[890] All Along The Watch-Tower

Guest poem sent in by Mohit <Mohit_Puthuraya@>

"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief,
"There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."

"No reason to get excited," the thief, he kindly spoke,
"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

           -- Bob Dylan

	     from "John Wesley Harding", 1967

I must admit that when i first heard the song back in college, the only line
that made any sense at all was -
  "There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke"
but in the aftermath of the events of the past week, it seems that the joke's on
 us! sadly no one is laughing.

Dylan's lyrics bear a stamp of timelessness. he briefly turns fortune-teller
through these words, but it's paradoxical that the setting spells gloom.
The last few words are eerie .when i heard Hendrix's version of the same song
earlier today, i was quite certain i heard the wind make noises.
  "Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl."

Mohit

Links:

We've run a few of Dylan's lyrics on Minstrels:
poem #112
poem #227
poem #832

From: "Jaideep" <jaideep@>

all along the watchtower, princes kept the view, reminds me so much of
hamlet and horatio and i can almost hear laurence olivier say 'there are
more things on heaven and earth, horatio'...as seconds

From: CIC4urGC@

Well Boys and Girls,

I'm sorry to learn that all of you are so uneducated.  Bob Dylan didn't write 
the lyrics to "All Along the Watch Tower."  They are hundreds of years old.  
He "borrowed" them from written history.

Get educated.