Yes. Ring them bells. Post your favorite Bob Dylan lyric here. Bob Dylan Are you Visigoth or an Athenian?Sixpence None the Richer, Together Again, Live
Here’s one of the shorter ones I’m fond of; I always want to quote it when someone claims that Dylan doesn’t write poetry:
Love Minus Zero/No Limits
My love she speaks like silence,
Without ideals or violence,
She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful,
Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire.
People carry roses,
Make promises by the hours,
My love she laughs like the flowers,
Valentines can’t buy her.
In the dime stores and bus stations,
People talk of situations,
Read books, repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall.
Some speak of the future,
My love she speaks softly,
She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all.
The cloak and dagger dangles,
Madams light the candles.
In ceremonies of the horsemen,
Even the pawn must hold a grudge.
Statues made of match sticks,
Crumble into one another,
My love winks, she does not bother,
She knows too much to argue or to judge.
The bridge at midnight trembles,
The country doctor rambles,
Bankers’ nieces seek perfection,
Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring.
The wind howls like a hammer,
The night blows cold and rainy,
My love she’s like some raven
At my window with a broken wing.
Forever Young
May God bless and keep you always,
May your wishes all come true,
May you always do for others
And let others do for you.
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung,
May you stay forever young,
Forever young, forever young,
May you stay forever young.
May you grow up to be righteous,
May you grow up to be true,
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you.
May you always be courageous,
Stand upright and be strong,
May you stay forever young,
Forever young, forever young,
May you stay forever young.
May your hands always be busy,
May your feet always be swift,
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift.
May your heart always be joyful,
May your song always be sung,
May you stay forever young,
Forever young, forever young,
May you stay forever young.
Favorite Bob Dylan lyric? That’s asking the impossible. How do you choose? I guess I’ll go with Every Grain of Sand. Here’s the first verse:
In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need
When the pool of tears beneath my feet flood every newborn seed
There’s a dyin’ voice within me reaching out somewhere,
Toiling in the danger and in the morals of despair.
http://bobdylan.com/songs/grain.html
Grandpa died last week
And now he’s buried in the rocks,
But everybody still talks about
How badly they were shocked.
But me, I expected it to happen,
I knew he’d lost control
When he built a fire on Main Street
And shot it full of holes.
– Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again
I’ll go with my favorite verse from “Tangled Up In Blue:”
She lit a burner on the stove and offered me a pipe
“I thought you’d never say hello,” she said
“You look like the silent type.”
Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century.
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin’ coal
Pourin’ off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you,
Tangled up in blue.
I love the imagery of the words of the poem glowing like a coal, pouring off the page and written on his soul. I’ve had similar experiences with songs, poems, literature and the Bible.
One of my very favorite passages is from Love Minus Zero / No Limit:
“my love winks she does not bother
she knows too much to argue or to judge”
I don’t think this is about a person but a Buddhist-like philosophy of being above the situations of this life
And for pure 60’s Dylan mercury, from Outlaw Blues:
“don’t ask me nothin’ about nothin’
I just might tell you the truth !”
really hard to pick one but surely “Visions of Johanna” is one of the most complex with “ghosts of electricity howling on the bones of her face”…
Shoot nbooth, you already named my favorite Dylan song! Although, he has written so many amazing songs that choosing something different is not a huge challenge. I’m going with Mr. Tambourine Man:
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,
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.
These lyrics just sets my imagination aflame. That is what I love about Dylan’s words, or poetry if you will. It calls to mind images, and has a certain ambiguity which lets you imagine what you will and related it to your own life or situation. What he says is just so beautiful, and elevated compared to much of rock music which repeats the same vacuous refrains; Dylan’s songs take your mind and your imagination on a rich journey that I rarely find elsewhere. Congrats to him on the award.
I like to do just like the rest, I like my sugar sweet,
But guarding fumes and making haste,
It ain’t my cup of meat.
Ev’rybody’s ‘neath the trees,
Feeding pigeons on a limb
But when Quinn the Eskimo gets here,
All the pigeons gonna run to him.
Come all without, come all within,
You’ll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn.
who could only pick one?
i always liked this off of ‘street legal,’ one of him most underrated albums imho:
There’s a lion in the road,
there’s a demon escaped,
There’s a million dreams gone,
there’s a landscape being raped,
As her beauty fades and I watch her undrape,
Well I won’t, but then maybe again I might…
mike rucker
fairburn, georgia, usa
mikerucker.wordpress.com
uh… that should be “one of his most underrated albums.”
him bob.
him make album.
him write good songs.
Maybe a little late but here goes; I’ve been into Dylan since the age of 12 and have liked at least something of each album or manifestation of the Dylan projections. As for my favourite D words, it’s the old ones that get me; “worried blues”, “he was a friend of mine”, “tomorrow is a long time”, “I shall be released”, “when i paint my masterpiece” & “watching the river flow” – all beautiful, simple, elegant. And “Dark Eyes”;
“Oh, the gentlemen are talking and the midnight moon is on the riverside,
They’re drinking up and walking and it is time for me to slide.
I live in another world where life and death are memorized,
Where the earth is strung with lovers’ pearls and all I see are dark eyes.
A cock is crowing far away and another soldier’s deep in prayer,
Some mother’s child has gone astray, she can’t find him anywhere.
But I can hear another drum beating for the dead that rise,
Whom nature’s beast fears as they come and all I see are dark eyes”