end Just Like
Tom Thumb’s Blues. The last two lines:
I’m going back to New York City
I do believe I’ve had enough
End of song. And it feels like a due ending for the perfectly simple reason that, in this final verse (one that, in closing, starts out “I started out”), all the
lines (odd and even) rhyme – something that is not true of any previous verses.
I started out on burgundy
But soon hit the harder stuff
Everybody said they’d stand behind me
When the game got rough
But the joke was on me
There was nobody even there to call my bluff
I’m going back to New York City
I do believe I’ve had enough
The other verses rhyme only the even lines. You don’t have to be conscious of it, but it works on your ear to tell you that there’s
something different about this final verse: all its lines are rhyming away. Whether or not you consciously record this, you register it. An ending, not a stopping. And (“I’m going back
to New York City”) it has an allusive comic relation to his first album, where the first of his own two songs, Talking New York, has as its ending:
So long, New York
Howdy, East Orange
Why was that such a wittily wry ending? First, because of the Orange as against an apple. New York is the Big Apple, so there’s a subterranean semantic rhyming going on,
sense rather than sound, Big Apple versus East Orange. But the ending depends, too, upon the fact that “orange” famously is a word that does not have a rhyme in English. Dylan was asked
once about this:
Do you have a rhyme for “orange”?
“What, I didn’t hear that.”
A rhyme for “orange”.
“A-ha . . . just a rhyme for ‘orange’?”
It is true you were censored for singing on the “Ed Sullivan Show”?
“I’ll tell you the rhyme in a minute.” 62
Apple , on the other hand, is easy as pie. Dylan uses the awry feeling at the particular part of such a blues song, where the last throw-away moment throws away rhyme,
and goes in instead for a sloping-off movement. “Howdy, East Orange”. So long, rhyme.
The reason that Andrew Marvell’s lines about the orange are so delectable is that the poetical inversion is not lapsed into, but called for:
He hangs in shades the orange bright,
Like golden lamps in a green night.
( Bermudas )
The inversion of “the orange bright” is justified by there not being a rhyme for orange anyway, and if Marvell had said, “He hangs in
shades the bright orange”, he’d have had to set out for a mountain range a long way from Bermuda. (That’s right, Blorenge, in Wales.) Even the great rhymester Robert Browning
never ventured to end a line of verse with the word “orange”.
There’s a deft comedy that Dylan avails himself of here, in making something from the simple fact that some words do and other words don’t rhyme. True, the voice that exults in
forcing “hers” into rhyming rapport with “yours” (“I don’t wanna be hers, I wanna be yers”) is one that never rests when it comes to wresting and
wrestling, but there are limits . . .
Emotionally Yours : the phrase signs off, the usual formula unusually worded and unusually used. The song takes the great commonplaces of rhyme and makes them not quite what you would have
expected. But then love is like that in its comings and goings. The first rhyme in Emotionally Yours is find me / remind me – itself a reminder that every rhyme is an act of
finding and of reminding (that’s what a rhyme is, after all). Later there is rock me / lock me , this not locked into position (no feeling of being trapped), and with “rock
me” – “Come baby, rock me” – having the lilt of a lullaby, not the drive of rock. It’s a song about how someone can be indeed “emotionally yours” but
not yours in every way (not domestically, for instance – not available for marriage, for who knows what reasons?). Every verse signs off, as if in a letter at once intimate, cunning, and
formal, “be emotionally
Tom Thumb’s Blues. The last two lines:
I’m going back to New York City
I do believe I’ve had enough
End of song. And it feels like a due ending for the perfectly simple reason that, in this final verse (one that, in closing, starts out “I started out”), all the
lines (odd and even) rhyme – something that is not true of any previous verses.
I started out on burgundy
But soon hit the harder stuff
Everybody said they’d stand behind me
When the game got rough
But the joke was on me
There was nobody even there to call my bluff
I’m going back to New York City
I do believe I’ve had enough
The other verses rhyme only the even lines. You don’t have to be conscious of it, but it works on your ear to tell you that there’s
something different about this final verse: all its lines are rhyming away. Whether or not you consciously record this, you register it. An ending, not a stopping. And (“I’m going back
to New York City”) it has an allusive comic relation to his first album, where the first of his own two songs, Talking New York, has as its ending:
So long, New York
Howdy, East Orange
Why was that such a wittily wry ending? First, because of the Orange as against an apple. New York is the Big Apple, so there’s a subterranean semantic rhyming going on,
sense rather than sound, Big Apple versus East Orange. But the ending depends, too, upon the fact that “orange” famously is a word that does not have a rhyme in English. Dylan was asked
once about this:
Do you have a rhyme for “orange”?
“What, I didn’t hear that.”
A rhyme for “orange”.
“A-ha . . . just a rhyme for ‘orange’?”
It is true you were censored for singing on the “Ed Sullivan Show”?
“I’ll tell you the rhyme in a minute.” 62
Apple , on the other hand, is easy as pie. Dylan uses the awry feeling at the particular part of such a blues song, where the last throw-away moment throws away rhyme,
and goes in instead for a sloping-off movement. “Howdy, East Orange”. So long, rhyme.
The reason that Andrew Marvell’s lines about the orange are so delectable is that the poetical inversion is not lapsed into, but called for:
He hangs in shades the orange bright,
Like golden lamps in a green night.
( Bermudas )
The inversion of “the orange bright” is justified by there not being a rhyme for orange anyway, and if Marvell had said, “He hangs in
shades the bright orange”, he’d have had to set out for a mountain range a long way from Bermuda. (That’s right, Blorenge, in Wales.) Even the great rhymester Robert Browning
never ventured to end a line of verse with the word “orange”.
There’s a deft comedy that Dylan avails himself of here, in making something from the simple fact that some words do and other words don’t rhyme. True, the voice that exults in
forcing “hers” into rhyming rapport with “yours” (“I don’t wanna be hers, I wanna be yers”) is one that never rests when it comes to wresting and
wrestling, but there are limits . . .
Emotionally Yours : the phrase signs off, the usual formula unusually worded and unusually used. The song takes the great commonplaces of rhyme and makes them not quite what you would have
expected. But then love is like that in its comings and goings. The first rhyme in Emotionally Yours is find me / remind me – itself a reminder that every rhyme is an act of
finding and of reminding (that’s what a rhyme is, after all). Later there is rock me / lock me , this not locked into position (no feeling of being trapped), and with “rock
me” – “Come baby, rock me” – having the lilt of a lullaby, not the drive of rock. It’s a song about how someone can be indeed “emotionally yours” but
not yours in every way (not domestically, for instance – not available for marriage, for who knows what reasons?). Every verse signs off, as if in a letter at once intimate, cunning, and
formal, “be emotionally
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