Who is this blue-eyed son in Dylan’s “A hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”?

By Kees de Graaf

Undoubtedly this Dylan classic is a masterpiece. This song written in 1962, ended up on the album “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”(1963).
The song is written in a question and answer format and is based on a traditional folk ballad written in 1803 called “Lord Randal”.

The single question we want to deal with in this article is this: who is this person who answers all these questions; who is this “blue-eyed son”, this “darling young one” and annex who is the person that asks all those questions?

Some have argued on the internet that the “blue-eyed son” may be Bob Dylan himself because Dylan has blue eyes. But the “blue-eyed son” in the lyrics, says things of such epic proportions that it would seem very unlikely that a mortal human being would say epic things like that and refer to himself. Epic words like “And reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it ,And I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinking”.

Or does Dylan refer to the “blue-eyed boy” in the legend of the ringing of the Liberty Bell, at the time when the Declaration of Independence was adopted (July 4 1776)?.

The legend says: "there among the crowds on the pavement stood the blue-eyed boy, clapping his tiny hands, while the breeze blowed his flaxen hair all about his face. And then swelling his little chest, he raised himself tiptoe, and shouted, a single word—Ring!".(Source: Washington and his Generals or Legends of the Revolution, by George Lippard; Philadelphia: G. B. Zeiber & Co., 1847- Page 392).

The question is whether Dylan had this “blue-eyed boy” in mind, to express what has become of this promising start of the American Dream, to all trials, tribulations and injustice that were to follow in the centuries ahead.
Soon it turned out that the promising Liberty Bells of the American Dream would eventually lead to what Dylan would later call “a child that cries, when innocence dies” (Ring Them Bells).

The lyrics “A hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” very much resemble the apocalyptic gloom and doom of the Biblical prophets and writers, especially like those of St. John the Apostle in his “Revelations of St. John”. When you take this into account, one may easily jump to the conclusion that the “blue-eyed son” must be Jesus and that the song is a question and answer dialogue between God the Father and Jesus the Son. But it is not as simple as that.

It is true, Jesus is called “My beloved Son” in e.g. Mat. 17:5 where it says: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” and this comes close to “my darling young one” . However, nowhere in the Bible Jesus is called “my blue-eyed son”. Apart from this, Dylan -as far as we know -never publicly stated that the person addressed to in this song is supposed to be Jesus.

Yet we feel that there is reason enough to assume that “the blue-eyed” son is in fact Jesus. Dylan seems to give us some sort of a clue in what direction we have to think. And this direction is Bethlehem, a village in Israel, the place where Jesus Christ was born. Dylan gave this clue when more than two decades later he composed a song called “Man of Peace” for the album “Infidels” (1983). The final verse of this song reads:
“Somewhere Mama's weeping for her blue-eyed boy
She's holding them little white shoes and that little broken toy
And he's following a star
The same one them three men followed from the East
I hear that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace”

This verse is a parody of the child massacre which took place in Bethlehem by king Herod as described in Matthew 2-:1-18. King Herod tried to find out where Jesus was born. He pretended that he wished to worship the newly born child Jesus. In fact his real intentions were to kill the child. Herod instructed the wisemen to come back to him as soon as they succeeded in finding the place where Jesus was born.

Following the star, the wisemen found Jesus in Bethlehem. When it was time to leave the wisemen were warned by God not to return to king Herod and tell him the whereabouts of the child Jesus. King Herod was so furious that the wisemen had outwitted him that he sent soldiers to kill all the boys in and around Bethlehem who were two years old and under. (Mat. 2:16).
Herod did this to make sure that the child Jesus would be killed.

In this parody Dylan pictures the intense grief and mourning of a woman who witnessed the brutal murder of her little baby boy by Herod’s soldiers. The baby is called “her blue-eyed boy”. It is clear that this was a Hebrew child that was brutally murdered, like all the young children that were murdered in this atrocity. A “blue-eyed boy” is here just another word for a Hebrew, Jewish boy.

It was “her” blue-eyed son that was killed but Herod’s real target was not “her” blue-eyed son but “the” blue-eyed Son Jesus. In the eyes of king Herod this child and this woman were just collateral damage. Dylan wants to make it clear in this song that King Herod, pretending to be a “Man of Peace”, reveals himself as Satan.

Apart from this, it is not only Dylan who took us us to the village of Bethlehem. In 1919 the Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote a poem called “The Second Coming” of which the final lines read:

“What rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Whereas Dylan referred to Mat. 2:1-18, to King Herod to describe Herod’s futile attempt to kill the blue-eyed son Jesus, Yeats describes the same event – seen from a different angle- in Rev. 12: 4 where it says that a beast, a “dragon” stood before the woman (mother Mary) who was about to bear a child (Jesus), that he might devour her child”.

Now the final question: Is the thesis that the “blue-eyed” son is in fact Jesus supported by the lyrics of the song?. We have good reasons to assume that this is indeed the case. To outline this we restrict ourselves to the four final lines just before the final chorus which may be seen as a conclusive statement:

"And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinking,
But I’ll know my song well before I start singing"

What may these lines mean? Well, that when Jesus – the Son of God- came into the flesh and became human He absorbed the full human identity. He took upon Him all sins and all evil, all atrocities. He became One with all of these things (2 Cor. 5:21) in such a way that He not only “tells” and “thinks” and “speaks”” about it, he even “breathes” all these things to express full identification. At the same time He redeems us from all of this, but that is something this song does not deal with.

“And reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it” may be some sort of referral to the so-called “Sermon of the Mount” which Jesus once gave (Mat. 5-7) or even better to the Mount Sion on which Jesus (the Lamb) stood (Rev. 14:1).

“Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinking”. Although once Jesus walked on the waters of the sea (Mat. 14:25); He even commanded the sea to be quiet (Mat 8:26), but eventually He had to go under. He had “to start sinking” when all the wrath of God fell upon Him at Cavalry when He died on the cross.

But it ends with an optimistic tone: “But I’ll know my song well before I start singing”. He knew what He doing, it was all part of what Dylan would later call “a perfect finished plan” (Every Grain of Sand) It was supposed to be a well learnt song of redemption, it is the song of the Lamb (Rev. 15:3).

The question is was Dylan aware of this broader implication when he wrote this song back in 1962? Presumably not. But the deeper Christological significance of this song may have become clear to him when he converted to Christianity in the late ninety seventies and especially when he wrote about the blue-eyed son in “Man of Peace”.

We conclude that the thesis that this song is a dialogue between God – the Father- and Jesus – his beloved Son- is a very plausible one. If you have a different point of view, please let us know and share your comments with us in the box below.