“I Contain Multitudes” is the opening track on Bob Dylan’s 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways. The title is an allusion to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself, 51“:
The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.
Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?
Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?
But the song itself, too, contains multitudes, from the humorously bizarre (“I drive fast cars and I eat fast foods”) to the almost unbelievably audacious (“I’m just like Anne Frank – like Indiana Jones/And them British bad boys the Rolling Stones”). Some of those multitudes are from the realm of Anglophone literature (“Gotta tell tale heart like Mr. Poe”; “I sing the songs of experience like William Blake”). And some of them, or at least might be, are classical. I want to suggest three.
- In the third verse, Dylan (or whoever the speaker is supposed to be) says, “Half my soul baby belongs to you.” That might seem like nothing more than a clichéd way of saying “I love you, we belong together.” But that precise form of expression actually has a classical antecedent.[1] It is in Horace, Odes 1.3, addressed to the ship that is about to carry off his friend Vergil.[2] He instructs the ship, “Preserve the half of my soul” (serves animae dimidium meae). In James Michie’s translation, which could be the one Dylan knows if he knows the passage, animae dimidium meae is rendered precisely as “half my soul.” That tag of Horace would later be picked up by St. Augustine to describe his relationship with a friend in Confessions 4.6.11.
- In the fifth verse, Dylan sings, “Everything’s flowin’ all at the same time.” Dylan has sung similarly elsewhere (“Watching the River Flow“), but here (and who knows, maybe there, too) it is plausible to suggest that we should have the Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus in mind. For one of his most famous and influential surviving sayings is πάντα ῥει [panta rhei], “everything flows.” (It is disputed whether Heraclitus ever actually said this, as the linked article in Angitone Journal argues, but for our purposes it is sufficient that he is widely believed to have said it.)
- Finally, at the end of the sixth verse, Dylan sings, “I’m a man of contradictions and a man of many moods . . . I contain multitudes.” The “man of contradictions,” it is true, is already present in Whitman’s poem (“Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself,/(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”). But I think that Richard Thomas is right to say in The Dylan Review that we should also have Odysseus in mind here, the one whom Homer calls the “man of many turnings” (πολύτροπον/polutropon). Possible confirmation is found in the next verse, which begins “Greedy old wolf – I’ll show you my heart/But not all of it – only the hateful part.” Homer tells us that Odysseus’s maternal grandfather was named Autolycus, or “Lone Wolf.” Autolycus was a thief, and was also the one who gave Odysseus his name. The story is told in the recognition scene of Odyssey 19. I give the relevant passage in the translation of Robert Fagles, because Scott Warmuth has shown that this is the–or at least a–translation that Dylan has used.
“You,
my daughter, and you, my son-in-law,” Autolycus replied
“give the boy the name I tell you now. Just as I
have come from afar, creating pain for many–
men and women across the good green earth–
so let his name by Odysseus…
the Son of Pain, a name he’ll earn in full.
And when he has come of age and pays his visit
to Parnassus–the great estate of his mother’s line
where all my treasures lie–I will give him enough
to cheer his heart, then speed him home to you.”
However, there is a play on words that is clearer in Greek than in English translation but that Dylan may know about from elsewhere: Odysseus gets the name he does because of the meaning of a related verb, ὀδύσσομαι (odussomai). Fagles takes it as meaning “creating pain,” so that Odysseus is “Son of Pain.” Richmond Lattimore renders it as “distasteful.” But it’s most basic meaning is “to hate.” Odysseus is “hateful”–to others, because he causes them distress; to Prometheus, because he has offended him; or both–and it’s possible that Dylan recalling this etymology in transmuted recognition scene of his own.
What to make of all this? I’m not sure. At the most basic level, we can say that Dylan’s lyrics, especially the later ones, are palimpsests or centos, made up of recollections and scraps of other texts recombined–like the subject of “My Own Version of You”–in a new form. But can we say more? Is there a larger allusive program in this song? I don’t have an opinion on that at present. That’s a rather disappointing conclusion, but I can only give you what I have.