⁹This can be seen as yet another one of the small motifs that recur here and there on the record, which in this case may (possibly) be traced back to Petrarch’s Canto 332, Mia benigna fortuna: I miei gravi sospir non vanno in rime, e ‘l mio duro martir vince ogni stile (‘and my heavy sighs can not be brought into rhyme, and my hard fate conquers every style’). In ‘Mississippi’ the narrator takes Petrarch’s position: Love cannot be described, captured in poetry, whereas in ‘Bye And Bye’ he states, seemingly matter-of-factly, that ‘I’m singing love’s praises in sugar-coated rhyme’ (see below). It is not obvious that Dylan has known these lines from Petrarch, but there is in fact a more or less direct link between them, which at least invites speculation: in Tangled Up In Blue (1975) the I-person follows a woman home to her place, where she reads for him from a ‘book of poems written by an Italian poet from the thirteenth century’. Well, Petrarch didn’t live in the thirteenth century, but in an interview Dylan once intimated, in his usual, anti-intellectual way, that the poet’s name is ‘Plutarch’ (Dylan: ‘I like that song. Yeah, that poet from the Thirteenth Century.’ McGregor: ‘Who was that?’ Dylan: ‘Plutarch. Is that his name?’ McGregor: ‘Yeah’. Craig McGregor interview, 12 March 1978. Published in New Musical Express on 22 April 1978). Even thematically Petrarch seems to be a likely candidate, with his personal relation, rich in contrasts, to Woman, not unlike what Dylan expresses in other songs. That the quoted line has been of a certain import for Dylan, appears, not only from it being the emotional climax of ‘Tangled up in Blue’, but also from the fact that after his conversion, fall 1978, precisely this line was re-written: now, the quotes are from the Bible and Jeremiah.