The Philippine Online Chronicles

This piece serves as Metakritiko's introduction to a weeklong series of song analyses, Songs as Poetry.

If poems turn up the volume of “ordinary speech,” then songs (the “good” ones, at least) should theoretically be able to amplify the volume to a whole new level. Anyone who enjoys listening to music must have noted, at some point in the sound tripping experience, that there is something “poetic” about the lyrics of a particular song. And anyone who appreciates poetry must have thought, upon reading a powerful line, that some poems almost “sound” like a song.

Traditional literary critics would probably scoff at the argument that songs=poetry and poetry=songs. Songs are meant to be sung/performed, while poems are meant to be read from the pages of a book. But history tells us that the demarcating line between the two art forms isn’t all that clear. Think of epics that have found their way into printed books, think of the concept of “performance” poetry, think of how almost all songs (good or bad) attempt to use poetic devices like rhyme and metre. And think of songwriters/performers like Bob Dylan. (Obviously, I’m a Dylan fan).

Most people only know Dylan as a singer-songwriter, not as a poet. Although Dylan has made his mark as a venerated icon in music history, his place in literature remains in question. He may be a good songwriter, but can he legitimately be called a poet? One explanation goes: “It takes the lyrics, music, and voice working in tandem to unpack the power of a song, whereas a poem ideally stands up by itself, on the page, controlling its own timing and internal music. Dylan’s lyrics, and most especially his creative rhyme-making, may only work, as critic Ian Hamilton has written, with ‘Bob’s barbed-wire tonsils in support.’” This argument can be raised not just against Dylan’s songs, but all songs in general, and implies a privileging of poems over songs in the world of words, since poetry can “stand up by itself.” In response, Prof. Christopher Ricks makes a case for Dylan as the “greatest rhymester of the last fifty years,” at par with poets like Milton, Keats, and Tennyson. Ricks even came up with an entire book that features close reading of Dylan’s songs as poetry. Dylan fans, I’m sure, are aware that Dylan has repeatedly been nominated for the Nobel prize in Literature since 1995, although he remains a nominee to this day, partly because of the label (lyricist vs. poet) confusion.

But even though the debate remains unresolved, what’s clear is that the confusion triggered by musicians like Dylan has helped popularize poetry (in the traditional sense as in poetry=rhymes, line breaks, imagery). If it is true that poetry is the most threatening literary genre, then reading songs as poems makes the genre more accessible, less foreboding, less exclusionary. Which is why I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” is included in the Norton’s Introduction to Literature anthology. Who would have thought that such a snobbish literary anthology would consider this song worthy of being called a poem, Dylan a poet?

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Mr. Tambourine Man (trogg1980)

Mr. Tambourine Man

In traditional poems, the poetic device of sound is merely suggested through the words used, line breaks, spacing, punctuations. In songs, sound is obviously “louder,” in the sense that we actually hear the tune, melody, beat, rhythm. In a way, sound is flexible in songs if we consider that all songs can be re/performed (Ricks argues that a song in this sense is “forever young”). A reading of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” could be drastically different from a reading of The Byrds’ version of the same song. And even if the voice behind one song is the same, how the song is performed affects the reading, which means that Dylan’s various live performances/recordings of the same song could generate various readings (compare this version with the link above, for instance). Just to simplify things, I’ll stick to the original recording of “Mr. Tambourine Man” for this particular reading.

Some thoughts on the song’s general structure: “Mr. Tambourine Man” opens with soft guitar strumming before introducing the chorus which is repeated five times in between the four stanzas. The lines are longer from the first stanza to the next, which is consistent with the increasing density of imagery per stanza, after every chorus. Dylan lends a voice to the persona who addresses the mysterious Tambourine Man, who is the unifying symbol throughout the song.

The slow rhythm of guitar strumming is pretty much consistent until the end. The opening is soft and dreamy, almost like a lullaby, as though the speaker is half-awake/half-asleep, even though he knows he should be resting. In contrast to this dream-like situation, the lines of the chorus suggest an urgent imploration: “Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me/I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to/Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me/In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you.” The chorus gives us a glimpse of the persona’s situation, and his reason for wanting to follow the Tambourine Man: he wants to go somewhere, he’s never had a specific destination. Since the chorus is repeated after every stanza, it’s as though each stanza provides a reason behind the persona’s desire to follow the Tambourine Man, with each reason being a stronger argument than the previous one. Only the voice of the persona is heard in the song, but if indeed the Tambourine Man was being addressed, the interludes after each stanza before returning to the chorus are the gaps in which the Tambourine Man could have (not) spoken back to the persona, each time denying the persona’s request. The speaker’s imploration is strengthened by the rhymes, which function to reiterate/reinforce the urgency of the speaker’s desire to follow the Tambourine Man, taking after Prof. Rick’s argument that each rhyme is both “an end and an again.” And so, the song basically goes like this: “Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, take me with you because of the following…,” which means that each stanza implicitly begins with a “Because…”

What are the reasons provided? The first stanza establishes the persona’s restlessness at having no destination, even though it seems that he’s constantly on the move. He’s attached to no one, he has no home, and this sense of freedom has begun to take its toll. “My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet/I have no one to meet/And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming.” The next stanza emphasizes the speaker’s desire for a sense of direction and destination, like an “anywhere-but-here” kind of scenario: “I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade/Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way/I promise to go under it.” In the third stanza, the speaker demystifies his façade, he’s saying that he’s ready to drop everything and leave right away even if it doesn’t look that way, even if “you might hear laughin’, spinnin’, swingin’ madly across the sun/It’s not aimed at anyone, it’s just escapin’ on the run.” Once the Tambourine Man plays his song, the persona will follow him with no regrets.

At this point, the song breaks into a relatively long interlude, the constant guitar strumming is interrupted and accompanied by a shrill harmonica adlib before the song returns to the chorus. The interlude prepares readers/listeners for the persona’s final, presumably the strongest argument, and I must admit this is the part of the song I like best because of the barrage of images: “Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind/Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves/The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach…”
Dylan’s singing here noticeably sounds more forceful and most urgent. The persona wants to go far away “from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow” in order to be free, “With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves.” But the last line of this last stanza is strange, because it suddenly hints that the speaker thinks going away with the Tambourine Man won’t really help him get past his restlessness and loneliness, the temporariness of this new freedom with the Tambourine Man: “Let me forget about today until tomorrow.”

The strength of “Mr. Tambourine Man” is its ability to “continue,” in a manner of speaking, even after the final strum of the guitar that signifies the closing of the song. The readers/listeners are left asking themselves the million-dollar question: “Who the hell is the Tambourine Man?” One of the most common interpretations is that the song is about drug addiction (“take me on a trip,” “smoke rings of my mind,” “beneath the diamond sky,” etcetera). Others argue that Mr. Tambourine Man is like the character of the popular tale of the Pied Piper, while some detect religious undertones and liken the Tambourine Man to prophets, even Jesus Christ.

But I’m inclined to believe that the Tambourine Man is not a Who but a What (Freedom? Liberation? Fantasy?), and that the speaker represents the desire to escape this growing sense of alienation in a world that remains exploitative. It’s easy enough to understand why a song like this was produced in the turbulent war period of the 60s, but just like the structure of the song that continues even after it ends, a song like “Mr. Tambourine Man” has retained its relevance today. Because if you look around, things aren’t any better. We are still as restless and as desperate, amazingly weary, like the speaker in the song.

Many say that “Mr. Tambourine Man” is not as “political” as Dylan’s classic protest songs like “The Times They Are A-Changing” or “Blowing in the Wind.” It’s in responding to such views that I find reading songs with the same discipline and esteem applied to poetry not just useful, but necessary. And at a time when it seems the world is taking a turn for the worse, I’m pretty sure that Dylan’s are not the only songs that deserve special attention.

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