Sad Eyed Lady of The Lowlands - Critical Comments

Critical Comments

Many critics have noted the similarity of 'Lowlands' to 'Lownds', the name of Dylan's wife Sara, and Dylan biographer Robert Shelton wrote that "Sad Eyed Lady" was a "wedding song" for Sara Lownds, whom Dylan had married just three months earlier. Her maiden name was Shirley Noznisky, and 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, magazine photographer Hans Lownds.

Written over the space of eight hours in the CBS recording studio in Nashville, on the night of February 15–16, "Sad Eyed Lady" eventually occupied the whole of side four of Blonde On Blonde. In his paean to his wife, "Sara", written in 1975, Dylan amends history slightly when he sings:

Stayin' up for days in the Chelsea Hotel,

Writin' "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" for you.

When Dylan played Shelton the song, shortly after recording it, he claimed, "This is the best song I've ever written." Around the same time, Dylan enthused to journalist Jules Siegel, "Just listen to that! That's old-time religious carnival music!" However, in 1969, Dylan confessed to Rolling Stone's editor, Jann Wenner, "I just sat down at a table and started writing...And I just got carried away with the whole thing...I just started writing and I couldn’t stop. After a period of time, I forgot what it was all about, and I started trying to get back to the beginning ."

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". 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", writes Gill, "it's serious."

Heard by some listeners as a hymn to an other-worldly woman, 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." 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.

Critic Clinton Heylin has described "Sad Eyed Lady" as both "possibly the most pretentious set of lyrics ever penned", and also "a captivating carousel of a performance". 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 symphony... with different melodies and different words, different ideas... which just roll on top of each other... the end result being a total... They say my songs are long now. Some time just gonna come up with one that's gonna be the whole album." This ambitious plan ultimately gave birth to "Sad Eyed Lady", a song Heylin describes as "a thirteen minute one-trick pony."

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."

In a footnote to this passage, written later, Gray adds: "When I read this assessment now, I simply feel embarrassed at what a little snob I was when I wrote it... When I go back and listen, after a long gap, to Dylan's recording, every ardent, true feeling I ever had comes back to me. Decades of detritus drop away and I feel back in communion with my best self and my soul. 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."

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 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."

Literary critic Christopher Ricks compares both the imagery and the metre of “Sad Eyed Lady” to a poem by 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”.

Referring to the phrase repeated in the chorus of the song, “Sad eyed lady of the lowlands/ Where the sad eyed prophet say 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. Dylan’s song allude 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”.