436 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II
In each stanza of Dylan’s song, the mother’s questions prompt a fl ood of apoca-
lyptic visions whose meaning is sometimes obscure but whose sense of impend-
ing doom is unmistakable:Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’
I saw a white ladder all covered with water...
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.Dylan sings each visionary line to the same short musical phrase. The number
of lines varies from stanza to stanza, and the resulting unpredictability creates
a tension that fi nds resolution in the closing refrain, which foretells the fall of
a “hard rain.” Many listeners understood that rain to be the radioactive fall-
out that, should the Cold War erupt into a nuclear confrontation, might mark
the end of humanity. Dylan, in a radio interview, resisted that interpretation,
however, suggesting that the song pointed to a range of injustices that might be
washed away in a metaphorical hard rain.
The opening song on Freewheelin’, “Blow in’ in the Wind,” asks a series of ques-
tions, some of them pointedly referring to the civil rights movement: “How
many years can some people exist / Before they’re allowed to be free?” Dylan
underlines his meaning by borrowing from the tune of a Negro spiritual that
had become a civil rights anthem, “No More Auction Block.” The song, though it
poses many questions, offers no solutions. If any answer is to be found, it is blow-
ing in the wind: all around us, yet elusive and hard to grasp. Unlike Pete Seeger,
for whom a topical song should be a call to action and therefore must have a clear
meaning, Dylan uses the topical song to explore moral ambiguities.K Twenty-two-year-old
Bob Dylan sings “Only a
Pawn in Their Game” at a
Mississippi voter registration
rally in 1963.“Blowin’ in the Wind”172028_17_412-439_r3_sd.indd 436 23/01/13 10:58 AM