He came and went. He was here but now he’s gone. Many Dylan songs are about comings and goings, arrivals and departures. Most of them have to do with lost loves, relationships gone south but with the yearning for them still in place (“Most Of The Time“) or the suffering from the yearning expressed (“Love Sick“). The need to travel on, move ahead, be gone, sever ties, are shared in them, painfully sometimes, if not most times. “Boots Of Spanish Leather,” “One Too Many Mornings,” Down The Highway,” “Tangled Up In Blue” and “If You See Her, Say Hello” come immediately to my mind.

Other comings and goings involve death. The ballads are about people who went to their deaths, often abruptly, unjustly, tragically.  Songs like “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “A Pawn In Their Game,” “Only A Hobo,” “7 Curses,” and “Who Killed Davey Moore” are not only memorable as finger-pointing songs but for the feelings pity and tragedy evoke in us.

Like the film I’m Not There, the latest video version of “Most Likely You Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine” traces the comings and goings of Dylan’s personas:

******************************************************************************************************

The “went” rhyme in “Life Is Hard” conveys something gone but how we’re left with the traces, past being never dead, not even past:

The evening winds are still
I’ve lost the way and will
Can’t tell you where they went
I just know what they meant
I’m always on my guard
Admitting life is hard
Without you near me

Way and will are gone, but their meaning remains with the speaker. If you think about it that is the way with all meaningful things gone–they are gone but what they meant to us remains; hard to shake what brings meaning to our lives, partly why life is hard.

****************************************************************************************************

“Tin Angel” is about by desertion. It’s the Boss’s wife we learn from the start who has gone and left her husband:

It was late last night when the boss came home
To a deserted mansion and a desolate throne
Servant said: “Boss, the lady’s gone
She left this morning just ‘fore dawn.”

Later, on the road to revenge his men desert him:

Well, they rode all night, and they rode all day
Eastward, long down the broad highway
His spirit was tired and his vision was bent
His men deserted him and onward he went

The Boss goes, too, ardent-hearted, bent on going, vision bent, narrowed to the narrow way, “bent”/”went” rhymed for emphasis, this theme tune following him wherever he goes, which is to his own death:

He crawled to the corner and he lowered his head
He gripped the chair and he grabbed the bed
It would take more than needle and thread
Bleeding from the mouth, he’s as good as dead

****************************************************************************************************

“Roll On, John” consists of eight stanzas with an irregular rhyming pattern, perhaps partly caused by lines coming directly from so many of Lennon’s lyrics.  The first stanza fools us into what could be a consistent a/b/c/a/c rhyming:

Doctor, doctor, tell me the time of day
Another bottle’s empty
Another penny spent
He turned around and he slowly walked away
They shot him in the back and down he went

The “e” in “empty” and “went” have assonance and then “spent” hooks up with “went” for a perfect rhyme. But the “roll on, Johns” break up the continuity, a broken pattern to fit a world broken by Lennon’s departure, his “journey’s end:
Shine your light, move it on, you burn so bright, roll on John
From the Liverpool docks to the red light Hamburg streets
Down in the quarry with the Quarrymen.
Playing to the big crowds Playing to the cheap seats
Another day in your life until your journey’s end
Shine your light, move it on, you burn so bright, roll on John

The “roll on, John” lines aside the rhyming goes a/b/a/b.

By verse three, the rhyming is disrupted into a/b/c/d/c:

Sailing through the tradewinds
Bound for the sun
Rags on your back just like any other slave
They tied your hands and they clamped your mouth
Wasn’t no way out of that deep dark cave