Dylan likes to play with the meaning of words. And he does this with the word “hard.” Hard can mean a surface that’s not soft or something complex.  One of the things I love about Dylan is where his words take me. And the road that leads me to thinking he means one sense of a word and then makes me start to think he means another is the poetic road worth my traveling.

He tried to explain about how “Hard Rain” is not about atomic or fallout rain, it’s just a hard rain, “an end that just has to happen.”  Well, hard rain also conjures images of missiles, weapon launches and catastrophic landings, twisted metal and steel shrapnel falling from the sky. But maybe he really meant hard as in complex; the hard rain that’s gonna fall perhaps is hard because after what we’ve done to our environment with pollution this will not be a simple rain–a hard to figure out what it is rain, or worse, what it will do, a rain based on “lies,” the poisoning of our minds.

Here’s the interview with Studs Terkel in which Bob talks about the song’s meaning (he sings it first and then talks about it around 11:00):

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The words that rhyme with “hard” in “Life Is Hard” are all names of hard subjects,  except for the first one:

I’m always on my guard
Admitting life is hard

Schoolyards and boulevards are hard, concrete and blacktop abound in them.  And being locked and barred has a hardness to it to the touch.  But to be on guard is not hard yet it signifies a rigidness. All told the “hard” rhymes Dylan creates in the song have a nice range of feeling to how life is hard, the sensation of life’s hardness is conjured by the sensations of hard substances and how one feels when on guard.

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Exasperation is the tone in “Narrow Way.”  The bridge underscores this:

It’s a long road, it’s a long and narrow way
If I can’t work up to you, you’ll surely have to work down to me someday.

The narrow way is biblical, i.e., Matthew 7:14, “”For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” Struggle to get somewhere, yes, but there’s in the song a resistance or an unwillingness to put up with the situation (whatever it is) being so difficult to achieve.  So the speaker holds the other accountable–if I can’t get there, you gotta meet me at least halfway.

Threats are present, too–this is not a voice of supplication or subservience–the terrific “hard“/”unscarred” rhyme is an example”

I’m armed to the hilt, and I’m struggling hard
You won’t get out, of here unscarred.

This is a lashing out against someone, maybe a some thing or even a deity.  It’s a Dylan whose bell still rings with its voice of revolt and invectives hurled in rhymes.