RSS
Home
Bob Dylan and Thomas Hardy--secret soul mates?
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Bob Dylan at the March on Washington, 1963
Are Bob Dylan and British poet and novelist Thomas Hardy secret soul mates? The Manhattan Review, one of New York City’s little magazines, thinks so. Its latest issue features “The Ballad of Thomas Hardy and Bob Dylan,” an article that takes the measure of the two famous figures and finds they match up in many ways.
“They’re both obsessive, haunted characters,” says its author Baron Wormser, who teaches writing in the MFA program at the University of Southern Maine and is the state’s former poet laureate. “They share the idea that human affairs are fated. It’s an idea that goes back to the Greek tragedies.”
Dylan’s song “Simple Twist of Fate” comes immediately to mind. So do many of Dylan's other pieces that suggest mythic narratives.
Hardy (1840-1928) could almost have written the gorgeous and evocative last lines of Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower," Wormser points out in a telepone interview. He quotes: “Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl,” which leaves the listener with a big, existential question mark.
“It has that mysterious quality of Hardy’s, the sense of events happening that always elude explanation,” Wormser says.
As for Hardy, he has a tendency to be Dylanesque at times. In “The Convergence of the Twain,” about the sinking of the Titanic, Hardy’s line “Dim moon-eyed fishes near / Gaze at the gilded gear,” could be a missing couplet from Dylan’s “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” And, like Dylan’s song “Black Diamond Bay” points out Wormser, Hardy’s poem is about a natural disaster.
To hear Wormser talk, despite the hundred-year gap, these guys just might have been separated at birth. “Thomas Hardy, were he strolling around today with some apparatus plugged into his ears, would have recognized Bob Dylan as a confederate, both artistically and personally,” he says in his essay.
So if Hardy, the author of 13 novels, including “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” and “Far from the Madding Crowd,” as well thousands of poems, did have an iPod, what would he be listening to?
“He wouldn’t be bouncing to electronic techno-pop. He’d want traditional English music, probably Edward Elgar,” Wormser tells me, without skipping a beat. Hardy, by the way, was a skillful fiddler who played at local weddings and holiday parties in his native Dorest, in the west of England.
Like so many other Dylan fans with a literary bent, Wormser sees Dylan as a poet. “When you look at his stuff on the page, you think—yeah, this is a poem!” he argues.
But Wormser takes it further, arguing Dylan is a particular kind of poet, a ballad writer—just as Hardy was. His piece in The Manhattan Review examines stanza structures, beats-per-line and rhyme schemes, for those who love the carpentry of the craft.
“The ghost of the ballad is everywhere in their poetry,” he says. “The traditional ballad is a very tight form. This is not the New York school of poetry—people like John Ashbery; it’s a tight narrative. There’s always a story that matters.”
Wormser points out that, while both Dylan and Hardy were steeped in traditional English ballads, Dylan fused the ballad with the African-American blues traditions.
“That’s the neat thing about Dylan, he’s internalized the wry commentary and the self-mocking quality of the blues,” he mused. “But balladeers and bluesmen are connected. They have a similar energy.”
So, what are the chances that Bob Dylan could be the reincarnation of Thomas Hardy? “Far be it from me to comprehend the workings of the spirit,” says Wormser. “But you can look at artists across the ages and see they’re connected. Dylan and Hardy are on the same page.”
They are in fall/winter issue of The Manhattan Review, anyway.
A local magazine that publishes essays and poetry from around the world, The Manhattan Review is available by subscription and can be purchased at some Manhattan bookstores.
“We’re high energy and low budget. And we get around,” says its founder, editor and life-long New Yorker Philip Fried. The review sponsors readings in bookstores and bars around town. Up next is a February 27th reading at Book Culture, on West 112th Street, near Columbia University.
Related Articles:
Comments
