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It is striking that our feelings about the song are so divergent despite noting the same points. Having written extensively on the primacy of performance, I am more than open to the claim that how a song sounds and makes you feel should be key. Yet, for me, Dylan’s achievement is in deliberately cloaking the bitter intent of the words in ‘sugar-coated rhymes’. After all, sometimes, as he warns us, “Satan comes as a man of peace”, or one can “look like the innocent flower,/But be the serpent under’t”, as Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth puts it in Macbeth Act V scene i.28
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