Dylan's A Hard Rain Part 2 - a Visualisation

Dylan's A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall - verse 3.

Few songs have ever conjured so many stark visual images, which is why I couldn't resist coming back for verse three after posting a visualisation of the first two verses here.

Popular legend famously has it that the song, based on the question-and-response form of the traditional English folk ballad Lord Randall, was written as a response to the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world seemed to teeter on the brink of nuclear war.

But according to the song's Wikipedia entry Dylan first performed the song at Carnegie Hall in September 1962, one month before President Kennedy announced that Russia had installed nuclear-capable missiles on Cuba.

This makes the song infinitely more ambiguous and suggestive than a reductive reading of the song as solely about the threat of nuclear war might suggest - as I hope these blog posts clearly illustrate.

Starvation, oil pollution in the Gulf of Mexico, the catastrophic Indian Ocean tsunami, and the over-fishing out of the world's oceans (explored powerfully in the just -released documentary, End of the Line) are all contemporary issues that find reflection in the words of this song written nearly 50 years ago. All of which attests to both the genius and lasting quality of Dylan's art.

And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son ?
And what did you hear, my darling young one ?


I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin'


I heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world


I heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin'


I heard ten thousand whisperin' and nobody listenin'



I heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin'


Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter


Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley


And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.