On Dylan's HardRain

Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

 One of the most perfect of all American folk songs, “Hard Rain” approaches the prophetic, calling our nation to repentance regarding race, wealth and poverty, and pollution. The song is set in the action of a parent, a mother, asking her troubadour son a series of questions about his travels in the world and in America. The ensuing dialogue fulfills the purpose of folk music that verged on socialism, aiming to make humanity and our nation more just regarding certain issues (We usually do not think of the socialist-leaning implications of songs like “This land is your land” when we hear them. It is ironic in our love of America, because of our free market and individualism, that concern for the common good can be confused with socialism. For those who disdain American folk for this reason we can indicate that these are not politicians but musicians, and to ask, “Where, then are your prophetic poets?”

Now the year is very early, 1962, and yet here we already see the generational theme that was to become central to the late sixties, as found in the Who song “My Generation” and elsewhere. Gordon Lightfoot would later repeat the dramatic scene of troubadour son to parent in his song Sit Down, Young Stranger, almost making this a folk theme category. As has been noted, the pattern and the first two lines are suggested by a ballad out of the collection of Child, “Lord Randall, but Dylan blows away anything in lyric tradition, period. He has already written “Blowing in the Wind.” There is an interview statement from Dylan himself that he wrote the song in 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, but Clinton Heylin figured out that it was written before then, and there is nothing in the song that suggests a concern with nuclear annihilation or foreign policy. “Hard Rain” is rather a domestic policy song. Dylan commented that “it doesn’t really matter where a song comes from. It just matters where it takes you.” And so, we do interpretation rather than music history, although again important clues are often suggested by the work of the historians. In any case, foreign policy is inseparable from domestic. The song is timeless, and so prophetic.

On the liner notes to the album Freewheelin, Dylan himself wrote of Hard Rain: “It is a desperate kind of song, every line in it actually the start of a whole song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all these songs, so I put all I could into this song.” This is like the teachings on which it is permissible only to give the chapter headings, emphasised by Maimonides. In the best theoretical writing, too, each sentence could be a chapter. But here, each line could be a whole song, as each is an image and, like a child beside a dead pony, implies a story.

The questions introducing each of five sections are “Where have you been ? What did you see? What did you hear? Who did you meet, and What will you do now? Each question results in a flurry of cryptic images in answer.

 Oh where have you been, my blue eyed son?

Oh where have you been, my darling young one?

 I ’v stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains.

I ’v walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways,

Slept in the middle of seven sad forests.

I ’v been out in front of a dozen dead oceans,

Been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard,

 It’s a hard / And it’s a hard, it’s a hard rain’s gonna fall

He has journeyed over mountains, highways, forests, oceans and graveyards. The places he has been are all over the nation and beyond, including the spiritual realms called mountains, forests and oceans, the heights and depths. He returns to these things at the end of the song, in the last set of lines, so that they then have become clearer through the song: “reflect from the mountains so all souls can see it,” and “stand on the ocean.” “Forest is especially interesting in the last set of lines. The journey is what allows him to “know my song well before I start singin.'”

From his travels he concludes and reports that “a hard rain’s gonna fall.” A section of the Scorsese biography of Dylan showed a host suggesting that “hard rain” was a cryptic reference to acid rain, then falling from U. S. industry onto Canada. Dylan famously answered that it is not acid rain, “its just a hard rain.” Later, introducing the song at a performance, he says it means “something’s gonna happen.” He restores the literal meaning, and won’t comment on the higher meaning regarding what it is that is going to happen.

Recalling too the question of “acid rain,” it is a good occasion to introduce a teaching of Jung regarding symbols. Jung writes: “Symbols are not signs or allegories for something known; they seek rather to express something that is little known or completely unknown.”[xii] They are meanings that we do not yet have rational categories for, that the contents might be integrated into a comprehensive understanding, and so of great value to learning or the philosophic quest. Does anyone care if the hard rain is spiritual, and an invisible thing that results in many literal political manifestations, like the race riots that were then about to occur, or the murders of Abraham, Martin and John and Robert, national sins for which we have yet to atone? Other things might have occurred, and still the hard rain would be prophetic of these.

The hard rain that’s gonna fall is like a judgment of heaven coming on our nation, much like the prophecies of the civil war indicated by Mason, Jefferson and others, and acknowledged by Lincoln, when in his second inaugural address he said: “…Till every drop of blood drawn by the lash is paid” with the blood drawn by the sword. This is the blood of Lincoln and the soldiers dying in the Civil War, as well as that of Saint Martin and the Freedom Riders. One sees in hindsight that the most important thing for the health of a nation, including its foreign policy, is justice. The judgment for all the things, the injustices, that he saw in America and among humanity are to be the direct cause of the hard rain or the time of tribulation that is to come upon America in a way similar to that which is to come upon humanity in the tribulation. Folk prophecy, like that in the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” from the civil war, is directly national, and only apocalyptic by analogy. Sean Wilentz writes, “The apocalyptic themes in Dylan’s early songs had appeared chiefly as metaphors of social redemption.” And if we pause to consider, should the apocalypse occur a generation or two after ours, what matters is the injustice right in front of our faces, as we write our deeds into the book of life. And for America, the events that followed were the escalation of the war, the consequent division, the sixties assassinations and riots in the cities, and more. We must ask the unjust, the mob and the KKK, if they are satisfied with the result of the ways they spent their days. The places he has been are the reason that he will know his song well before he starts singin,’ a line toward the end of the song in the Gaslight version.

The second section, after “Where have you been?” is “What did you see…”

What did you see my blue eyed son?

What did you see my darling young one?

Saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it,

Saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it.

I saw a black branch with blood that kept dripping.

Saw a room full of men whose hammers were all bleeding.

I saw a white ladder all covered with water.

Saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,

 And it a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard rain’s gonna fall.

The images are akin to dream or prophecy. So reading images is similar to attempting to see something like Nostradamus or the Biblical prophesies unveiled. Progress occurs, if for us only a bit at a time, and we will consider possibilities for each that are in the end contradictory, though one or another may be on the right track.. Intelligible realities beyond our present comprehension are described by the soul in images which it, the soul, produces spontaneously. The images occur because the reality they describe is yet unknown, or, they refer to concepts that are above us, or thoughts we cannot yet contain. Hence the song makes many people cry, though they cannot say why. For this reason the images call us to the ascent toward knowledge, and demonstrate that knowledge is somehow in the soul from which they were produced. He sees a newborn surrounded by wolves, a luxurious, empty highway, and these seem to be paired. This reminds immediately of the strange increase in the number and size of Coyotes around here lately, so that we were just saying yesterday that one could not leave a baby in the back yard unattended. This is something new and strange in nature in the metro areas, and we would regret the reintroduction of hawks and wolves if civilization declined just a bit. Children are unattended, left prey to all sorts of crime, as in fact occurred in American society. The human or American condition is one in which wolves are allowed to threaten the vulnerable innocent, or even the child that is the image of the newborn thing in man, similar to the poet allowed to die in the gutter. The wolves threaten to devour the precious future, while a highway of diamonds was built that is seen empty, as might in fact be seen in a nation-stopping oil crisis, or after the destruction of our nation, like looking back on the ruins of a past civilization. Sean Wilentz, in Bob Dylan in America (p. 178) writes:

 “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall,” although in part apocalyptic, is also a song of a quest that leads through sights, sounds, and scenes of everyday misery as well as of a blasted, scorched and bleeding earth. And unlike Dylan’s other early songs of destruction, it concludes not with justice or redemption but with the singer vowing to sing to all the world of what he has seen and heard.

The image too may rather be about the pointlessness of our scurrying about the highways spread out over America in an explosion of construction after the war. The diamond highway, too, might be a spiritual way, empty because no one goes on it, while everyone travels the crooked highways which the poet too has been on. He sees something black, a branch that is dripping with blood, and a room full of men whose hammers are bleeding, in two images that are again connected. Black and white in this song evoke our guilt about race in America, and in this song, we must always consider a racial meaning as a leading possibility. Black branch, and perhaps also white ladder, remind of lynchings. The bleeding hammers may be because they have murdered the black branch, or it may mean that their labor is the condition of spiritual misery. The image evokes a memory of the mural by Degas at the Detroit museum, inspired by the labor union movement. Then he says he saw a white ladder covered in water and a room full of speakers with broken tongues. In “The lonesome death of Harriet Carrol,” the ladder is the ladder of the law, as has been suggested in connection with this song on authority. Dylan may understand “philosophy” in the way it is spoke of in this song, prior to the emergence of the great Socratic Jewish philosophers of the Twentieth century, Leo Strauss, Jacob Klein, and Allan Bloom. Too late to cry for Harriet, for those who “philosophize disgrace and criticize our fears.” What can philosophy do about the murder of a servant woman and the corruption of justice that, in hindsight, allowed her beating with a cane to occur? The white ladder may also be the way of spiritual ascent, similar to that seen by Jacob stretching up to heaven. It may be submerged in water because those speaking are not making it apparent or bringing it into consciousness for a people, perhaps because their tongues are all broken. The song “Hard Rain” is an attempt to remedy this condition, or to show something that makes the white ladder emerge from the unconscious mind of America and mankind. He tries to do better than the talkers whose tongues are all broken. He does do better, because he has spent ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard, which speaks of those killed by injustice. He carries the report of the graves of those like Ms. Carrol.

What did you hear, my blue eyed son?

What did you hear, my darling young one?

Heard the sound of a thunder that roared out a warning

Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world

Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a blazing

Heard ten thousand whispering and nobody listening

Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughing.

Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter,

 And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard rain’s gonna fall.

 After describing where he has been and what he has seen, the poet describes what he has heard. What is the difference between seeing and hearing in the song? Are the things seen past, and the things heard, in the central section, prophetic of the more distant future? He heard the sound of a thunder that roared out a warning, and he tries to tell us about this, for the warning of the thunder (one of the seven thunders?) is of a wave that could drown the whole world. This is not necessarily a prophecy of a giant tsunami, though that may be what would happen if the poles were to shift as is said of December 21, 2012, when we cross the galactic center. The wave may have more to do with the human and political world, an ominous movement, similar to the wave of communism that could be said to have submerged one third of the globe. This direction may be confirmed by the audio-vision of one hundred drummers drumming, which indicates war. The terrorist part of Islam now wishes to become something like this. Something similar was seen in the drum show in China at the start of the 2008 Olympics. Like the dance of a host tribe at an inter-tribal feast in Africa, this show was meant to be “intimidating.” As the television commentator noted, it was intimidating. Ten thousand were whispering about this, and no one was listening. These are compared with the ten thousand talkers whose tongues were broken. That is, while the talkers could not make the white ladder accessible, those who whispered the truth were not heeded. In the future scene, the talkers are not completely mute, but do not speak loudly enough. He heard one starve while many laughed, and this one is the same as the poet who died in the gutter. (This could be me, if my books do not sell!) The many laughing in their warm houses do not care about the starving poet any more than they care about the others starving, and the deafness is related to the social injustice none move to remedy. The talkers are our teachers, and the whisperers our poets. One of two original lines that have been removed from the later, edited version, is “I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of small children.” Someone on the internet, at songmeanings.com, has accurately related this to the children made soldiers, in the African militias, for example. It may be a thing future, though, a thing heard, and so does not quite fit. A clown who cried in the alley is a thing heard that is removed. Watching the video from the early performance, it is a wonder the singer can contain himself, and he must have practiced hard to avoid breaking out in tears. Often, as when performing Tambourine man, he is crying, and we, the spectators, hardly care enough to notice. The tears and fluttering, which almost interfere with the performance, is because the poem is inspired, and this means that the poet himself does not fully know or contain its meaning.

The fourth section is not about places he has been or things he has heard and seen, but about people he has met:

Who did you meet, my blue eyed son?

Who did you meet, my darling young one?

I met a young child beside a dead pony.

I met a white man who walked a black dog.

I met a young woman whose body was burning.

I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow.

I met one man who was wounded in love,

I met another man who was wounded in hatred.

It’s a hard, its a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard rain’s gonna fall.

Hence, the section is not so much political as psychological. The “who did you meet” section breaks the pattern that would take us through the five senses following sight and hearing with touch, taste and smell. It is the more rational question to follow from the parent, leaving us to explain why the previous section was “what did you hear.” Hearing is different from seeing. The warning of prophecy comes through a faculty that is more like hearing, and is different from our perception of the things around us that we can see for ourselves if we look, the things that have already occurred. The hearing section is central of the five sections of the song, which again underlines that the song is centrally a prophecy. But here, in answer to the question of who it is that he met, the young traveling poet answers, again in two lines that are paired, that he saw a child by a dead pony, and a white man walking a black dog. A child by a dead pony is a very sad sight, yet we are immune to the sorrow of racial injustice, whites treating blacks often worse than the love and compassion shown for the pets of their children.

The next two images are also paired, as images of love and lust, a young woman in lust and a young girl that inspired him or gave him a rainbow. His tears flow here, though like us, she cannot care. She gave him entrance to imagination through the colors of refracted light. The last two are again obviously paired, a man wounded in love and another wounded in hatred, and we conclude for sure that this pairing of the lines is a key to reading the song. The child with the corpse of the pony is also wounded in love and the man who enslaves the black is wounded in hatred. Pivoting around the two central lines, we see that these are the two different kinds of wounds of the soul, related to the difference between love and lust, or between the things of the body and the things of the soul. Race hatred is based on or flows from the principle of the body or the animal, but human beings have a natural compassion and love for the animals, because of the soul. Cruelty to animals outside is a sign of inner faction, and the master holds over the slave an authority that is fitting to that of man over the animals, rather than to men over one another.

What’ll ya do now, my blue eyed son?

What’ll ya do now, my darling young one?

I’m going back up ‘fore the rain starts a falling

I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest dark forest

Where the people are many and their hands are all empty

Where the pellets of poison are flooding our waters

Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison

The executioner’s face is always well hidden

Where hunger is ugly and souls are forgotten

Where black is the color and none is the number

And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it

Reflect from the mountains so all souls can see it

And I’ll stand on the ocean before I start sinkin’

(Copyright 1963 by Warner Music, Inc.; renewed in 1991 by Special Rider Music.)

To the question of what it is that he will do now, he concludes that he will now return to his travels, and the song becomes a song about that activity of music and poetry, or the purpose of the poet. He’s going back up, i. e., returning to the spiritual ascent that led him along the sides of all those mountains, and quickly, before the rain begins to fall. This line clearly sets the time frame, for the rainstorm that will become the hard rain has not even yet begun. He will also return to the depths of the forest, which, as he said, he had slept in. A reader on the internet suggests that this dark too is racial, the forest like the ghetto, as would fit with the next line. Here the people are seen to be many and in need, empty not only of material wealth (and this would not even be seen in the depths of the literal forest) but empty of what the talkers could not give them and the whisperers could not make heard. Here the poison is seen in pellets entering our waters, which may refer not only to our polluting our nation but to the poisoning of the source of poetic inspiration. Again, this is before there was an environmental movement. Silent Spring was only published by Rachael Carson in 1962, the same year that Hard Rain was published. The one line, in fact, that Dylan has explained what he had in mind is that the pellets of poison are “all the lies on the radio and in the news.” We see from this the way the images, which may be quite literal, also function especially in analogy, as poetry is inclined to do. Here he sees the place where the luxury of the valley meets the misery of our prisons. In another paired line, the explanation and comment is given in the image of the hidden face of the executioner, and direction to the reason for this. The source of punishment by the government is not apparent, but they live in the valley and cause the conditions of those in the prisons. Indeed, the people in the suburbs do not care about prison injustice, which they could end with their votes, and might, except that it is hidden from them. “Where hunger is ugly and souls are forgotten” may be the most literal line of the whole song, and needs no comment, but its couplet is “Where black is the color and none is the number,” or, blacks count for nothing in the poverty and injustice of the America that the poet sees from the depths of the forest. What he is going to do now is to continue the work of folk music, which is summed up in the next three lines, for he will “Reflect from the mountains so all souls can see it,” tell and speak of all these things that he thinks and breaths, the very mountains now mentioned twice explicitly and once implicitly. These are the mountains of the theoretical or contemplative heights. Going there allows the things of the forest, regarding man and our nation, to be seen in their natural light, or in the light of high truth. His final image is striking and beautiful, for as if to say he will do this with every bit of his mortal strength, he says he will stand on the ocean until he starts sinking. The ocean appeared earlier in the line that said he had been out in front of a dozen dead oceans. Unlike a sea or lake, an ocean is universal, and the things he sees concern not only America but the world. There are not even a dozen oceans now alive, but where he has been is out in front of a dozen dead ones, his frightful vision of a future time that need not happen were it not for human injustice. The image is meant to remind us of Peter the Apostle, called out from the boat to walk on the sea of Galilee, when his faith wavered and he began to sink (Matthew 14:22-29). The activity of the folk musician is a kind of walking on water, from where he can tell it, but only until his mortal faith begins to faint.

We, who live now in a much different world, underestimate the problems of poverty and race in America. Dylan as a folk poet works successfully to alleviate these problems, as now there are extensive networks for distributing food to the poor and racial injustice has been toppled, at least in law and in majority opinion. Yet our national sin remains, and we must agree that the rain has already begun to fall, and a Hard Rain is indeed coming, because we will not repent. We do not even know how, or know how to listen to the poets who can show us where to begin, or what to repent.