Nice to be reminded of an old song, Whistling D! That verse is a killer. Leonard Cohen, of course, was a recognised poet before he entered the pop world and as a young writer would have been aware of the history of poetry in English/American from the nineteenth century onwards. Also the influences from France and beyond. Rhyme was in the process of being displaced before the First World War in Modernism generally. Bob Dylan, despite his adoption of a minor lyric poet’s name, (Bob Hart or Bob Crane probably didn’t have the same resonance for him?) also had an awareness of these literary processes so it’s probably not much of a stretch to see those poetic influences working themselves out in various songs. I’m thinking especially with regard to old Dylan songs like ‘Hattie Caroll’ where the chorus is in rhyme and the verse stretches to accommodate his narrative beyond a conventional rhyme scheme. Dylan massively expanded the potentials of popular and folk songs and his influence opened a lot of space, eliding those genres, one could argue. Whether songs rhyme or not doesn’t seem so important imo after over a century of language stretched by experimentation and circumstances. There is a larger argument here, no doubt, but for now: it contains multitudes…