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The Narrative and Poetry of Tangled Up in Blue
Main Post:
Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and for good reason. And Tangled Up in Blue is one of those reasons.
I came across 10-month old post asking for an explanation of the song and none of the comments really answered the question, so I left the following comment. I thought I'd break it out into a separate post, however, because I think it's such a fascinating, literary, artful song.
Tangled Up In Blue:
The song is the story of a man's relationship with a woman. They fell in love, fell apart, and he never stopped loving her.
"I'd seen a lot of women, but she never escaped my mind."
He's tortured with a blue feeling fired by the memory of her.
The first verse is written in the present tense. He's laying in bed, thinking about her. This compels him to get up and "head out to the East Coast."
The song then switches to the past tense and tells the story of their relationship.
"She was married when we first met ...
But they break up "on a dark said night, both agreeing it was best."
He then drifts around the country ... great northwest (in another version, Santa Fe), to New Orleans, which seems to be the nadir of his wandering with the reference to Delacroix (a town that once billed itself as the end of the world, and the narrator goes even further than that -- on a fishing boat (looking for something) outside of the supposedly furthest global point)
Delacroix was also a French painter who inspired Baudelaire and his abstract approach to poetry, who then influenced Dylan. Dylan also wrote this song after studying painting with a man whom Dylan credits with teaching him to see differently, his own Delacroix, so to speak.
He reconnects with his love (NOTE: working in a topless place as well "married when we first met" could be read as references to the wife he was breaking with at the time, Sara).
Then you get the reference to Dante's Inferno and its implicit reference to Charon, the ferryman of the underworld (eyes like burning coal). This fits the theme of a tortured soul wandering.
The relationship reaches a critical breaking point again on "Montague Street" (this places them all back in NYC, or Brooklyn to be precise, on the "East Coast") and also provides a reference to another ill-fated lover, Romeo (last name Montague).
The song ends where it started, in the present tense, with the love-tortured wander explaining why he's standing in the rain heading back to the East Coast. Because "I've got to get back to her some how" and that great line that sums up the relationship, "We always did feel the same / we just saw it from a different point of view."
Dylan has said that he intended the song to confound time, to fuse together yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Clearly, the other theme is travel, the wandering of a tortured soul, a soul tortured by one true love that never seems to bond. Tangled up in blue.
Top Comment: I would love to see a summary of all the significant lyric changes this song has elicited from Bob over the years.