Have you written anything else about JWH songs?

This is funny, because my first thought on reading your original posts was that I agree with you completely and what you’re saying has almost nothing in common with my own feeling for the song–a weird combination. I should explain that I used the word “monarch” because there has to be someone for the guard to be guarding. I, too, hear “surrender and vulnerability,” but the vulnerability of this monarch–who is the singer-poet’s deepest self–does not manifest itself until the final verse, when he opens himself to the “King and Queen of Swords.” The song’s first six verses comprise the history of the guards being ejected from the guardhouse–i.e., the monarch’s superannuated ego. And all their suffering and vulnerability is ancient history: those first six verses read like friezes decorating the interior of a mausoleum. The singer-poet first finds himself ejected from the mausoleum (once his castle) at the beginning of the 7th verse (“She wakes him up…”) [a verse that has always reminded me of a shipwrecked Odysseus being rescued by Nausicaa], and after resisting a final temptation to take charge, he dismisses his courtiers and faces the pitiless dawn. One final thing: I might have come to agree with Paul Williams that the song is confused had I not heard Dylan sing it in Philadelphia in October, 1978: the vocal on Street Legal does seem confused, or just uncertain, or maybe even clueless about the song’s emotional burden, but that night in Philly, Dylan took it with a ferocious clarity.