Here too, Hawthorne may aid our understanding of Dylan. Her secret lover is revealed to the reader as the young priest Arthur Dimmesdale. Hawthorne's two narratives, taken together, can shed light into the dark corners of Dylan's song. If this is so, then the man and woman escape the town at the end, but for an uncertain future, most likely a dead end. Certainly the town they have left will not change.
Somebody is out there beating on a dead horse'.
Dylan here reanimates the stereotype phrase 'flogging a dead horse', bringing it to life and asking us to imagine someone physically doing exactly that. The image stands for a whole community flogging a dead horse, stuck in a narrow, obsessive, repetitive groove from which it can imagine no way out. This song portrays a dark, life-denying Calvinist society and an equally dark, negative flight into the void. Calvinism may have destroyed the spirit to the point that even revolt can only be negative. Puritanism, whether in its seventeenth-century shape or in the modern form explored in 'Man in the Long Black Coat', is part of the problem, not the solution.