your sheet-metal memory of Cannery Row”, rings true because of the memory within this song that takes you back to the
phrase “your sheets like metal”, and because of the curious undulation that can be heard, and is memorable, in “memory” and “Cannery”. And Cannery Row is itself
a memory, since the allusion to John Steinbeck’s novel has to be a memory that the singer shares with his listeners, or else it couldn’t work as an allusion.
As for rhyming on “forget”: True Love Tends to Forget , aware that rhyming depends on memory, has “forget” begin in the arms of “regret”, and end, far
out, in “Tibet”. The Dylai Lama. And True Love Tends to Forget rhymes “again” and “when”, enacting what the song is talking about, for rhyme is an again / when . And rhyme may be a kind of loving, two things becoming one, yet not losing their own identity.
Or there is Dylan’s loving to rhyme, as all the poets have loved to do, on the word “free”. If Dogs Run Free does little else than gambol with the rhyme (but what a good
deal that proves to be). Or there are “free” and “memory” in Mr. Tambourine Man .
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow
There the word “free” can conjure up a freedom that is not irresponsible,and “memory” asks you not to forget, but to have in
mind – whether consciously or not – another element of the rhyme: trustworthy memory.
Dylan wouldn’t have had to learn these stops and steps of the mind from previous poets, since the effect would be the same whether the parallel is a source or an analogue. 58 But Dylan is drawing on the same sources of power, when he sings in Abandoned Love :
I march in the parade of liberty
But as long as I love you, I’m not free
– as was John Milton when he protested against irresponsible protesters:
That bawl for freedom in their senseless mood,
And still revolt when truth would set them free.
Licence they mean when they cry liberty.
(Sonnet XII)
Licence is different from liberty, don’t forget – and Milton makes this real to us, by rhyming “free” with “liberty”. Licence is not rhymed
by Milton (though it grates against “senseless”), and is sullen about rhyming at all. Does it rhyme? In a word, no? But whatever Milton’s sense of the matter, my sense is that he
would never have sunk to poetic licence, though Dylan could well have risen to it.
What did Milton himself mean by “Licence they mean when they cry liberty”? That true freedom acknowledges responsibility. The choice is always between the good kind of bonds and the
bad kind, not the choice of some chimerical world that is without bonds. That would be licence. D. H. Lawrence warned against idolizing freedom, happily alive to rhyming in his prose even as poetry
is: “Thank God I’m not free, any more than a rooted tree is free.”
Milton described his choice of blank verse for his epic as “an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome
and modern bondage of rhyming”. But he knew that there are such things as good bonds, and he valued rhymes all the more because he knew that their effect could be all the greater if not every
single line had to rhyme. T. S. Eliot began the final paragraph of his Reflections on “Vers Libre” (1917): “And this liberation from rhyme might be as well a liberation of
rhyme. Freed from its exacting task of supporting lame verse, it could be applied with greater effect where it is most needed.” 59
A particular pleasure attaches to rhyming on the word “rhyme”. 60 Keats:
Just like that bird am I in loss of time
Whene’er I venture on the stream of rhyme
( To Charles Cowden Clarke ) 61
The beginning of Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands is superb in what it does
phrase “your sheets like metal”, and because of the curious undulation that can be heard, and is memorable, in “memory” and “Cannery”. And Cannery Row is itself
a memory, since the allusion to John Steinbeck’s novel has to be a memory that the singer shares with his listeners, or else it couldn’t work as an allusion.
As for rhyming on “forget”: True Love Tends to Forget , aware that rhyming depends on memory, has “forget” begin in the arms of “regret”, and end, far
out, in “Tibet”. The Dylai Lama. And True Love Tends to Forget rhymes “again” and “when”, enacting what the song is talking about, for rhyme is an again / when . And rhyme may be a kind of loving, two things becoming one, yet not losing their own identity.
Or there is Dylan’s loving to rhyme, as all the poets have loved to do, on the word “free”. If Dogs Run Free does little else than gambol with the rhyme (but what a good
deal that proves to be). Or there are “free” and “memory” in Mr. Tambourine Man .
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow
There the word “free” can conjure up a freedom that is not irresponsible,and “memory” asks you not to forget, but to have in
mind – whether consciously or not – another element of the rhyme: trustworthy memory.
Dylan wouldn’t have had to learn these stops and steps of the mind from previous poets, since the effect would be the same whether the parallel is a source or an analogue. 58 But Dylan is drawing on the same sources of power, when he sings in Abandoned Love :
I march in the parade of liberty
But as long as I love you, I’m not free
– as was John Milton when he protested against irresponsible protesters:
That bawl for freedom in their senseless mood,
And still revolt when truth would set them free.
Licence they mean when they cry liberty.
(Sonnet XII)
Licence is different from liberty, don’t forget – and Milton makes this real to us, by rhyming “free” with “liberty”. Licence is not rhymed
by Milton (though it grates against “senseless”), and is sullen about rhyming at all. Does it rhyme? In a word, no? But whatever Milton’s sense of the matter, my sense is that he
would never have sunk to poetic licence, though Dylan could well have risen to it.
What did Milton himself mean by “Licence they mean when they cry liberty”? That true freedom acknowledges responsibility. The choice is always between the good kind of bonds and the
bad kind, not the choice of some chimerical world that is without bonds. That would be licence. D. H. Lawrence warned against idolizing freedom, happily alive to rhyming in his prose even as poetry
is: “Thank God I’m not free, any more than a rooted tree is free.”
Milton described his choice of blank verse for his epic as “an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome
and modern bondage of rhyming”. But he knew that there are such things as good bonds, and he valued rhymes all the more because he knew that their effect could be all the greater if not every
single line had to rhyme. T. S. Eliot began the final paragraph of his Reflections on “Vers Libre” (1917): “And this liberation from rhyme might be as well a liberation of
rhyme. Freed from its exacting task of supporting lame verse, it could be applied with greater effect where it is most needed.” 59
A particular pleasure attaches to rhyming on the word “rhyme”. 60 Keats:
Just like that bird am I in loss of time
Whene’er I venture on the stream of rhyme
( To Charles Cowden Clarke ) 61
The beginning of Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands is superb in what it does
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