Chimes of Freedom (song) has quality protest song
"Chimes of Freedom" is a song written and performed by Bob Dylan and featured on his Tom Wilson produced 1964 album Another Side of Bob Dylan. The song depicts the thoughts and feelings of the singer and his companion as they shelter from a lightning storm under a doorway after sunset. The singer expresses his solidarity with the downtrodden and oppressed, believing that the thunder is tolling in sympathy for them.
Initially, critics described the song as showing the influence of the symbolist poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, but more recent biographers of Dylan have linked the origins of the song to verses the songwriter had written as a response to the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. Some commentators and Dylan biographers have assessed the song as one of Dylan's most significant compositions, and critic Paul Williams has described it as Dylan's Sermon on the Mount.
The song has been covered many times by different artists, including the Byrds, Jefferson Starship, Youssou N'Dour, Bruce Springsteen, and U2.Over the course of the song, the sky and mist begin to partially clear and the lyrics can be interpreted as a proclamation of the hope that as the sky clears in the progress of the difficult night, that all the world's people will endure their setbacks and eventually proclaim their successful survival to the sound of the chimes of freedom.In his 2003 book, Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan's Art, Mike Marqusee notes that the song marks a transition between Dylan's earlier protest song style (a litany of the down-trodden and oppressed, in the second half of each verse) and his later more free-flowing poetic style (the fusion of images of lightning, storm and bells in the first half). In this later style, which is influenced by 19th century French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, the poetry is more allusive, filled with "chains of flashing images." In this song, rather than support a specific cause as in his earlier protest songs, he finds solidarity with all people who are downtrodden or otherwise treated unjustly, including unwed mothers, the disabled, refugees, outcasts, those unfairly jailed, "the luckless, the abandoned and forsaked," and, in the final verse, "the countless confused, accused, misused, strung out ones and worse" and "every hung-up person in the whole wide universe." By having the chimes of freedom toll for both rebels and rakes, the song is more inclusive in its sympathies than previous protest songs, such as "The Times They Are A-Changin'", written just the prior year. After "Chimes of Freedom", Dylan's protest songs no longer depicted social reality in the black and white terms which he renounced in "My Back Pages", but rather use satirical surrealism to make their points.In addition to Rimbaud's symbolism, Oliver Hopkins has suggested that the song also shows the influence of the alliterative poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the poetic vision of William Blake, and the violent drama, mixed with compassionate and romantic language, of William Shakespeare. Dylan had used rain in a symbolic manner in earlier songs, notably "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall".Clinton Heylin has suggested the assassination of U.S. President, John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 as a possible inspiration for Dylan's song, although Dylan has denied that this is the case. Dylan drafted a number of poems after Kennedy's death on November 22, 1963. Heylin suggests one of those poems, a six-line piece, seems to contain the genesis of "Chimes of Freedom":
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