SHELTER FROM THE STORM:
BEAUTY WALKS A RAZOR’S EDGE…
…She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies…
Lord Byron, She Walks in Beauty, 1833
…It is in Music, perhaps, that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles – the creation of supernal Beauty. It may be, indeed, that here this sublime end is, now and then, attained in fact. We are often made to feel, with a shivering delight, that from an earthly harp are stricken notes which cannot have been unfamiliar to the angels. And thus there can be little doubt that in the union of Poetry with Music in its popular sense, we shall find the widest field for the Poetic development….
Edgar Allan Poe, The Poetic Principle, 1850
Blood on the Tracks is an album which largely consists of songs about broken relationships. Dylan approaches this subject from a range of different perspectives. Sometimes he is angry, sometimes distant, sometimes wistful. At other times he is almost helplessly distraught. In Shelter from the Storm, perhaps the album’s most instantly appealing tune, he mingles gratitude, awe and regret with a range of suggestive imagery in an ethereal, other worldly and timeless setting. The woman his narrator takes refuge with is less a real person than a chimera – the personification of the poetic ideal of sublime beauty. She is both muse and goddess, who rescues him from a ‘wilderness’ of pain and confusion. The song is a lament for the death of their relationship and thus for the narrator’s separation from his access to the beauty of poetic language. But the paradox of the song is that, in performing it, Dylan regains much of the transcendent poetic power that, since that separation, had eluded him.
SHELTER FROM THE STORM…
In his 1963 Poem for Joanie Dylan had issued his first coherent thoughts on the nature of beauty and its relationship to poetry. In the poem he tells us that his original conception of beauty had been formed by the dark musings in the tragic dirges of his ‘first hero’, country singer Hank Williams. But later, when he encountered the angelic voice and radiant personality of Joan Baez, his view had changed radically. Shelter from the Storm examines this dynamic anew through the voice of an older narrator who has learned from bitter experience that, although it may be relatively easy (especially as a young person) to be entranced by sublime beauty, holding onto such an ideal source of inspiration when one is older and (supposedly) wiser is far more difficult. Thus the song encapsulates many of the struggles that Dylan had been through in his career. If Blood on the Tracks is a reclamation of his connection with his poetic muse, Shelter from the Storm outlines the price he has had to pay in order to achieve this. But the song is only partly autobiographical. It also carries a message which we can all relate to, asking how possible it is to retain the wondrous perceptions and ambitions of our youth when one is beset by life’s many ‘slings and arrows’.
In its original form, the song is presented in an intimate acoustic setting, with Dylan on guitar, harmonica and vocal and Tony Brown on bass. It was one of the songs which was recorded in the earlier ‘New York’ sessions in a ‘stripped down’ form but which was not altered when Dylan carried out re-recordings in a Minneapolis studio. Dylan adopts a soft-spoken tone which is a far cry from his abrasive early 60s vocals, modulating his voice in places for emphasis. The song’s melody is generated from the rising and falling intonation of his vocals rather than the insistent strumming of the guitar. The sound he generates is indeed beautiful, but also sad and world weary. It is the voice of bitter experience.
Shelter from the Storm is around five minutes long in its original form. Apart from a short harmonica break, the lyrics are delivered relentlessly. Dylan crams in ten verses, each of which ends with the repeated refrain …”Come in,” she said, I’ll give ya/ Shelter from the storm…. Each verse begins with a rhyming couplet and continues with a line that rhymes with the refrain. In a few cases, Dylan appears to be straining to find a suitable rhyme to fit his purpose. But in many ways these slight ‘stumbles’ only add to our perception of the narrator’s vulnerability. As on much of John Wesley Harding, Dylan veers between archaic and colloquial language, which gives the song both a timeless and a contemporary quality. Each verse could be sent to take the form of a painting or a still image. Sometimes those images begin to move, as Dylan ‘cuts’ from one scene to another.
SHELTER FROM THE STORM…
The first three lines setup the scenario with great economy, beginning with what sounds like the opening of a fairy tale: ‘Twas in another lifetime… This establishes that the story will be set in either a ‘parallel universe’ or much earlier in the narrator’s life. This ‘lifetime’ is described in mythic terms as …one of toil and blood/ When blackness was a virtue, the road was full of mud… The reference to ‘toil and blood’ recalls Churchill’s famous speech on becoming Prime Minister when he declared that, in the midst of a terrible war, all he could offer was ‘blood, toil, sweat and tears’. The phrase ‘blackness was a virtue’ does not refer to skin colour but implies a dark time in which conventional ideas of morality are reversed. This is juxtaposed against the mundane reference to muddy roads, perhaps alluding to Hitler’s retreat from Russia. Such intimations paint a picture of a world in chaos, from which the narrator emerges: …I came in from the wilderness… he tells us …a creature void of form… which mixes semi-Biblical language with a horror-movie sensibility. Set against all this apocalyptic imagery, the tone of the refrain is particularly comforting.
It is then made obvious that the ‘other lifetime’ was actually that of the narrator’s past. He is clearly now speaking from the present day as he attempts to reassure us that he is also capable of great compassion: …If I pass this way again, you can rest assured/ I’ll always do my best for her, on that I give my word… This appears to establish that, despite the narrator’s best intentions, the relationship is now over. He then gives us a quick flashback to the chaotic war-like background described earlier, which he memorably summarises as …a world of steel eyed death and men who are fighting to be warm… This could easily place us back on the terrifying reality of the Eastern front. This intense war imagery is evocative of the state of his mind .before meeting the woman.
The next three verses give us various different ‘pictures’ of how the relationship unfolded. Firstly we glimpse the lovers united and untroubled in silent bliss: …Not a word was spoke between us, there was little risk involved… But already there is a hint that the real issues that they needed to discuss are being ignored: …Everything up to that point had been left unresolved… The narrator then continues his conversation with the listener, still attempting to reassure us: …Try imagining a place… he whispers …where it’s always safe and warm… We are then shown more suggestive pictures of the narrator’s existence in the ‘wilderness’: …I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail/ Poisoned in the bushes and blown out on the trail/ Hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn… In this chain of disparate images, intimations of war are succeeded by a collocation of ways in which the narrator has been ‘poisoned, hunted and ravaged’ by life. Then, for the first and only time in the song, we are shown the woman herself. She is presented as a radiantly lovely figure with …silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair… part pre-Raphaelite beauty and part hippie. We can imagine her as being carefully backlit, as in a classic Hollywood movie.
For the only time in the song we now see the woman in action: …She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns… There is an obvious reference to the ‘crown’ that Jesus was said to have worn on the cross. Her removal of that crown symbolises the great joy and spiritual sustenance she provided him with as she relieved him of the burdens he had been carrying from his previous tortured existence. But the fact that the narrator delivers an implied comparison of his suffering with that of Jesus seems rather extreme. Perhaps, then, he has been exaggerating his troubles, presenting himself as a Christ-like figure to gain her sympathy. Despite her ‘graceful’ removal of this symbol of his supposed blamelessness, we will soon get the impression that she soon tires of him pretending to be a victim. We then switch back to the present and the narrator’s recollections. But these, rather tellingly, are unconvincing. He tells us that …Now there’s a wall between us, something there’s been lost… admitting that …I took too much for granted, I got my signals crossed… After the resonant metaphors that have been given to us earlier, the awkward juxtaposition of ‘wall’ and ‘signals’ is rather awkward. Even the reminiscence that follows …Just to think it all began on an uneventful morn… is insubstantial.
In the remaining verses a range of disparate images is thrown at us as the narrator continues (not always successfully) to try to gain our sympathy. Dylan firstly assembles a set of characters that could easily have appeared in any of the songs on Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde. There is …deputy who walks on hard nails… a preacher who …rides a mount… and a …one eyed undertaker… The ‘deputy’ could be a deputy sheriff from a Western, bizarrely transformed into a yogi who is demonstrating his detachment from the material world. Next to him, a ‘preacher’ rides into town, perhaps hoping to bring salvation. The ‘undertaker’ (a mixture, perhaps of the ‘one eyed midget’ from Ballad of a Thin Man and the ‘guilty undertaker from I Want You) is shown blowing a ‘futile horn’, as if he is unsuccessfully trying to bring on the Day of Judgement. Although we are told that …it’s doom alone that counts… (‘doom’ being the archaic term for that fatal day) what we are actually shown is an apparently random collection of ‘Dylanesque’ imagery, assembled on a Dali-like landscape. The images that follow, of …newborn babies wailin’ like a mournin’ dove/ And old men with broken teeth, stranded without love… are more like details from a modern version of a hellish Bosch landscape. There will, it seems, be no ‘divine judgement’ here.
In the penultimate verse Dylan again flirts with a Biblical context. The line …In a little hilltop village they gambled for my clothes… again sees him presenting himself as a ’Christ-figure’ as it is reminiscent of the way Jesus’ garments were divided up among the Roman soldiers. But in the midst of all this obfuscation, we are finally given a glimpse into his real relationship with the mystical beauty who had supposedly ‘saved’ him: …I bargained for salvation… he tells us …and she gave me a lethal dose… It turns out that, although he has portrayed her as his ‘saviour’, in reality she has betrayed him. The phrase ‘lethal dose’ is extremely cutting, rather cruelly associating that betrayal with the transmission of a venereal disease. The apparently contradictory notion of a ‘lethal dose of salvation’ shows that in reality his feelings to her are extremely bitter. Compared to this…I offered up my innocence and got repaid with scorn…, which follows, is relatively mild.
In the final verse the narrator acknowledges that, despite her attempts to provide ‘salvation’, his relationship with her was actually a destructive one. As a result of his disillusionment he is now …living in a foreign country… and has thus tried to detach himself from the regret he feels about how things turned out. This is expressed in a bizarrely ambiguous way in the final line before the last chorus. He sighs: …If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born… This might be taken to imply that, despite the song’s Biblical references, she can be compared to one of the female deities of the classical world, who were often seen as emanations of ideal beauty. But the narrator, with his self-pitying Christ complex, seems to have had his senses deranged by the encounter.
Perhaps the most revealing lines here, though, come a little earlier when the narrator, despite living in exile, assures us that …I’m bound to cross the line/ Beauty walks a razor’s edge, someday I’ll make it mine… He seems determined that, although his attempt to capture beauty has failed, he will never give up the struggle to do so. He proclaims that he will continue to attempt to cross the borderline between life in the wilderness and one of poetic self realisation. The woman in the story is the personification of sublime beauty – the aesthetic ideal of poets from ancient times. It is his immersion in the search for that sublime essence that has dominated his life. But in fact the woman has failed to really ‘shelter’ him. In order to regain that magical connection to the ‘salvation’ of letting his inspiration truly flow, he will need to step out into that storm and bravely confront whatever is out there. But the memory of the comfort that she once provided remains alluring and powerful. We are left wondering whether, instead of truly declaring his independence from her, he will allow her to ‘keep him safe’ from the howling winds outside. The song thus challenges the very ideal of poetic beauty itself, which could in theory provide ‘salvation’ but in all reality may just provide a ‘lethal dose’ of the illusory world where everything will always supposedly be ‘safe and warm’.
The full band version of Shelter from the Storm that appears on 1976’s live album Hard Rain, on which most of the latter day performances are modelled and which is delivered in an uncompromisingly harsh tone, appears to acknowledge such that the entire ‘encounter with beauty’ that the song depicts may be just a wish fulfilling illusion. The song became a staple of Dylan’s live performances, later being performed several hundred times during the Never Ending Tour, although rarely in an acoustic setting. Most of these performances present the narrator as uncertainly trying to negotiate his way through his twisted memories. Rarely does he attempt to replicate the sense of the fragility of beauty that hangs over the original recording. Although Keats once famously asserted that …beauty is truth… when performing the song Dylan appears to be more influenced by the idea that, as in the old saying, beauty is essentially ‘in the eye of the beholder’.
LINKS
STILL ON THE ROAD – ALL DYLAN’S GIGS
THE CAMBRIDGE BOB DYLAN SOCIETY
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