She Belongs to Me - Bob Dylan She’s got everything she needs She’s an artist, she don’t look back She can take the dark out of the nighttime And paint the daytime black You will start out standing Proud to steal her anything she sees But you will wind up peeking through her keyhole Down upon your knees She never stumbles She’s got no place to fall She’s nobody’s child The Law can’t touch her at all She wears an Egyptian ring That sparkles before she speaks She’s a hypnotist collector You are a walking antique Bow down to her on Sunday Salute her when her birthday comes For Halloween give her a trumpet And for Christmas, buy her a drum
“She Belongs to Me” is a song by Bob Dylan, and was first released as the second track on his 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home. The song may be about a former girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, or fellow folk singer Joan Baez, contemporary siren Nico, or Sara Lownds, the woman that Dylan would wed in November 1965.
Wikipedia
Meaning
The title of the song is perhaps ironic. The woman described in the song perhaps belongs to no one, as suggested by the lyric “She’s nobody’s child, the law can’t touch her at all.” However that is open to interpretation. The lyrics describe how the singer “bow[s] down to her on Sunday” and “salute[s] her when her birthday comes.” Other lines celebrate the woman’s assertiveness and moral conviction.
Wikipedia
An alternative interpretation of the song is that it is a paean to Dylan’s muse, depicting it as unapproachable but domineering.
Wikipedia
She Belongs to Me is a love song, of sorts. As Joan Baez wrote in her song Diamonds and Rust, Dylan had a gift for “keeping things vague.” Often his songs can be interpreted in many ways, and this one is especially open to interpretation.
Bob Dylan Commentaries
David Weir’s Analysis
A more spiritual interpretation can be found on David Weir’s site BobDylanSongAnalysis.wordpress.com
The song seems to present an ambivalent picture of God. The indications that it is God the narrator has in mind are numerous. In the first verse the woman is self-sufficient – ‘She’s got everything she needs’ – just as God traditionally is held to be. She’s also a creator – a creative, or forward-looking, artist (‘She don’t look back’). Furthermore, since she ‘can take the dark out of the night-time/ And paint the daytime black’, she seems to be the creator of the universe, making the world revolve – and so continually turn from night to day and back to night again.
It seems significant that the song is written in each of the first, second and third persons. ‘She’ is very prominent. The title, however, uses the first person ‘me’ in order to claim that the narrator possesses the woman – ‘She belongs to me‘. And there is the second person ‘you’:
‘You will start out standing
Proud to steal her anything she sees’.This seems to refer to someone else, maybe the listener, who it seems is possessed by the woman. ‘Me’ and ‘you’, then, seem to refer to different people. The tone of ‘You will start out standing’ seems to imply something like ‘You will start out standing just as I did’.
The song, then, seems to describe a God in human terms (she’s female, an artist, a wearer of jewelry, a collector, a recipient of gifts), and identifies her with human beings struggling to progress morally. At the same time, seen just as God, she is detached, and thus beyond characterization in human terms, including moral terms.
(Interestingly relevant quote: ‘Well, first of all, God is a woman, we all know that. Well, you take it from there.’ Dylan, Austin Press Conference 1965.)
David Weir
Visual Interpretation
We asked AI image generates to visualize the lyrics.
Margot Cotton / One Woman Band
Margot’s YouTube channel can be found here.
She Belongs to Me
Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again
Like a Rolling Stone
Another Interpretation: Jemmy Joe A-Go-Go
Recently I came across a Spotify playlist of folk love songs and on it was the 1965 Song by Bob Dylan “She Belongs to Me.” In therapeutic circles I believe they would call this song a classic example of an avoidant type attracting an anxious attachment type.
Good luck taking that face value. “She Belongs to Me” by Bob Dylan is a character sketch. It’s not a love song.
There is this woman. She is a transformative artist turning day into night and she’ll change you too. She is mysterious, powerful, and if she sees you at all it’s from a vantage point of control. This is not a relationship of equals. Our narrator tells the listener that they should approach this woman with deference and with gifts.
The title of the song “She Belongs to Me” seems to be in contrast with everything about how she’s described. Let us note that the singer of the song does not seem to interact with her at all. He is describing her to someone else…
Whatever the singer thinks of this woman, they’re keeping it to themselves. But to have such a subtle nuanced view of a person you need to have some real deep interests. We don’t dig too deeply into the hearts of people we have no reaction to. Our singer sees her, but for whatever reason moves no closer and leaves her for others to pursue.
[When] I’ve been writing or talking about Bob Dylan I am always quick to dismiss any sort of explanation of who the song is about. I believe it devalues this song. “She Belongs to Me” in particular to suggest who is it about personally unless we know this particular person declaring who the song is subject about isn’t a good use of what art is for….
Secondly. celebrity personal lives have always been part of the draw and paying attention to them, I get that, sure cheap fun attached to their work, but for goodness sake, this is Bob Dylan. He’s supposed to be a sophisticated artist who has a nuanced view on humanity and on society. We are not take him in his best when we put him into the gossip rags.
And lastly. the reason why I don’t like to look into Bob Dylan’s personal life is because one day Bob Dylan will die. In a hundred years people will still be paying attention to the songs of Bob Dylan but they won’t know who Susie Rotolo was. If it was revealed that the song she belongs to me was written about Bob Dylan’s middle school math teacher the people in the future won’t care. All [that] will matter is the song.
I think the song will still have something to say and it can capture an audience. Can you see yourself in there? It is feasible to imagine some kin of my generations’ unborn could hear the song and say “Yes I want to know a woman like that. That’s who I want to fall in love with.” … This is a story of fascination that could have been painted on the bedrooms of Babylonian Royals or it could be in the diaries of art school students a thousand years from now….
Jemmy Joe A-Go-Go / YouTube
