 This video was brought to you by Brilliant. The first 200 subscribers to go to the link in the description will get 20% off an annual premium subscription. Is Bob Dylan a poet? It's a debate that has raged in both literary and musical circles for most of the singer's career with passionate litigators on both sides. And like most great art debates, I don't think there's any singular, objective answer. But for myself personally, the answer has always been a resounding yes. If Bob Dylan's grasp on the English language isn't poetic, then I don't know what is. Drawing influence from some of the great poets in history, Dylan's lyrics are rife with beautiful description, teaming with intricate wordplay, and rich with literary device. And of all of Dylan's immense catalogue, I think few songs make as compelling an argument for Dylan the poet as Mr. Tambourine Man. So in this video, we're going to examine Mr. Tambourine Man as we would any other poem, by looking at the words to analyze technique and find meaning. Let's take a closer look. Mr. Tambourine Man was probably born out of a trip that Dylan took to New Orleans in February of 1964. Dylan was living through a crossroads in his country's history. Martin Luther King was marching, miners were striking across the country, and the president had just been assassinated. In search, perhaps, of hope or meaning, Dylan turned to the works of his heroes, including the beatwriter Jack Kerouac. In his magnum opus On the Road, Kerouac glorified the concept of the road trip as a kind of uniquely American odyssey. So Dylan and his friends piled into a Ford station wagon, and set off across the country. The trip only stopped through New Orleans for one or two nights, but the city enchanted Dylan. He and his friends had one of the nights you remember for years, going from pub to pub, debating poetry, collecting strangers into their entourage, going to a drag show, and ending up at a stranger's party at five in the morning. Personally, it seems to me that Mr. Tambourine Man documents the aftermath of one such evening. It's an attempt to capture that strange tinge of loneliness that you feel once the revelry dies out, and you're left on your own in a halo of smoke and alcohol, watching the sun rise on tomorrow. While Mr. Tambourine Man begins with the chorus, I think it's best for us to start with the verses. The first verse sets us clearly in Dylan's dreamy New Orleans night, though I know that evening's empire has returned into sand, vanished from my hand, left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping. Dylan sets the scene with intricate, stunning metaphor, the glory of the previous night portrayed as an empire washed away like a sandcastle. But Dylan remains, not ready for his night of revelry to be over. In looking at this section, we can see parallels between Dylan and some of the legendary poets that influenced him. One of Dylan's favorites was William Butler Yates, a giant in poetry who used symbolist metaphor to create darkly surreal pieces, often meditating on apocalypse and empire. One such poem is Byzantium, a piece that Dylan biographer Robert Shelton connects to Mr. Tambourine Man. You can see the influence in the opening stanza of Byzantium, where Yates depicts night falling on an imperial city. The unpurged images of day recede, the emperor's drunken soldiery are a bed. Night resonance recedes, Night Walker's song after great cathedral gong. Once Dylan sets his own scene inspired by Yates, he pulls in closer and focuses on himself and his emotions. My weariness amazes me, I'm branded on my feet, I have no one to meet and my ancient empty streets too dad for dreaming. The focus on Dylan's feet will return throughout the song. They show his tiredness but also give a sense of movement. He's been walking until his feet burn like they've been branded, moving through the city and through life in search of connection or meaning. The line I have no one to meet is a statement of freedom but also one of loneliness. Dylan has been left without hope on an ancient street too dad for dreaming. The first verse also introduces us to Dylan's unique rhyme scheme. It's made up of six lines with an AAB CCB scheme, but nestled into the third and sixth lines are a piece of internal rhyme matched to the preceding couplets. By doing this Dylan creates a sense of forward motion with the song. The verses roll on to each other, pressing onward like a wandering vagrant in the night. In the second verse we see Dylan yearning to be transported, brought away from his loneliness and off to some new adventure, even as his body still aches and his mind is exhausted. Take me on a trip upon your magic swirling ship. My senses have been stripped, my hands can't feel to grip, my toes too numb to step, wait only for my boot heels to be wandering. See how Dylan furthers the sense of momentum by expanding on the internal rhyme in this verse, and once again he focuses on his feet, singing about going forth on this magical journey. Over the years many have taken this trip to be a reference to drugs, particularly LSD. In this reading the titular tambourine man is a drug dealer. But Dylan wrote Mr. Tambourine Man before he had ever experienced LSD though he was a marijuana smoker. And beyond that I've always found this reading to be far too simplistic for an artist whose career was defined by dense riddles. So then what is this trip that Dylan's singing about? I think it's something more primal and pure than drugs. It's the wonder of music itself. As Dylan wanders through the empty streets of New Orleans, the birthplace of modern music, he bombs his loneliness, bombs his sorrow with the one eternal friend that will always be there, song. Dylan is singing an emotion that I think a lot of us have felt before, the feeling of being transported by a distant melody, being willing to open yourself up fully and feel the flow of music through your body, through your spirit, and through your soul. I'm ready to go anywhere, I'm ready for to fade, into my own parade, cast your dance and spell my way, I promise to go under it. In a 1977 interview with journalist Ron Rosenbaum, Dylan described this exact feeling. Music filters out to me in the crack of dawn. You get a little spacey when you've been up all night, so you don't really have the power to form it. But that's the sound I'm trying to get across. In the third verse, Dylan engulfs the listener in a kind of manic madness, a joy that comes from being absorbed in music. Though you might hear laughing, spinning, swinging madly across the sun, it's not aimed at anyone, it's just escaping on the run, and but for the sky there are no fences facing. Dylan notes that the euphoria of his music isn't aimed at anyone. As someone who was constantly having his work scrutinized, this could perhaps be a line about himself. His cryptic words aren't directed at anything, they're just expressions of the joy he feels from music. In this verse, Dylan's love for language is clearly on display as well, and that's a love that he got from his poet influences, especially from Arthur Rimbaud. In his autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan remembers what a single line from Rimbaud meant to him. I came across one of his letters called Je est un autre, which translates into I is someone else. When I read those words, the bells went off. It made perfect sense. I wished someone would have mentioned that to me earlier. While Dylan adopted an identity based on Rimbaud's writing, he also adopted literary techniques that Rimbaud used. In the third verse, Dylan tinkers with language and creates a string of pronouns that confound the story. And if you hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme to your tambourine in time, it's just a ragged clown behind. I wouldn't pay it any mind, it's just a shadow you're seeing that he's chasing. It's unclear as to who the you is. Is it the audience, the tambourine man, or Dylan himself? As Dylan says, I is someone else. And there's another aspect of this verse that gets to the core of who Dylan was. A kind of irreverence. Dylan is perhaps describing himself as a ragged clown, following the path walked by the tambourine man. Throughout his life, people loved dissecting every word of Dylan's lyrics and trying to pull meaning from them, something that frustrated him to no end. Sorry, Bob. But in the third verse, he seems to be insisting that his music doesn't really have meaning. He tells you not to pay it any mind, he's just a man chasing a shadow. And I think that walking among the weight of musical history in New Orleans, Dylan might be meditating on his own career, following the footsteps of the great American musical tradition birthed from that city. For me, the last verse of Mr. Tambourine Man, with its eloquent apocalyptic imagery, has always been the one that most reveals Dylan's T.S. Eliot influences. Take me disappear and through the smoke rings of my mind, down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves, the haunted frightened trees, out to the windy beach, far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow. This verse parallels a number of points in T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Proofrock. Let us go through certain half-deserted streets, the muttering retreats of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels, and later in the poem, and indeed there will be time, for the yellow smoke that slides along the street, rubbing its back upon the window pane, there will be time, there will be time. Dylan's stream of consciousness style falls into rhythmic patterns of repetition in this verse, a hypnotizing dive into a long forgotten past. The line about smoke rings of my mind is another that people have used to suggest the song is about fantastical drug trips, but Dylan insists that's not the case. I'm not going to write a fantasy song. Even a song like Mr. Tambourine Man really isn't a fantasy. There's substance to the dream. You have to have seen something, or have heard something for you to dream it. So then, what is it that Bob Dylan is dreaming on his empty New Orleans street? I think it's a number of things. I think it's a dream of continuing a night that he never wanted to end. I think it's a dream of escaping from a world of rising pressures and tension. But mostly, I think it's a dream of music. It's about the way that one can get lost in a song and transported to other worlds. Walking through New Orleans, Dylan is reminded of all the reasons he started playing music in the first place, of the rich history of folk, blues, and jazz that walked the very same streets he walked that night, and laid the groundwork for his career. It's a dream of escaping the pressures that come with being labeled the voice of a generation, and returning to the simple love of music, forgetting about everything else and losing yourself in song. Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands, with all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves, let me forget about today until tomorrow. So then who is Mr. Tambourine Man? On a surface level, the character was probably inspired by one of Dylan's friends and musicians, Bruce Langhorn, who used to walk around playing a large Turkish tambourine. Langhorn actually played the electric guitar on Mr. Tambourine Man as well. But given the context of the lyrics, I don't think this song is simply an ode to Langhorn. I think it's an ode to any musicians who can tear us from the malaise of the world and let us disappear into dream and fantasy. It's a celebration of the great history of musicians who paved the way for Bob Dylan and all of his contemporaries. And to me at least, Mr. Tambourine Man has always been Dylan himself. Because no other musician has ever been able to pull me from reality, to weave word and melody and create an escape from the increasing stresses of my life, to let me forget about today until tomorrow. But at the end of the day, that's just one fan's interpretation. The great thing about poetry, the great thing about music is that we each connect to it in our own way. So I'll leave you with this question. In your mind, who is Mr. Tambourine Man? And what does the song mean to you? As someone who grew up loving music, poetry, and the arts, my STEM education skills are honestly a little lacking. And living in the digital age, working on a website driven by algorithms, editing with software that uses its own version of JavaScript for effects, I really regret that. And that's why it's cool to have this video sponsored by Brilliant. Brilliant is a unique service that provides a one-of-a-kind learning experience in math and science through dynamic interactive lessons. Rather than spout dry theories at you, Brilliant teaches you through hands-on activities, interactive challenges, and problem solving. And they've got courses on all kinds of topics from a fundamental level to more advanced learning. 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