[Roger Slater]

I did some Googling to see if my sense is correct that the phrases Dylan "stole" from Timrod are really not all that definitely Timrodian. Here are some preliminary observations.

The exact phrase "hidden pain" turns up 33,900 times on Google. There's even a website called hiddenpain.com. So I conclude that Dylan either stole it from Timrod, or stole it from 32,899 other original wordsmiths. Yes, Dylan and Timrod both rhymed it with "explain," but I'm hoping you'll agree that this is a familiar rhyme pairing and that Timrod doesn't have dibs.

I think the most distinctive and original-sounding phrase that Dylan is accused of stealing from Timrod is "temporary death," which Dylan and Timrod (I think) both likened to sleep. (I'm sure no one here will be concerned that Timrod and Dylan both rhymed it with "breath," since every rhyming poet and songwriter who ever lived has rhymed breath and death). It turns out that there are well over 10,000 websites in which others have likened sleep to "temporary death," including many religious oriented sites, blogs, ranters, poets, and major literary figures.

For example, in a Byron translation of Catullus' "Ad Lebiam":

My eyes refuse the cheering light,
Their orbs are veil'd in starless night:
Such pangs my nature sinks beneath,
And feels a temporary death.--

And Frances Sheridan (1724–1766), in The History of Nourjahad, has a character say:

"Your life," said he, "will be frequently interrupted by the temporary death of sleep."

http://www.wwnorton.com/nto/romantic...4/sheridan.htm

Nathaniel Hawthorne used the same phrase in The Haunted Mind:

Now comes the peal of the distant clock, with fainter and fainter strokes as you plunge further into the wilderness of sleep. It is the knell of a temporary death.

http://www.eldritchpress.org/nh/hmind.html

And someone named AJ Davis wrote in the 19th century:

"True sleep is a temporary death of the body and a rest of the soul."

see http://www.dreamhawk.com/dyd-ch2.htm ]

Apparently, it is a familiar Islamic thought, as well.

In Islam, sleep is considered as a temporary death.

http://www.nmnonline.net/tenets/DREA...RSPECTIVE.html

A poet name Augustine Ohanwe also used the trope:

SLEEP
Sleep is a temporary death
Through which nature acquaints us
With the inevitable permanent sleep.

http://www.poemsofsoul.com/poemsbyAugustineOhanwe.htm

There are thousands of other uses of the same phrase by others I've never heard of. Here's one example:

After a hard day's work don't you look forward to some sleep? And is sleep not temporary death?

http://www.sunnewsonline.com/webpage...2-2005-001.htm

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As far as the "precious hours"/"frail flowers" is concerned, Timrod likened "logic" to frail flowers, and Dylan likened precious hours to frail flowers, so there's an obvious difference. Not even the same thought is being expressed. And certainly flowers/hours is a familiar enough rhyme to belong to no one, or to everyone. So I doubt that this "similarity" of phrasing even proves that Dylan was familiar with Timrod. In isolation, it certainly doesn't, and if the phrase, in isolation, owes no debt, one's infernce from other factors that Dylan knows Timrod's work should be irrelevant. In Google, the exactly phrase "precious hours" turns up 195,000 times -- so Dylan ought to be accused of triteness and lack of distinctiveness, perhaps, but not of taking a specific phrase from someone who used it over 100 years ago. And well over 21,000 webpages speak of "frailer" and "flowers" in the same breath.

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As far as wisdom growing up in strife, my conclusion is that Dylan did in fact pick this familiar thought up from Timrod, since I cannot find any specific uses of the phrase other than Dylan and Timrod. This, alone, however, is an unstriking enough phrase or "borrowing" that I don't think any poet or songwriter can claim not to have done something similar or worse. I find it inconsequential. Others may differ. The thought, however, is not original to Timrod, and the expression is not, to me, all that distinctive. At any rate, I doubt, if this were the only Timrod/Dylan correlation, anyone would be talking about it.