In August of 2006 a person who uses the handle "Peggy Day" on the website expectingrain.com made the following comment regarding Bob Dylan's then new album Modern Times: "Thunder on the Mountain has the line: 'I've been sitting down studying the art of love' Wonder if he's referring to 'The Art of Love' by Ovid..." It was a prescient observation.

A few weeks later New Zealand poet Cliff Fell noticed that a number of lines on Modern Times had roots in the poetry of Ovid, but, perplexingly, they were from a different collection of poems, The Poems of Exile.

Last November I pieced together that Dylan had indeed been studying The Art of Love, the Peter Green translation titled The Erotic Poems: The Art of Love, The Amores, Cures for Love, and On Facial Treatment for Ladies, and had incorporated lines from it into songs on Modern Times. The examples are pretty cut and dry, Dylan's "If I catch my opponents ever sleepin'/I'll just slaughter them where they lie" to Ovid's "Catch your opponents sleeping/And unarmed. Just slaughter them where they lie" for instance.

In Dylan's recent interview with Bill Flanagan he stated, "I think I have a dualistic nature" and I believe that one of the lines in the Together Through Life song "Jolene" shows that, as well as Dylan's sense of humor, at work.

In the song Dylan sings, "Can't fight somebody with his back to a hill." That struck me because I've never heard anybody ever say that. "Back to a wall," sure, but never "back to a hill." Where did that come from?

I did a Google search for the phrase "with his back to a hill" and it returned a mere four hits. One was for the song's lyrics, quoted on expectingrain.com, and two were for Sun-Tzu's The Art Of War.

The Art of War: Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, translated by John Minford, includes these lines:

"These are axioms
Of the Art of War:
Do not advance uphill.
Do not oppose an enemy
With his back to a hill."

You can choose to write that off as chance or coincidence. I don't think it is. It has all the earmarks of something that Dylan would do intentionally and I think of the Minford translation as more assigned reading.

Regarding Dylan's previous assignment of the David Wright translation of The Canterbury Tales I noticed that the song "It's All Good" contains the line "restaurant kitchen all full of flies." In The Prologue of The Cook's Tale appears the line, "Because your cookshop's always full of flies." I'll bet that this is the same kitchen, the bane of the health inspector for over six hundred years.