Bob Dylan - "Dark Eyes" (Lyric Interpretation)

Similar to my initial thoughts. Dark eyes of the unbelievers (infidels). Those living in a different world from him. The eyes of the hopeless, the sinners.

 

I'm not convinced one way or the other that the "dark eyes" are good or bad (not yet anyway, but the thread is still young). They could represent the eyes of the soulless as you suggest, but, as was referenced upthread, Dylan's romantic interest at this time was his soon to be wife, Carolyn Dennis, who certainly possesses dark eyes. "All I see are dark eyes" could mean that he doesn't "see" the soulless world of the gentlemen and their shallow concerns, he only sees the eyes of his love.

 

Eyes of love, huh? Could be. It don't sound all that upbeat to these ears. I hear mystery--the sad mystery of life.

 

I take the song to be Dylan's argument for the metaphysical. It juxtaposes our fallen humanity with the beautiful, true and good that he has been able to glimpse with the eye of faith, but cannot quite capture. It's of a piece with his monologue in "Masked and Anonymous" that, on the soundtrack, leads into the Dixie Hummingbirds' awesome cover of "City of Gold" -- "The way we look at the world is the way we really are. See it from a fair garden and everything looks cheerful. See it from a higher plateau and you'll see plunder and murder." Come to think of it, "City of Gold" is the flip side of "Dark Eyes." It's the beatific vision for which the narrator in "Dark Eyes" longs.

 

Certainly anything is possible with Dylan. The term "dark eyes" just strikes me odd, however, as a non-pejorative physical description of someone's eyes to which you're referring with affection. If it was eye color he was thinking about, it just seems like there would be so many better, more romantic phrases than "dark" to describe them. "Dark" has mainly negative connotations - none of which would be mitigated by the context of the rest of the lyric. At the very least, it doesn't feel like any kind of love song in a traditional sense.

 

In regards to the term "dark eyes" being positive, negative or ambiguous, Wikipedia offers up:

"Dark Eyes" (Russian: Очи чёрные, Ochi chyornye; English translation: Black Eyes; Spanish translation: "Ojos negros"; French translation: Les yeux noirs German Schwarze Augen; ) is probably the most famous Russian romance song.

Dark eyes, burning eyes
Passionate and splendid eyes
How I love you, How I fear you
Truly, I saw you at a sinister hour

Dark eyes, flaming eyes
They implore me into faraway lands
Where love reigns, where peace reigns
Where there is no suffering, where war is forbidden

Dark eyes, burning eyes
Passionate and splendid eyes
I love you so, I fear you so
Truly, I saw you at a sinister hour

If I hadn't met you, I wouldn't be suffering so
I would have lived my life smiling
You have ruined me, dark eyes
You have taken my happiness away forever

Dark eyes, burning eyes
Passionate and splendid eyes
I love you so, I fear you so
Truly, I saw you at a sinister hour

 

Yes, but its Russian! I'm sure they also have a great love poem called "Poisoned Dead Heart."

I don't know. It still seems like a stretch. Again, the context of the rest of Dylan's lyric's doesn't mitigate the negative connotations of "dark, " whereas the rest of this lyric clearly states it's about passion and love.

I would add that I feel there's a lot of sympathy in Dylan's "dark." Empathy, even. Even if his quote from his book is a total fabrication, it might point to the kind of people in the kinds of situations that define his "dark eyes." Hopeless, frightened pretending.... Maybe? I'm just throwing out thoughts and batting ideas around, you understand, not actually making an argument from any kind of strong point of view on the subject.

 

Are you saying Russian writers (particularly 19th century Russians) tend to be a bit bleak in their outlook?

I think Dylan exhibits sympathy for the mother with the lost child, and the soldier deep in prayer. Are their eyes "dark" as well? They are certainly differentiated from the "gentlemen" and those who worship speed and steel.

 

Maybe, in the end, theyre all dark eyes.

 

"With love to lead the way
I've seen more skies of grey
Than any Russian play
Could guarantee"

I think there's sympathy for all the dark eyes - even for "gentlemen." In the religious/spiritual sense I was talking about above, the "gentlemen" are like children, who don't know better, I suppose. In his earlier born again work, he didn't show much sympathy or seem to admit he was/had been one of the gentlemen, himself - and recently, too. But that seems to be going away by this point.

What's also interesting and must have some meaning is his choice to say "AND all I see" as opposed to "BUT all I see" at the end of each stanza - apart from the last one where he DOES use "but."

 

Great thread, Ray. I've always loved this song. Admittedly, at first it was because it was a "pure" Bob-on-acoustic song alone on the bombastic "Big '80s" Empire Burlesque; but the words have stayed with me for 30 years now and it's long past the "it's great because it's the best song on a bad album" phase. I think it's a classic "stranger in a strange land" Dylan song, not much different in tone from "Things Have Changed" or "Ain't Talkin'" or "Scarlet Town." Recurring themes are the rejection of the way "normals" think you should live, feeling lost in a world of lost souls, and a general feeling that nothing the singer says or does will change our fate. My favorite verse is probably this one:

They tell me to be discreet for all intended purposes,
They tell me revenge is sweet and from where they stand, I’m sure it is.
But I feel nothing for their game where beauty goes unrecognized,
All I feel is heat and flame and all I see are dark eyes.​

But I love the whole song. I don't think the "dark eyes" are specifically meant to be a condemnation of Bob's audience, but they are referenced in the last verse. I think the "dark eyes" are all of humanity, because Bob thinks big. But I also think that this song is special because it's universal enough for the listener to connect with it. Who doesn't feel that the world is crazy sometimes, and that we don't belong in it?

 

Glad to see this thread. Mostly because this is a song I've managed not to think much about over the years. It's puzzling to me, and I've never known exactly what to do with it or how to respond to it. The two comments (above), however, do suggest a starting point.

I think what makes the song puzzling is that it's sort of out of it's period, out of time, like a pre-echo of what would come later from Dylan in a fuller, clearer form. The images and the stance of the singer certainly tie it to the string of songs we discussed in the thread on "I and I." This is another one of those, "the problem with being Dylan" or more broadly "the problem of being an artist" songs. What I find sort of obscuring and fascinating about it (the more I think about it) is that it sounds to me like an early, incomplete version of the approach Dylan would take to this sort of song in his latest, most recent period (the one that began in the mid-nineties, that came into its own with "Time out of Mind," and that we're now still in).

Many of the images do gesture back as Ray has noted, but the feel of them gestures forward more. Above all, the feel of the music gestures forward to the musical world of the 21st Century Dylan. As mpayan notes it's neither Manhattan nor Mississippi--at least not the present day or even the last century of those places. It's a Stephen Foster vibe. Very 19th-century. So it feels to me like a first venture into the vast backward and abysm of time echo-chamber of late Dylan. He wouldn't get this far into that place again until some of the songs on "O Mercy," and it would take a little longer and those two acoustic covers records before he fully realised what he says already here: that he lives--maybe has always lived or lived most vividly--in that place, "another world, where life and death are memorized" like songs or poems--or in songs and poems....

L.

 

I need to think about this some more, but I'm thinking now that the dark eyes have more than one resonance in the song. One side suggests some sort of emptiness, no response, something inscrutable, but the other is romantic (in the "Age of Romanticism" sense, which includes, but isn't confined to the erotic sense), and I think it's linked to that Russian song.

L.

 

I think Koabac is right that a key shift happens in the final line ("and" to "but"), and I think that's responsible for the sense many people take a way from the song that the singer's attitude toward the eyes is negative. I don't think it holds for the whole song.

L.

 

I don't know how deeply I can get into "Dark Eyes" as poetry, but my gut response to the lyrics are that the "dark eyes" are those of doomed humanity -- the unwitting, the unsaved, the unrepentant. The third line of each verse is some kind of apocalyptic / gloom-and-doom vision:

I live in another world where life and death are memorized
But I can hear another drum beating for the dead that rise
But I feel nothing for their game where beauty goes unrecognized,
Oh, time is short and the days are sweet and passion rules the arrow that flies​

which he follows up by saying that ALL he sees are dark eyes. To me, the "all" diminishes the people represented by the dark eyes, and only adds to the singer's despair.

 

I just responded to this idea while you were posting this, but I do think that the phrase "all I see" is negative -- or at least, it feels negative to ME. Like Bob is saying, "The world has gone insane in every possible way, and ALL I SEE are dark (unseeing, uncaring) eyes."

 

That's certainly how the final line feels because at that point he's contrasting the fact that so many faces are at his feet, but all he sees are dark eyes (either it's the eyes in those faces or some other eyes, but they seem to hide or obscure or distract from his ability to see all those faces). I'm not sure what it means exactly, but since having a million face at one's feet sounds like a good thing, the contrast does seem to be negative--or it feels that way.

In the other verse, however, it's less clearly so, and if you follow through the logic of each verse's construction, I'm not sure the negative feel holds securely. The images of the song aren't logical. They're poetically dense and ambiguous, but the verses do each have a logical structure--in fact the same one.

In the first, the singer contrasts the world of the "gentlemen" with his world, and the contrast seems to be in favor of his world. The gentlemen are talking in the moonlight by the river, they drink and walk and that's a signal it seems for the singer to leave ("slide") because he lives in a world different from theirs. In that world he sees only dark eyes, but it's not clear that this is a negation of the memorizing of life and death or the lovers' pearls, which are part of that world in which he sees those eyes. All of that seems to go together in his world, on his side of the comparison.

Oh, the gentlemen are talking and the midnight moon is on the riverside
They’re drinking up and walking and it is time for me to slide
I live in another world where life and death are memorized
Where the earth is strung with lovers’ pearls and all I see are dark eyes

The second verse is constructed in a similar way. A cock crows (awakening, work, the ordinary world), there's another soldier (there are lots of them, and they often pray), children go astray. These are all things of the ordinary world (unhappy things, parts of an unhappy reality), but the singer is preoccupied with something else, something otherworldly and apocalyptic: he hears the rising of the dead and their intimidation of natural beastliness and again all he sees are those eyes.

A cock is crowing far away and another soldier’s deep in prayer
Some mother’s child has gone astray, she can’t find him anywhere
But I can hear another drum beating for the dead that rise
Whom nature’s beast fears as they come and all I see are dark eyes

Same again with the third verse. The contrast is between what "they" say about discretion and revenge. He assumes that from their perspective that makes sense, but he feels nothing for it from his perspective. This time he adds the recognition of beauty to the list of things essential to his other world--the world different from the one most of us inhabit along with the gentlemen, the soldier, the mother, the child, "they" The singer now tells us tells us that all he feels (as opposed to those who play the game he rejects) is heat and flame, and again that all he sees are those eyes.

They tell me to be discreet for all intended purposes,
They tell me revenge is sweet and from where they stand, I’m sure it is.
But I feel nothing for their game where beauty goes unrecognized,
All I feel is heat and flame and all I see are dark eyes.

The final verse is a little different. The account of things happening in the world he observes without inhabiting it extends through the 3rd line, maybe even in to the 4th, and the contrast is introduced clearly only with the "but" in the middle of that last line. It seems to me that this contrast is still the same one he's been making all along, and that the list of sad, worldly stuff has simply gotten longer and more far-reaching, with that last image of the "million faces" at the singer's feet a final summation of his distanced existence in that ordinary world where idolatry feeds hunger, where days are so sweet, but short, and were passion drives time's arrow. All of that stuff is out there. He knows it; it's all as palpable and real as anything could be, but it's not what he sees, not what he recognizes at the deepest level. What he sees are dark eyes and whatever they hold for him in that other world.

Oh, the French girl, she’s in paradise and a drunken man is at the wheel
Hunger pays a heavy price to the falling gods of speed and steel
Oh, time is short and the days are sweet and passion rules the arrow that flies
A million faces at my feet but all I see are dark eyes

My take, anyway. For now.

L.

 

Hmm, you've certainly given me something to think about, Louis -- as you often do!

 

You've done a wonderful job of summing up my great connection to this song in one line (although you could eliminate the word "sometimes" )

 

I was being nice ...

 

So the "heat and flame" that the narrator feels (in fact, they are ALL he feels) ... They conjure up desire, and they also conjure up Hell. Dylan has already described his "journey through dark heat" in "Where Are You Tonight?" Is this "dark heat" a flame that burns but produces absolutely no light (as the flames of Hell do?) Is the "dark heat" desire, but of a sinister or unwanted kind? He also mentions "heat" in "Caribbean Wind" - "Ceiling fan's broken, there's a heat in my bed" - a seeming double entendre describing the weather and his general lustful feelings. If the "heat and flame" that he feels are negative, than one might assume that the dark eyes that he sees are as well.

 

great commentary here -- I see now that the "dark eyes" seem to be the speaker's most consistent token from the "other world." The question is how that other world is valuated -- is it a place that is good because the true things (life, death, beauty) are recognized there, as opposed to this world of vanities, or is it more a simply terrifying place, where beasts and death reign?

 

Empire Burlesque (with Zombies). Bob--ahead of his time, as usual....

Seriously, though. Thanks to all of you for the care and careful thinking that have gone into your responses. You've given me a lot of new ideas to chew on...

 

And I am serious about that. Not meant to be flippant at all

 

Our discussion has caused me to make a connection I never have before - between "Dark Eyes" and George Harrison's "Living in the Material World".

While Dylan compares the seemingly corrupt and misguided everyday world to "another world" (his spiritual home, even if it is only in his mind), Harrison compares the "material world" that he lives in to the "spiritual sky". Harrison hopes to "get out of this place" and not "get lost and go astray" in the process. Harrison's song has some humor to it, while Dylan's is generally bleak. In both cases, there is no humanist element whatsoever. The material world and the world of the "gentlemen" are not transformable by human deed or will, they are only escapable.