Songs with Homeric references
This song is a direct invocation of the Muse, which is the exact literary device Homer uses to begin both The Iliad and The Odyssey.
The opening lines of Dylan’s song are:
“Mother of Muses, sing for me, Sing of the mountains and the deep dark sea.“
This directly echoes the opening of The Odyssey, which begins (in a common translation):
“Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending…”
Dylan’s song is a plea for inspiration, directly invoking Mnemosyne (the Mother of the Muses) and her daughters, the goddesses of the arts.
Other Homeric Allusions
Dylan also uses Homeric themes and specific lines in other songs:
(from Tempest, 2012): The lines in this song,
“I can strip you of life / Strip you of breath / Ship you down / To the house of death,” are widely noted by scholars as being lifted almost directly from Robert Fagles’s translation of The Odyssey (Book 9), where Odysseus threatens the Cyclops Polyphemus.
I contain multitudes“ (from Rough and Rowdy Ways, 2020):
In this song, Dylan calls himself a “man of contradictions and a man of many moods.” Scholars link this to the famous epithet given to Odysseus: polytropos, which means “man of many twists and turns” or “many-sided.”
This theme inspired the film, I’m Not Here.
Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize Banquet Speech
To my ears, the song Tangled Up in Blue is the song that most closely approximates an epic poem.
We can also appreciate Spanish Boots of Spanish Leather as a song that talks about a long journey.
We can all appreciate the weakness of metaphors that go something like Violeta Parra was the Bob Dylan of Chile; because she came first historically. Her journey to collect folk tunes in Chile from various rural areas, did something similar in terms of re-calling, remembering something from culture’s past and bringing it to the fore once more. Her song Gracias a La Vida resonates with the Odyssey because this lady went through a lot, (there’s a movie about her Violeta Goes to Heaven in English. a seemingly endless journey of trials, and this is her attitude.
On the contemporary scene, at least in the early 2010s, the Bob Dylan of Chile was a star named Chinoy. Check out this song Klara.