Why Bob Dylan Matters by Richard F. Thomas

Author:Richard F. Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

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MATURE POETS STEAL: VIRGIL, DYLAN, AND THE MAKING OF A CLASSIC

Immature poets borrow; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

—T. S. Eliot, “Philip Massinger,” 1920

A few days after it came out, on September 11, 2001, as mentioned earlier, I started listening to the songs on “Love and Theft,” and when I arrived at “Lonesome Day Blues,” I heard Virgil, greatest of the Roman poets, singing with the voice of Dylan:

Dylan:

I’m gonna spare the defeated—I’m gonna speak to the crowd

I’m gonna spare the defeated, boys I’m gonna speak to the crowd

I am goin’ to teach peace to the conquered

I’m gonna tame the proud

Virgil:

remember Roman, these will be your arts:

to teach the ways of peace to those you conquer,

to spare defeated peoples, tame the proud

Spare the defeated, teach, peace, conquered, and tame the proud. This is beyond coincidence. Virgil’s lines, from Book 6 of his epic, the Aeneid, are set in the Underworld. The ghost of Aeneas’s father is instructing him, and future Romans, on how to conduct themselves as they build their empire, whose remains are still so visible today in the city of Rome. Aeneas will in fact fail at the end of the poem to live up to his father’s instructions, as he kills his defeated enemy. That final move is a culmination of the second half of Virgil’s poem, and of the epic wars of Aeneas, whose depiction is generally taken to allude to the civil wars of Julius Caesar and his adopted son, future emperor Augustus Caesar, whose propaganda presented the Caesars as the descendants of Aeneas, and so of Venus, the divine mother of Aeneas. It is this darker aspect of Virgil’s poem that seems to be appealing to Dylan.

Vietnam, the war of Dylan’s youth, also seems very much in the air in the words of the “Lonesome Day Blues,” whose singer is in a bad way, stripped through death, desertion, and elopement of all his family: “My pa he died and left me, my brother got killed in the war / My sister she ran off and got married, never was heard of any more”; also in the sixth verse: “Set my dial on the radio / I wish my mother was still alive.” In the official Bob Dylan: The Lyrics: 1961–2012, the second line reads, “I’m telling myself I’m still alive.” So Vietnam is the natural setting for the song, at least as heard by any baby boomer with ears to hear. But once we recognize the Virgilian intertext and its context of the ancient Roman civil wars, something happens to the song’s meaning. The two

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