Bob Dylan's "Dark Eyes"

"I Can Hear Another Drum"

I’ve been a Bob Dylan fan most of my life. As a young teen, I learned to play guitar on Dylan songs, often in the company of my late, once-best friend also named Bob. That Bob would hand-print the lyrics and chords of the other Bob’s songs in all caps on lined notebook paper, and we would spend hours on weekends in his room or mine playing and singing each song he wrote down. We even bought harmonicas to accompany our guitar playing, and harmonica holders like the ones Dylan used. We didn’t take it too seriously, though. We found a lot of Dylan’s lyrics amusing, like “Hear the one with the mustache say ‘Jeez, I can’t find my knees,’” from “Visions of Johanna.” Whenever we were together, and wherever we were, we’d randomly repeat lines like that, often mimicking Dylan’s nasally sound.

When we were about 14, Bob and I approached one of the priests in our local parish and asked if we could start a coffeehouse in the church. That would give us a place to perform the songs we were learning, and having a coffeehouse featuring folk music in a church was a cool thing back then (even if they didn’t serve coffee). We were probably surprised when the priest said yes, but then we had a venue, Bob had an amplifier and mics for our acoustic guitars and vocals (and his buddy Jim’s electric bass guitar), and we had friends willing to come see us in our first-ever gig.

Having never performed before, I did not yet have a sense of how to please an audience, even one made up of just a handful of friends. So, I decided to play Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” What better way to charm a small group of young teens than to sing a song symbolically foretelling a nuclear holocaust through five very long, depressing, and repetitive verses? I probably realized halfway in that the piece was not my best choice, but figured it would be bad form to stop singing in the middle of a song, so I saw it through. And that, my friends, was the beginning of what passed for my mostly unpaid dozen years or so of a part-time music career.

The first time I saw Dylan in concert was almost two decades later, in 1988, at a partially outdoor venue then known as “Great Woods” in Massachusetts. I remember the year not only because I was finally seeing my musical idol on stage, but also because I bought a shirt at the concert that bore Dylan’s name and the year of the show. I used to wear the shirt around the house for quite a while after that, and when our oldest son was two-and-a-half years old, he would point to the last letter in Dylan’s name and say “n.” (He eventually became an avid reader. Thanks Dylan!)

That concert occurred just three years after the release of “Empire Burlesque,” one of Dylan’s better albums in the post-“Blood on the Tracks” era.  The final song on the album, and one of my favorites of all Dylan’s songs, is “Dark Eyes.” He recorded it plainly, accompanying himself only with acoustic guitar and harmonica, but the lyrics are what make it truly stand out.

Trying to interpret a Dylan song is a fool’s errand. Dylan had abandoned message songs like “Hard Rain” in the early ‘60s, pivoting from acoustic to electric and then to combinations of both, and writing lyrics whose meanings were obscure, if they had any meaning at all. He stopped being a protest singer and donned the mantle of a post-modern artist, then experimented with a variety of musical styles inspired by other musicians he admired but always bearing his unique touch. He’s been doing that for almost sixty years now, and “Empire Burlesque” was released in the first third of that period.

“Dark Eyes,” as obscure as any of Dylan’s most sublime writing, is packed with powerful imagery. There are gentlemen drinking, talking, and walking in the midnight moon by a riverside; an earth strung with lovers’ pearls; a mother searching for her lost child; unidentified people providing unheeded advice; a French girl in paradise; a drunken man at the wheel; an arrow flying by passion’s rule. The songwriter of 1985 (the year the song was published) had progressed greatly in his craft from his “Hard Rain” days.

Foolish though it is to try to discern meaning in many of Dylan’s works, I have always thought of “Dark Eyes” as an Easter song (or, perhaps more accurately, a Good Friday song). Dylan was Biblically literate, and before “Dark Eyes” was published, he had gone through a “born-again” phase, at least musically if not personally. There are several images in the song that, to my ears, echo the Biblical accounts of Jesus’ crucifixion. “A cock is crowing far away” is reminiscent of the cock that crowed after Peter denied Jesus three times. The “soldier[] deep in prayer” could be the Roman centurion who believed in Jesus after witnessing the crucifixion. The song’s narrator hears “another drum beating for the dead that rise,” an explicit reference to resurrection. And the “nature’s beast” that fears those rising dead conjures up the “rough beast” that slouches towards Bethlehem to be born, portrayed in William Butler Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming” (later put to music by Joni Mitchell). At last, perhaps, Yeats’ ominous beast, disturbingly present at the Nativity, is run off by the Easter morning beat of Dylan’s other drum.

I am surely oversimplifying a complex song that its writer intended to be more evocative than descriptive and that raises more questions than answers. Who is the narrator, after all? And who is the French girl, or the drunken man at the wheel? (I’ve often thought the latter was a reference to Ronald Reagan, President at the time the song was written and, some believed, recklessly at the wheel of the world’s power structures.) Why is time short and why are the days sweet? Are those also references to the Second Coming?

The most haunting image, repeatedly invoked in the last line of each of the four verses, is the image of the dark eyes. For all the world’s terror, violence, and greed, and for all of its temptations of wealth, fame, and power, the dark eyes are the only things the narrator sees. We learn in the final line that he sees them in the “million faces at my feet,” perhaps a reference to the crowds at Dylan’s concerts, perhaps to the people who looked up at Jesus hanging on the cross (though there certainly weren’t a million of them), or perhaps to the multitudes that followed Jesus during his earthly life.

Or maybe they have nothing to do with Jesus at all, but are simply the eyes of the world’s multitudinous poor, present today and throughout human history. It’s hunger, after all, that “pays a heavy price to the falling gods of speed and steel.” In 1985, and certainly today, hunger is the urgent norm and satiety the privileged exception.

In the end, what matters is not what the words make us think, but what the song makes us see and feel and hear. Can we, though? Can we see the eyes the narrator sees? Can we feel the desolation and abandonment felt by the dark-eyed masses? Can we hear the beat of the rousing drum? And if so, what is our response to be?

Dylan doesn’t tell us. For that part, we are on our own.

Happy Easter to those who observe it.

Photo, taken by the author, of a cross carved into a stone wall at the Colosseum, Rome, Italy, 2018.

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You can find the lyrics to “Dark Eyes” here.

You can find the lyrics to “Hard Rain” here.

You can find Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” here.