Shelter from the Storm

One should avoid the temptation to read explicit literal interpretations into songs that suggest their meanings through symbolism and imagery — like Dylan’s Shelter from the Storm. Where the narrator may at times be pictured as a warrior or Christ-like figure, this is clearly not the literal meaning of the song, which is about the redemptive power of love, and looks back on a specific love affair from a present in which the male and female are separated. Dylan uses the word “now” and the present tense when he chooses to contrast the past with his state in the present:

“Now there’s a wall between us, something has been lost” “Now I’m living in a foreign country” “If I pass this way again” etc.

The events of the past, which Dylan remembers in the song, are, figuratively, “another lifetime”: Dylan is metaphorically reborn by his encounter with the merciful woman. Each verse presents images of harshness and suffering which are eased by the intervention of the female: “‘Come in,’ she said, ‘I’ll give you shelter from the storm,’” concluding every verse.

The woman’s selfless act of charity offers redemption to a sinful world where “blackness was a virtue, the road was full of mud.” “In a world of steel and death and men who are fighting to be warm,” she alone shows kindness and compassion, giving the narrator the chance to relieve his “exhaustion”. He is "hunted like a crocodile" and in the first verse is even depicted as "a creature without form": yet she speaks to him as another human. Being “hunted like a crocodile”, “poisoned in the bushes and blown out on the trail” are thus symbols for the woes and troubles of the world, from which the compassion of the woman offers respite.

This dichotomy is in the song’s title: Shelter from the Storm, the storm being the black and muddy wilderness of toil and blood, steel and death, in which new-born babies and old men alike are abandoned “without love.” In contrast, the shelter offered by the woman is “always safe and warm.” She herself is pictured as a saintly, Classical figure with “silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair,” an image that recalls Diana or the Virgin Mary: “She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns.”

Dylan’s sufferings, too, reach their ultimate conclusion when he is imagined as Christ, dying on the cross for the sins of the world. (The New Testament tells how soldiers gambled for Christ’s clothes.) This is not to say that the narrator is, or believes he is, Christ. The point of the comparison is that, as Christ was reborn to redeem the world, so Dylan’s “innocence,” his faith in humanity, is restored by the selfless offer of shelter from the woman.

Like many of the songs on Blood on the Tracks, Shelter from the Storm looks back on a love affair from the perspective of the present. The narrator is now “living in a foreign country,” cut off from his old lover: “Now there’s a wall between us.” He wishes he could turn back the clock and have a second chance; last time he “took too much for granted, got my signals crossed.” In the context of an album filled with songs of bitterness and regret, however, Shelter from the Storm has a tone of acceptance and thankfulness for the time Dylan and his lover did spend together.