The song titles on John Wesley Harding have six “I”‘s in them, two in “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine.”  And that first person perspective makes an indelible impact, especially at the end when the word “glass” appears.  The song is an account of a dream involving participation in an execution.  The speaker’s reaction to the dream, the culpability felt from being responsible for someone’s death, is profound, and it is captured immediately upon his return from sleep:

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I dreamed I saw St. Augustine
Alive with fiery breath
And I dreamed I was amongst the ones
That put him out to death
Oh, I awoke in anger
So alone and terrified
I put my fingers against the glass
And bowed my head and cried

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The reaction of the “I” in the song is accentuated by the “I” sound that appears ten times in eight lines.  The personal response to the dream arguably is dramatized more than the dream, with the figure left caught in a freeze-frame leaning against glass (Robert Shelton asks, “What is ‘the glass’ he touches before crying? A window, a telescope, or a mirror?) “glass” is left un-rhymed, not peculiarly so as a pattern is present.  The odd numbered lines do not have rhyming end words.  Anger, loneliness, and terror combine to cause bowing and crying.  “glass” plays a memorable role in the “I”‘s distraught condition.

In all of Dylan’s “dream” songs this may be the one with the most emotion with the touch of glass the only support for a grieving man. In all, the response seems to be more about the “I” than St. Augustine’s, a self that has died, a self that was once “alive with fiery breath,” a self seen through a “looking-glass” of a dream, a self no longer.

Here’s Bob and Joan singing it at Madison Square Garden during the Rolling Thunder tour in 1975.

Call it “cultural plunder” (Lott) or “yoking” (Yaffe) “High Water” is an amalgam of allusions, references, borrowings, gleanings,  and sifting.  That said, the prophet in Dylan sure got it right that after 9/11 (Love and Theft released on 9/11) many people have lived feeling that their heads are just above water.  The song is packed with messages of how tough, rough, and bad it is “out there.”  The verse with a “head”/”lead”/”said” rhyme helps reinforce this sentiment:

High water risin’, six inches ’bove my head
Coffins droppin’ in the street
Like balloons made out of lead
Water pourin’ into Vicksburg, don’t know what I’m goin’ to do
“Don’t reach out for me,” she said
“Can’t you see I’m drownin’ too?”
It’s rough out there
High water everywhere

There’s keeping just above the dangers and threats, almost drowning, not dark yet but getting there, and we’re in this together–this is all over the place, happening to me and you stuff that nightmares are made of in this verse.  Coffins droppin like balloons is quite an image.  There’s staying above but going over implied in these lines, too.  Things go over like lead balloons.  Greil Marcus notes that what drops harder than anything in this song is the word “care” and the way Dylan says it in the line, “Either one, I don’t care”/High water everywhere.”  Dylan not caring goes over like a lead balloon. The finger pointing songs we grew up on made him seem to care so much.  Now he “used to care but things have changed.”  Staying above and going over, heady advice for our time though, downright caring, when we look again and see that what we saw is no longer standing there.

Dylan appears to care about this song having performed it 712 times over the last 17 years.  Here’s one of those times, Irvine, CA, August, 3, 2013:

Christopher Ricks hands us over eight pages on “Handy Dandy” in his chapter from Dylan’s Vision of Sin that focuses on Envy. He gives attention to the song linking him and Michael Gray to how they both find the song terrific.  Ricks distinguishes himself from Gray in how he sees the song as scary, and he ties what he calls the “You’ll say / He’ll say routine” in at as part of the fright, “as if someone is being instructed in a code of behavior.”  This makes the “said”/”dead” rhyme ominous, threading the motif of threat through the song:

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You say, “What are ya made of?”
He says, “Can you repeat what you said?”
You’ll say, “What are you afraid of?”
He’ll say, “Nothin’! Neither ’live nor dead.”

Yes, as Ricks notes, what’s neither live nor dead is money, HD is made of money, and probably drug money, i.e. the candy that he’s just like with sugar (on top? over the top?).

Ricks refers the game handy-dandy, defined the OED as “A children’s game in which a small object is shaken between the hands by one of the players, and, the hands being suddenly closed, the other player is required to guess in which hand the object remains.”  The expression has been used to mean “change of places, alternately, in rapid alternation.”   Sounds a little like Dylan himself.  Is Dylan the “hand-dandy” in the song?  Here are a couple of turn of the century dandies:

And here’s an audio of the only time Bob performed it live, June 27, 2008:

[This blog posting is an excerpt from an article I wrote for Professing Dylan (2016), a book about teaching Dylan, published by Philips Memphis Publishing and edited by Frances Hunter (1939-2016) of Arkansas State University with a forward written by Michael Gray.]

The song begins with the sound of locusts, though more like the melodic leg-rubbing sound of crickets.  The chorus refers to how they, the locusts, were singing to Dylan, but the listener gets to hear them, too, so we are in a sense privy to this invitation or entrance in to such singing. The tears and perspiration on the benches acknowledge the celebratory transformation that graduates anticipate, but Dylan is distanced from that–it is the locusts he hears, though he sees the tears and perspiration.

The second verse refers to darkness and the smell of a tomb.  But there is a sudden light–the hope perhaps shown to him from nature,

I glanced into the chamber where the judges were talking
Darkness was everywhere, it smelled like a tomb
I was ready to leave, I was already walkin’
But the next time I looked there was light in the room

and perhaps not limited to the singing of the locusts but to the birds “flying from tree to tree” in the first verse.

The third verse is probably a direct reference to Crosby’s anger–an emotion felt by Dylan and projected out from his friend, who upon departure called the Princeton administration a “[b]unch of dickheads on auto-stroke” (qtd. in Dylan, Chronicles).  But Dylan shuns this emotion. It is not the one he wants to pursue in this song.  Instead he pursues joy.

In the fourth verse, he picks up his sweetheart and heads out to nature, blissfully removed to a place where he could become himself again and not the representation or image-extended identity of someone else.

The song uses alternating rhymes throughout with “distance” appearing as an echo rhyme twice.  Keeping one’s distance from harmful settings and being distant from one’s self when one’s identify is compromised are messages echoing in the song.  What’s off in the distance, too, may just be where one needs to be so that what becomes distant  becomes relevant to a quote from another Dylan song,

What looks large from a distance
Close up ain’t never that big

(“Tight Connection To My Heart”)