Arnold Zwicky's Blog

🐅 🐅 🐅 ultimate January — would this awful month never end? — so in leap the valedictory tigers (paving the way for the sweet introductory rabbits of February, who in turn herald the fabulous, fortunate, and beneficent dragons of the new lunar year); but the near future looks dark, with at least a week of cold rain, predicted to begin any minute now (I look out my window into the gloom of 9 am and can barely discern my winter-flowering cymbidium orchids — four cultivars now in bloom, more to come soon, all beautiful memorials to my long-dead man Jacques)

And yes, this is another posting serving as evidence that I’m not dead yet. I have projects that are taking much longer than I expected, I’ve been hampered by crippling pain (which you don’t want to hear about, but there it is), and I took most of a day off to welcome visitors (an extraordinarily big thing; I get visits from friends only every few months), who came bearing a small carload of really fine sushi and stayed for a couple hours of amiable talk — giving me the balm of good company. So this morning, as a diversionary tactic I will shamelessly extract bits of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” (see my play on its refrain in the header for this posting), just to get the one line that appears to be of relevance to linguists:

Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken

And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

Oh, what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what’ll you do now, my darling young one?
I’m a-goin’ back out ’fore the rain starts a-fallin’

And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

(Out here in the real world, the rain has just begun. And no, I’m not going back out in it. Not until this afternoon, when I’ll have to go out to my mailbox to pick up the mail.)

The song. From Wikipedia:

“A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” is a song written by American musician and Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan in the summer of 1962 [AZ: in June 1962, I graduated from college and married] and recorded later that year for his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963). Its lyrical structure is based on the question-and-answer refrain pattern of the traditional British ballad “Lord Randall” …

The song is characterized by symbolist imagery in the style of Arthur Rimbaud, communicating suffering, pollution, and warfare.

Very much a song for our times. Alas.

The Wikipedia entry lists recordings of it, by an extraordinary range of musicians.

And here I note that, like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan is just a bit younger than me and just a bit older than Jacques.

This entry was posted on January 31, 2024 at 10:17 am and is filed under Holidays, Music, My life, Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.