the hilltop following a pack of wild geese

Someday, everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody

When I paint my masterpiece

With the fourth line—“It sure has been a long, hard climb”—he looks across the ten short years in which so much had happened since he had set out from his native Minnesota and arrived in Greenwich Village. But what about the next lines? The train wheels running through the back of his memory might seem to take us into another Dylan song, “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” from 1963, when he falls asleep while “riding on a train goin’ west” and is taken back to the days of his youth, and to the first few friends he had back then—by way of a nineteenth-century folk song.

But why does his memory train have him “running on the hilltop following a pack of wild geese”? Clinton Heylin tried to make sense of it: “he has returned in his time machine to Hibbing, remembering a time when he ‘ran on a hilltop following a pack of wild geese.’ ” But it is hard to find space for Hibbing in this song, whose next verse, “I left Rome and landed in Brussels,” would sandwich his hometown on a short plane ride between the capitals of Italy and Belgium. And following geese in Hibbing doesn’t make too much sense, unless the geese were in some classroom at Hibbing High, either during a Latin class or in discussion at the Latin Club. The wild-goose chase to which his memory goes back from the streets of Rome is more likely to refer to one of the favorite stories about ancient Rome, bound to have been on the quiz shows of the Latin Club, in which the sacred geese of the goddess Juno on the Capitoline Hill warned the Romans that invading tribesmen from Gaul were attacking the religious center of Rome. Virgil has the scene, along with other high points of Roman history, Romulus and Remus, the Sabine women, and Tarquin the Proud, on the shield that the hero Aeneas, Rome’s founder, carries into battle in the Aeneid:

And here the silver goose was fluttering

Through gilded porticos cackling that the Gauls were at the gate

“CHANGING OF THE GUARDS” AND THE SOULS OF THE PAST

It would be some years before the streets of Rome, or at least some things Roman, came back into his lyrics, but in one song from the immediate pre-Christian—in some ways not even pre-Christian—phase he can be seen reaching back through the years and the centuries, giving us fragments of worlds, hard to unravel or pin down, but highly evocative. “Changing of the Guards” was put out as the first track of the 1978 album Street Legal. The opening words of the song, and the album, have generally been seen as taking stock, looking back across the years to the beginning of his career in 1962: “Sixteen years / Sixteen banners united over the field.” Asked about these numbers in an interview with Jonathan Cott in November 1978, Dylan—of course—denied the relevance of the math, as he denies any single meaning for his songs. The images, situations, and characters that this song rolls out put it almost beyond overall interpretive reach—“It means something different every time I sing it.” The song proceeds through an array of figures, across fields with the good shepherd grieving, desperate men and desperate women, perhaps the music industry with which he had been dealing in those years: “Merchants and thieves, hungry for power, my last deal gone down,” and later, “Gentlemen he said / I don’t need your organization, I’ve shined your shoes / I’ve moved your mountains and marked your cards.” Just as it can mean something different every time he sings it, so it can mean something different every time I hear him sing it, depending on what images, all generally mysterious, are flashing by.

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