Sounds of the Tambourine

Though I know that evenin's empire has returned into sand
Vanished from my hand
Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping
My weariness amazes me, I'm branded on my feet
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street's too dead for dreaming.

and I remember those days when I would go to the beach and stand on the shore, looking at the crimson sunset and the ocean surface upon which it melted into a golden denoument, and the flock of birds in pristine geometric patterns wading across the sky in inky silhouettes against a backdrop of clouds in all hues of orange. I would hear the distant sound of the crashing waves and interspersed within it the faint notes of people patiently looking, waiting for that one moment when sky and the water are separated by the final breath of the dying Sun. I remember being so completely taken by the grandeur of it all that I would feel overcome with an overwhelming weariness and an intense inertia against the idea of being at any other place except that. And I would look on long after the evening's empire had returned into sand having taken with it all of my energy and all my purposes.

I have often wondered what is it about Dylan's 'Tambourine Man' which I love so much and perhaps it has to do with the immediacy with which his lines capture some of my fondest emotions. That a beautiful sunset evokes in me a heavy, even sad feeling more than it evokes fascination is something I could never have been aware of, had I not read it in someone else's words. The final paragraph of the song is the most poignant ode to freedom I have ever read. Freedom not in its parochial sense but in its deepest, most intense form. So fundamental that it escapes both a coherent definition and also the root of its own rebellion but is gracefully manifest in the images which the lines provoke - like the credits of a movie, like a swan song, like the final page of a great book, an afterthought of a dot below an elaborate signature - an ending silent, aloof and contented:

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.