Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands

In 1975, Dylan wrote and recorded a paean to his wife which challenged the account that "Sad Eyed Lady" had been written in the recording studio in Nashville. In "Sara", Dylan located the writing in a bohemian hotel where he and his wife had lived in 1965,[20] singing that he had once been:

Stayin' up for days in the Chelsea Hotel,
Writin' "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" for you.[21][22]

The technique employed by Dylan to write the song was to construct the verses as a series of "lists" of the attributes of the eponymous Sad Eyed Lady.[23] These "lists" are complemented by a sequence of rhetorical questions about the Lady which are never answered within the song.[24] Thus, the first verse begins:

With your mercury mouth in the missionary times
And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes
And your silver cross, and your voice like chimes
Oh, who do they think could bury you?[21]

Critic Ian Bell wrote: "Those that say 'Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' is a mere jumble of images miss a poet attempting, in the ancient manner, to count the ways of love... and to put the mystery of inviolability and passion into words."[25]

Critics have noted the similarity of 'Lowlands' to 'Lownds', the name of Dylan's wife Sara. Shelton wrote that "Sad Eyed Lady" was a "wedding song" for Sara Lownds, whom Dylan had married only three months prior to recording the song.[26] Heard by some listeners as a hymn to an other-worldly woman,[27] for Shelton "her travails seem beyond endurance, yet she radiates an inner strength, an ability to be re-born. This is Dylan at his most romantic".[26] Bob Dylan married Sara Lownds on November 22, 1965, at a judge's office on Long Island, New York. Sara's maiden name was Shirley Noznisky; her father, Isaac Noznisky, was a scrap metal dealer in Wilmington, Delaware. Critics have noted the link between "sheet metal memories of Cannery Row" and the business of Sara's father, as well as the quote "with your sheets like metal and your belts like lace". Similarly the line "your magazine husband who one day just had to go" could be a reference to Sara's first husband, a magazine photographer named Hans Lownds.[28]

Writing about "Sad Eyed Lady", historian Sean Wilentz comments that Dylan's writing had shifted from the days when he asked questions and supplied answers. Like the verses of William Blake's "Tyger", Dylan asks a series of questions about the "Sad Eyed Lady" but never supplies any answers.[24]

Literary critic Christopher Ricks compares both the imagery and the meter of "Sad Eyed Lady" to a poem by Algernon Swinburne, "Dolores", published in 1866. Ricks describes Swinburne's poem as an "anti-prayer to his anti-madonna, an interrogation that hears no need why it should ever end". Ricks writes that "Dolores moves ...'To a tune that enthralls and entices', as does 'Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." Ricks makes the point that "Dolores" "insists upon listing… all of her energies, her incitements and excitements, her accoutrements, her weapons" as does "Sad Eyed Lady". Ricks describes the way in which Dylan's song attributes so many objects and qualities to the Sad Eyed Lady as "part inventory, part arsenal, these returns of phrases are bound by awe of her and by suspicion of her".[23]

Referring to the phrase repeated in the chorus of the song, "Sad eyed lady of the lowlands/ Where the sad eyed prophet says that no man comes", Ricks suggests that the prophet Ezekiel is relevant, noting that the phrase "no man" occurs several times in the Book of Ezekiel. Ricks also notes several references to "gates" in that Book, as in Dylan's song. "This gate shall be shut, it shall not be opened, and no man may enter in by it." Ezekiel 44:2.[23] Dylan's song alludes to "the kings of Tyrus", and Ricks points out that, in the Book of Ezekiel, Tyrus is described as "a merchant of the people for many isles" (Ezekiel 27:3); this chapter of Ezekiel lists the many commodities and luxuries which Tyrus trades in, including silver, gold, spices, precious stones, emeralds, ebony and ivory. Thus, for Ricks, Tyrus is "one huge warehouse of hubris", but there is a force that can outwait the kings of Tyrus, "the Lord, he who speaks through his propher Ezekiel of the doom to come".[23]

Ralph Gleason wrote in 1966 that "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" was "a ghostly enigma. Allen Ginsberg says it stands as a good poem all by itself, which is praise of the first rank".[29] The Boston Globe reviewer Ernie Santosuosso commented of the song that "It's Dylan at his most esoteric best in this wailing tribute filled with sense-boggling word figures."[30] In Melody Maker, the song was described as "an appealing hymnic chant which ranks with the best of the new Dylan"[31] Richard Goldstein of The Village Voice found that "all that is necessary to appreciate the willowy beauty of its lyrics is to think closely of a personal sad-eyed lady and let the images do the rest".[32]

Because the song was recorded at around four in the morning, critic Andy Gill feels the work has a nocturnal quality similar to "Visions of Johanna".[22] Organist Kooper told an interviewer from Mojo that "to me, [Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands] is the definitive version of what 4 am sounds like".[33] Gill comments on the "measured grace and stately pace" of the song's rhythm, characterising the mood of the song as "as much funeral procession as wedding march". Gill notes that, though the song has its share of enigmatic imagery, there is no trace of the jokey nihilism that marks out much of the rest of Blonde on Blonde. "This time around",[lower-alpha 1] writes Gill, "it's serious".[22] Timothy Hampton commented that Dylan's "technique of varying the chorus as a way of isolating the singer from the listener" that he employed on some of the Blonde on Blonde tracks is in evidence on "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands". Hampton remarks that as Dylan sings ahead of the beat, and considers that "you cannot quite ever sing along".[34]

Musicologist Wilfrid Mellers writes that "Sad Eyed Lady" stands with "Mr. Tambourine Man" as "perhaps the most insidiously haunting pop song of our time". Mellers claims that Dylan has succeeded in concentrating contradictory qualities into the Lady: "It's impossible to tell ... whether the Lady is a creature of dream or nightmare; but she's beyond good and evil as the cant phrase has it, only in the sense that the simple, hypnotic, even corny waltz tune contains ... both fulfilment and regret. Mysteriously, the song even erases Time. Though chronologically it lasts nearly 20 minutes (sic), it enters a mythological once-upon-a-time where the clock doesn't tick".[1]

Jim Beviglia ranked the song as Dylan's best in his 2013 book Counting Down Bob Dylan: His 100 Finest Songs, referring to it as "the greatest love song there is, was, and ever will be" and considering it Dylan's "finest combination of lyrics, melody and performance".[35] In 2015, the song was ranked 27th on Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Bob Dylan Songs".[36] In a 2020 article for The Guardian, Alexis Petridis ranked it the ninth-greatest of Dylan's songs, and felt that "its understated sound, cyclical melody and devotional lyrics" provided persuasive evidence that the track was a "masterpiece".[37]

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross analysed "Sad Eyed Lady" to explore the paradoxical way in which Dylan can be both verbose and musically magisterial. Ross notes that the lyrics of the song become increasingly hard to fathom, writing that in the second-to-last verse, Dylan's meaning clouds over: "'They wished you’d accepted the blame for the farm.' What farm? What happened to it? Why would she be to blame for it?"[38]

Ross further interrogates Dylan’s imagery: "What are 'warehouse eyes', and how can one leave them by a gate? Dylanologists beat their heads against such questions. But the music makes you forget them. The melody of the refrain—a rising and descending scale, as in 'Danny Boy'—is grand to begin with, but in the fifth verse Dylan makes it grander. As the band keeps playing the scale, he skates back up to the top D with each syllable." Ross suggests that Dylan's technique is here reminiscent of the soprano in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas who "catches our hearts in the same way as she sings, 'Remember me, remember me'."[38]

Clinton Heylin has described "Sad Eyed Lady" as both "possibly the most pretentious set of lyrics ever penned", but also "a captivating carousel of a performance".[39] Heylin suggests that Dylan was driven to try to create a song that would reach a new level of writing and performance. Heylin quotes from Dylan's San Francisco press conference on December 3, 1965, when he stated he was interested in "writing [a] symphony ... with different melodies and different words, different ideas ... which just roll on top of each other ... the end result being a total[ity] ... They say my songs are long now. Some time [I'm] just gonna come up with one that's gonna be the whole album".[39] This ambitious plan ultimately gave birth to "Sad Eyed Lady", a song Heylin describes as "a thirteen minute one-trick pony".[39]

Dylan scholar Michael Gray expressed a similarly contradictory attitude to "Sad Eyed Lady". In his book Song & Dance Man III, Gray writes of the song's imagery: "Dylan is ... cooing nonsense in our ears, very beguilingly of course. The only thing that unites the fragments is the mechanical device of the return to the chorus and thus to the title ... It is, in the end, not a whole song at all but unconnected chippings, and only the poor cement of an empty chorus and a regularity of tune gives the illusion that things are otherwise".[3] The fact that it occupies the entire fourth side of Blonde on Blonde leads Gray to conclude that the song is "unsuccessful, and rather grandly so, inasmuch as it is offered on the album as something of extra-special importance and doesn't live up to its billing."[3]

In a footnote to this passage, written for the 2000 edition of his book, Gray modified his view: "When I read this assessment now, I simply feel embarrassed at what a little snob I was when I wrote it ... Whatever the shortcomings of the lyric, the recording itself, capturing at its absolute peak Dylan's incomparable capacity for intensity of communication, is a masterpiece if ever there was one".[3]

Perhaps the most hostile critique of "Sad Eyed Lady" was written by Lester Bangs in a review of Dylan's 1975 album Desire. Noting that Dylan's claims in his song "Sara" to have written "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" in the Chelsea Hotel, Bangs writes: "I have it on good authority that Dylan wrote "Sad Eyed Lady", as well as about half of the rest of Blonde on Blonde, wired out of his skull in the studio, just before the songs were recorded, while the session men sat around waiting on him …Those lyrics were a speed trip, and if he really did spend days on end sitting in the Chelsea Hotel sweating over lines like "your streetcar visions which you place on the grass", then he is stupider than we ever gave him credit for."[40]