Love Minus Zero / No Limit - Bob Dylan

The bridge at midnight trembles
The country doctor rambles
Bankers' nieces seek perfection
Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring
The wind howls like a hammer
The night blows rainy
My love she's like some raven
At my window with a broken wing.
...................................

In the 'well-made pop song'  the is usually also the hook line around which the song is built. Dylan's titles of that mid 60's period were an artform in themselves and the title often wasn't to be found anywhere else in the song at all. Here we have a clever mathematical title that could probably stand on its own as a short poem!

Generally supposed to be 'about' Sara, the song's lyric is very Zen like with it's paradoxical statements such as
- "There's no success like failure and failure is no success at all' ' My love speaks like silence.

The lady in question has a zen like equanimity while the rest of the world rat races on in it's socially conditioned way.
There's something elemental about her, unaffected, like ice, like fire. Her Eastern Zen like qualities of being true, not bothering, not easily impressed by conditioned male gestures of romantic love (Roses) or material notions of success and failure and thus Western dualism, the emptyness of everyday conversation, not holding grudges, beyond arguments and judging are contrasted with the Western norms of violence, loudness,  untrustworthyness, buying and selling, making empty promises, trying to be a 'success', holding grudges, seeking perfection and rewards.

Whoever it may be 'about' isn't the point because the song cleverly and very poetically juxtaposes Western and Eastern philosophy and culture and attempts to challange the way we think - recognise our socially conditioned notions of 'free will'!

Even with the threat of Armageddon (Ceremonies of the Horsemen)  she too above it all to bother. Such is the nature of Zen equanimity and enlightenment.

True he may have used Sara as a muse and focus and it may be one of the most beautiful love lyrics in the whole of time but the song is a powerful philosophy lesson and highly challanging. This was not written in his so-called 'Protest' period but what a subtle and powerful protest against western thought this is and written in such a way that we don't even notice the protest as we are lulled by the beauty of the words and the melody and his tribute to the lady of the song.

As with so many of Dylans 60's lyrics - so many of the lines or phrases have been lifted as popular quotations  -

There is a much use of synecdochic - a form of metaphor defined as - 

• A synecdochic metaphor is one in which a small part of something is chosen to represent the whole so as to highlight certain elements of the whole. For example "a pair of ragged claws" represents a crab in Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock. Describing the crab in this way gives it the attributes of sharpness and savagery normally associated with claws.