I believe the title is an allusion to Rimbaud's "My Bohemian Life": "My only pair of trousers had a big hole./Tom Thumb in a daze, I sowed rhymes". The poem also has a line sometimes translated as "strong Burgundy" (un vin de vigueur). This leads me to believe that this song is a response to the concept of "la vie boheme" that was very popular in the 1960s. Dylan goes through a laundry list of bohemian artist cliches; drugs, prostitution, drinking, rejection of money, antagonistic relationship with the police, before eventually deciding, in the final lines to leave it all and go back to New York.
I believe the title is an allusion to Rimbaud's "My Bohemian Life": "My only pair of trousers had a big hole./Tom Thumb in a daze, I sowed rhymes". The poem also has a line sometimes translated as "strong Burgundy" (un vin de vigueur). This leads me to believe that this song is a response to the concept of "la vie boheme" that was very popular in the 1960s. Dylan goes through a laundry list of bohemian artist cliches; drugs, prostitution, drinking, rejection of money, antagonistic relationship with the police, before eventually deciding, in the final lines to leave it all and go back to New York.