Dylan's Visions of Sin by Christopher Ricks Page A

with its first three rhyme-words, as simple as can be in the mystery of such spells, three by
three, with the triple rhymes interlacing assonantally with the triple “like” ( eyes like / like rhymes / like chimes ):
    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?
    “Times”, “rhymes”, and “chimes” are rhymes because they are chimes that come several times. (“And your eyes like smoke”: a chime
from Smoke Gets in Your Eyes .) “Your prayers like rhymes”: rhymes being like prayers because of what it is to trust in an answer to one’s prayer. With his voicing, Dylan
does what the seventeenth-century poet Abraham Cowley did withdifferent rhythmical weightings for this same triplet of rhymes in his Ode: Upon Liberty . “If
life should a well-ordered poem be”, then it should avoid monotony:
    The matter shall be grave, the numbers loose and free.
    It shall not keep one setled pace of time,
    In the same tune it shall not always chime,
    Nor shall each day just to his neighbour rhime.
    Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands uses the rhyme on rhyme poignantly. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go uses it ruefully, in singing of “Crickets talking back and
forth in rhyme”. For all rhyme is a form of talking back and forth, something that crickets are in a particularly good position to understand, rubbing back and forth, stridulating away.
“I could stay with you forever and never realize the time”: that is Dylan’s rhyming line upon rhyme, and this is the way in which the loving thought is realized.
“Forever” is so entirely positive, but then so, on this occasion, is the negative word with which it rhymes, “never”.
    Even as a yearning is realized – which is not the same as a hope being realized in actuality – in Highlands :
    Well my heart’s in the Highlands wherever I roam
    That’s where I’ll be when I get called home
    The wind, it whispers to the buckeyed trees in rhyme
    Well my heart’s in the Highlands
    I can only get there one step at a time
    The whisper here rises to a determination when “time” comes, in due time, to consummate the rhyme with “rhyme”; and furthermore when “roam”
finds itself not only rhyming with “home” (“roam” takes you away – “wherever I roam” – but “home” calls you home again) but when
“roam” is rotated into “rhyme”, a tender turn. But then rhyme, too, works “one step at a time”, the feet being metrical. Hopkins:
    His sheep seem’d to come from it as they stept,
    One and then one, along their walks, and kept
    Their changing feet in flicker all the time
    And to their feet the narrow bells gave rhyme.
    ( Richard )
    Like Hopkins, Dylan fits together rhymes in favour of rhyme. In the seventeenth century Ben Jonson notoriously, in mock self-contradiction, gave the world A Fit of
Rhyme against Rhyme . Dylan is well aware of the hostility that rhymes can evoke, in readers (or listeners), and between the rhymes themselves. For although there is a place where rhymes can
whisper (think of it as the Highlands), there are ugly places where rhyme needs to grate hideously, to make you yearn to break free, to change:
    You’ve had enough hatred
    Your bones are breaking, can’t find nothing sacred
    ( Ye Shall Be Changed )
    Dylan can be a master of war. The friction of “hatred” against “sacred” sets your teeth on edge, or makes you grit them. “You know Satan sometimes
comes as a man of peace.”
    Rhyme can give shape to individual lines and to a song or poem as a whole, which is where rhyme-schemes come in. A change in the rhyming pattern can intimate that the song or the poem is having
to draw to a close, is fulfilling its arc. Life is short, art is long: true, but art is not interminable. Think back to early days with Dylan’s endings, and to how he chose to