Under the assumption that “Song to Woody” actually was penned before “Talkin New York,” Dylan’s first rhyme paired the words “things” and “kings.” Here’s the stanza:
I’m out here a thousand miles from my home
Walkin’ a road other men have gone down
I’m seein’ your world of people and things
Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings
“home” and “down” have the look of a rhyme, but even Dylan doesn’t stretch the sound of either “o” to meet the other. So “things” and “kings” it is. Both of those words will get their time in the spotlight at some other time in this blog, but while I search for Dylan’s use of “throne” I thought it interesting to note the presence of royalty in his first rhyme.
The word “throne” is used only once on the entire Together Through Life CD, and that is in the opening stanza of “Beyond Here Lies Nothin.” For anyone who has seen the video of this song (see link below) this should not come as a surprise. Certainly, the authority, violence, and power that a throne conveys are present in the male character in this film.
I’m still in the 80′s in my search for “throne,” but I sneaked into the 70′s remembering the last lines of “When HeReturns”:
Of every earthly plan that be known to man, He is unconcerned
He’s got plans of His own to set up His throne
When He returns
The rhymes with “thrown” are internal, but LOOK: they are the same words used to rhyme with “thrown” in the first stanza of “Beyond Here Lies Nothing”:
I love you pretty baby
You’re the only love I’ve ever known
Just as long as you stay with me
The whole world is my throne
Beyond here lies nothin’
Nothin’ we can call our own
Now there’s a skipping reel of rhyme if I’ve ever seen one!
The word “throne” is found in the second stanza of “No Time to Think” off the 1978 Street Legal album, Bob’s last secular one as many said about it in the 80′s. It is used as an internal rhyme with the word “alone,” which ends the line, only to have the rhyme extend to the beginning of the next line with “unknown.” Those three words linked by rhyme summon Shakespeare’s Henry V for me, especially in the scene when Hal wanders from camp to camp hooded (as Dylan was often found in the 1990′s) taking the temperature of his soldiers’ feelings towards him and their attitude towards the battle that awaits them at daybreak. “A little touch of Harry in the night,” the chorus calls his presence among his men, before “the scene must to the battle fly” (indeed not much “time to think” the night before a war). I love where Bobby sends my mind from a little touch of the words he unites with rhyme.
If “Abandoned Love” “speaks volumes about . . . a man’s (Dylan’s?) deepest feelings” during the time of his failed marriage with a woman (Sara Lownds?), as Robert Shelton suggests in No Direction Home, the word “throne” used at the end of the song certainly puts her on the pedestal the man wants her to come down from:
One more time at midnight, near the wall
Take off your heavy makeup and your shawl
Won’t you descend from the throne, from where you sit?
Let me feel your love one more time before I abandon it
After all, he’s no leader in this song, a follower instead (“Baby, let me follow you down,” “in the jingle-jangle morning I’ll come following you”?), of the children:
Wherever the children go I’ll follow them
“throne” doesn’t get the royal treatment of rhyme in this song; neither does the woman fated to be abandoned not followed. The painful yearning on this song is heartfelt. The Other End, 1975:
“Tin Angel” uses “throne” with the tables turned: man returns home
To a deserted mansion and a desolate throne
Servant said: “Boss, the lady’s gone
She left this morning just ‘fore dawn.”
But the man is not a king, merely a boss to the women later referred to as a queen
His face was hard and caked with sweat
His arms ached and his hands were wet
“You’re a murderous queen and a bloody wife
If you don’t mind, I’ll have the knife”
A throne left alone, with a John Webster/Seneca pile of bodies left on stage by the end. A throne never seems to bode well in Dylan.
As a passionate fan, student and teacher of Bob Dylan, I have felt a need to create a concordance of the lyrics to Dylan’s songs. The only one I’ve come across is one published by Steve Michel, whose book includes over 8,000 words and is inclusive of the songs on 1992’s CD, Under the Red Sky.
My plan is to start from Bob’s latest CD (a new one called Tempest arrives September 11, 2012) and at first key on the words Bob Dylan rhymes. In an interview with Bill Flanagan, Bob once said, “I love rhyming for rhyming sake. I think it’s an incredible art form.” So I want to start there–where Dylan sees “an incredible art form,” and allow those words to go from song to song where they’ve been used before maybe to help form unexpected patterns for fans, students, and educators to admire and contemplate. Words themselves can create “some amazing hallucinogenic experiences,” something Dylan said in his 1978 Playboy interview about looking out his window in Hibbing, MN.
I also will not, at least initially, focus on common or popular Dylan rhyming words. For instance, in “Beyond Here Lies Nothin,” the first rhyme is baby/me. I could probably find those words in one of every three of Bob’s songs. The second rhyme, known/throne/own gives us a word worth pursuit, “throne.” “Known” and “own” tickle my brain, too, for where else they reside in Dylan’s lyrical universe, but I think “throne” will prove to be a word less traveled by Dylan and it should be interesting to see how that word has been used for its sound and meaning for Bob in his published songs for over fifty years.
I’m choosing a blog platform, too, so it can be interactive. I want to comment on and inspire discussion about Dylan’s words. I’ve never met Dylan and probably never will, but I bet he’d love a place where people just talk about the words he chose to rhyme. I think those words must be special to him, like strangers he’s introduced to each other who will always be friends.
A work in progress concordance blog also lets the process be as valuable or satisfying as the product. This may be a life long labor of love, but why wait til the end to see what people think.
Bob Dylan's Skipping Reels of Rhyme 