A Hard rain’s a gonna fall  BOB DYLAN (commentary)

The song is connected to the situation of upheaval and unrest that characterized the 1960’s, in particular the Cuban missile crisis, when after the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba in October 1962, many people feared the world was on the verge of a nuclear war. However, it seems that Bob Dylan wrote the song some months before the Cuban missile crisis.

Anyway, the song comes from the ferment of the 1960’s, characterized by a general atmosphere of young people’s rebellion and social protest.

Yet, the song may come from any period, since it has no specific historical references and the prevailing dimension is mythical.

As singer and song writer Bob Dylan said, "There would be no music without the words." He produced many songs of social protest.

This song was based on an old medieval ballad whose  title is  "Lord Randal", in which a mother asks her son lots of questions (beginning with "Where have you been?"), leading him to reveal he has been poisoned.

The answers in this song are not symmetrical and balanced like in the original Lord Randal but get longer and longer as the song goes on.

No time is mentioned, no setting is fixed; we have a series of effective, powerful, intense images.

Bob Dylan once said: "Hard Rain is a desperate kind of song. Every line in it, is actually the start of a whole song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn't have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one."

The hard rain of the song may be the fallout, consisting in the radioactive particles that are carried into the atmosphere after a nuclear explosion or accident and gradually fall back as dust or rain.

Dylan himself still  introduced this song by saying “hard rain meant something big was about to happen”, maybe a sort of nuclear catastrophe, a sort of final apocalypse.

In other words the hard rain that is going to fall is a reference to all the bad things that will happen in the world if we don't stop them.

This song is characterized by the use of a lot of adjectives- misty, crooked, sad, dead, black, young, ugly, damp, dirty….

It is also the song  of numbers- twelve, six, seven, a dozen, ten thousand (three times). repetitions and alliteration.

The blue eyed son may be symbolic of an innocent child witnessing terrible events, seeing the wrongs committed and realizing they will lead to destruction or a terrible damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale.

In the first stanza Dylan is saying that he has been to many different places all around the world and he has seen many different weird, dreadful things. Probably the twelve misty mountains are volcanoes, the six crooked highways represent mankind’s dishonesty, the seven sad forests are the trees that are dying because of the climate change, the dozen oceans are dead because of  the same problem.

In the second stanza, he is saying that children are surrounded by violence since their birth, the black are persecuted and even badly hit in some places in the world, cruelty and brutality are increasing more and more, there could be a “ladder”, that is a tool to escape but “that ladder” is so wet and slippery that  it cannot be used….and if you climb it, you may fall off and die, maybe the idea is that no one can change his condition and improve that in some way.

 Here he  is referring to racial hatred, segregation laws, the impossibility to change, the indifference to sorrow. He is also saying that those who want  to speak out against injustice cannot do that,  because they are not allowed to criticize society and point out its negative aspects.The future world will be so violent, senseless, absurd and immoral that even children will have to use  weapons  and defend themselves, changing themselves  into frightful soldiers.

In the third stanza, he is suggesting that people could catch some warning signs coming from nature and society.  The thunder and the wave may suggest some terrible natural catastrophe ( a terrible tsunami…), maybe brought about by human beings, for example a nuclear war.  Probably they will be people (drummers) who will play so fast that their hands will burn in order to warn about the possible dangers for the mankind. Some others will choose another way-they will use a soft and confidential tone of voice to warn of dangers.

However, no one will take the signs of warning seriously, even some of them will laugh, making fun of those who can see the truth- the awful, direful destiny human beings are going to meet.  The poet will die unheard and the clown, who is supposed to tell the truth in a joyful, disrespectful way, will die in a very narrow road closed at one end, because nobody will be interested in his words. People will go on thinking of themselves, even when clearly there are people who suffer ( “ I heard one person starve”).

In the fourth stanza, he is going on to claim that violence and death will be very close to children, because they will be exposed to more and more wars,  discrimination will be more and more manifest, violence against women won’t come to an end but it will grow more and more, emotions will be extremely strong, either in the positive way or in the negative one. In spite of that, he met a girl and she gave him “a rainbow”, a symbolic image referring to peace and equality, promoted by the 60’s civil rights movement.

In the last stanza, the longest one, he is saying that in one way or another he wants to help those who can’t help themselves. He wants to go to the worst places in the world, to those places where humans suffer more for being subjected to a real ugly situation, because of starvation, because of extreme pollution, because of the poor, dirty houses, because of the lack of justice. The poet is claiming that he will stand by these people even when he will “sink”, he will go down, to a lower level himself.

Finally, he is promising that he will educate himself , trying to know well the subject he is going to talk about, before “singing”,  making public declarations about that.

The song deals with the following themes- war, greed, racial hatred, the end of the world, corruption, exploitation, death, indifference to art, loss of innocence. However, along with these negative themes there are the positive ones- hope, love, the importance of memory and the vital role of the artist.

In a 1963 radio interview Dylan said, “In the last verse, when I say, ‘the pellets of poison are flooding the waters’, that means all the lies that people get told on their radios and in their newspapers”.