I guess out of all the old gospel numbers Dylan was performing during the late 90s and early 00s my favorite is Pass Me Not O Gentle Savior. I’ve posted clips of it before.

The lyric to that song was written by Fanny Crosby in 1864, working with melodist William Doane. A website devoted to Fanny Crosby contains many interesting quotes:

“I seem to have been led,” she says, “little by little, toward my work; and I believe that the same fact will appear in the life of anyone who will cultivate such powers as God has given him, and then go on, bravely, quietly, but persistently, doing such work as comes to his hands”.

And I think that if you put together a number of things that Bob Dylan has said about how his best songs come to him, it would be virtually identical in meaning to this quote from Crosby:

“That some of my hymns have been dictated by the blessed Holy Spirit, I have no doubt. That others have been the result of deep meditation, I know to be true. But that the poet has any right to claim special merit for himself is certainly presumptuous. I have sometimes felt that there is a deep and clear well of inspiration from which one may draw the sparkling draughts that are so essential to good poetry. At times the burden of inspiration is so heavy that the author himself cannot find words beautiful enough or thoughts deep enough for its expression.”

One way of hearing Bob’s Shelter from the Storm is as a song which personally addresses that very “well of inspiration” from which the “sparkling draughts” of song flow.

I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form.
“Come in,” she said,
“I’ll give you shelter from the storm.”

Heard from that perspective, it is a song telling of a journey from the first flush and joy of love, to an estrangment born out of taking “too much for granted.” It ends on a note that I can’t define in any terms independent of the song itself:

Well, I’m livin’ in a foreign country but I’m bound to cross the line
Beauty walks a razor’s edge, someday I’ll make it mine.
If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born.
“Come in,” she said,
“I’ll give you shelter from the storm.”

On his current concert tour, Dylan has come up with a new, absolutely knockout and elegiacal arrangement of Shelter from the Storm. Click here for a clip from Atlantic City, on June 22nd.

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