I'm looking for a bit of scholarly help here. Does anyone know where that Byron quote comes from? It would suit my incomplete book so well, I may want to use it - and if I do, I'll need to attribute it, etc. So, any Byron freaks out there?
The following is a quote from my blog, but of course more fundamentally a quote from the article at the website shown.
Andrew
Talkin' of 'Chronicles'/New York Times Review of Books
I quote from Volume 52, Number 4 · March 10, 2005 available at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17785
Review
'I Is Someone Else'
By Luc Sante
Michael Gray, who is probably Dylan's single most assiduous critic, turns up a quatrain by Robert Browning that the mind's ear has no trouble hearing in Dylan's voice, and not only because the end rhymes prefigure "Subterranean Homesick Blues":
Look, two and two go the priests, then the monks with cowls and sandals
And the penitents dressed in white shirts, a-holding the yellow candles
One, he carries a flag up straight, and another a cross with handles,
And the Duke's guard brings up the rear, for the better prevention of scandals.
Dylan himself, in the Songwriters interview, cites a Byron couplet that is equally convincing: "What is it you buy so dear/With your pain and with your fear?" But then, as he told Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times,
It's like a ghost is writing [the] song.... It gives you the song and it goes away.... You don't know what it means. Except the ghost picked me to write the song.
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