The Rain Keeps Falling

Main Article Content

Deborah Rose

Abstract

The force of disaster hit me in the heart when, as a young woman, I heard Bob Dylan sing ‘Hard Rain’. In a voice stunned by violence, the young man reports on a multitude of forces that drag the world into catastrophe. In the 1960s I heard the social justice in the song. In 2004 the environmental issues ambush me. The song starts and ends in the dying world of trees and rivers. The poet’s words in both domains of justice are eerily prophetic. They call across the music, and across the years, saying that a hard rain is coming. The words bear no story at all; they give us a series of compelling images, an account of impending calamity. The artistry of the poet—Bob (Billy Boy) Dylan—offers sequences of reports that, like Walter Benjamin’s storm from paradise, pile wreckage upon wreckage.

Article Details

Section
Desecration (Peer Reviewed)
Author Biography

Deborah Rose, Australian National University

DEBORAH ROSE is a senior fellow at the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University. Her latest book is Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation, UNSW Press, 2004.