Today is the fifth anniversary of the release of Bob Dylan’s masterpiece Rough and Rowdy Ways. Here is a little post in honor of the occasion.

The penultimate track on the album is called “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” It includes the following lyric:

Key West is the place to go

Down by the Gulf of Mexico

Beyond the sea – beyond the shifting sand

Key West is the gateway key

To innocence and purity

Key West – Key West is the enchanted land

What is the immediate referent of the phrase “beyond the sea”? Probably the Charles Trenet and Jack Lawrence song of the same name,^[1] most well known in the version of Bobby Darin (another “B.D.”), which Dylan discusses in Chapter 19 of The Philosophy of Modern Song. Dylan clearly sees himself in Darin (“Bobby Darin was more than a chameleon”; he had “multiple personas”; “Bobby knew that sometimes the past was nothing more than an illusion and you might just as well keep making stuff up”).

But whenever I hear “Key West,” I think of Wallace Stevens and “The Idea of Order at Key West.” That poem opens like this:

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.   

The water never formed to mind or voice,   

Like a body wholly body, fluttering

Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion   

Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,   

That was not ours although we understood,   

Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

I wonder if Dylan was thinking of it, too. After all, Stevens’s poem is about singing–about how singers make a world (“She was the single artificer of the world/In which she sang”). But unlike “Bobby Darin” (and “Bob Dylan”), “The sea was not a mask. No more was she.” Maybe that’s why, for Dylan, Key West is the place “for immortality”; “paradise divine”; the place where one can find one’s mind. It’s where one’s real self is found. That is, it is heaven.

Stevens–not one for immortality and afterlife–might have rejected some or all of these conceits. And yet he, too, associated Key West with the Delphic quest for self-knowledge. As he writes in the poem’s conclusion:

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,   

The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,   

Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,   

And of ourselves and of our origins,

In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

Both Dylan and Stevens associate Key West with enchantment (Dylan: “Key West is the enchanted land,” quoted above; Stevens: “The lights…enchanting night”). For Stevens, because it is where a mysterious figure tried to order this world, the only one there is, through song; for Dylan, because it is the land of song that gives meaning to ourselves and our world, while pointing beyond it to somewhere else. “Key West is on the horizon line.” But, as we know from elsewhere in Dylan’s catalog, there is something “Beyond the Horizon,” too.