Come out ye gifted Kings and Queens and hear my sad complaint

No martyr is among ye now whom you can call your own

But go along your way accordingly and know you're not alone

On a earlier record the "gifted Kings and Queens" would have been addressed directly as Madison Avenue executives or corporation heads and Dylan would have been content to castigate them, instead of trying to reform them. Dylan frets over having been responsible (in the dream) for Augustine's death but the note of redemption that has been struck transforms the event into splendid, healing suffering quite unlike the gratification-in-pain so evident in Blonde on Blonde.

A SIMILAR affirmation marks "All Along the Watchtower." The Joker revolts against the meaninglessness of it all,

Businessmen they drink my wine Plowmen dig my earth

None of them along the line know what any of it is worth

and the Thief, significantly chosen as speaker, soothes him and reassures him,

There are many here among us who feel that life is about a joke

But you and I have been through that and this is not our fate

So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.

The two then saddle up and ride to the watchtower where "Princess kept the view"--an image like the scene in Ivan the Terrible in which Ivan, in seclusion, is begged to return. (Eisenstein too was a master of defamiliarization.)

In other songs Dylan soars into mysticism. The Wicked Messenger, bringing bad news for once, discovers,

The soles of my feet I swear they're burnin'

The leaves began to fall and the seas began to part