A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall

The words

A young traveler returns with a torrent of nightmarish images and vows to keep telling what he saw.

A parent questions a beloved son about where he has been, what he saw and heard, and whom he met. Each answer pours out as a long list of images of suffering, ruin and warning, and every verse builds to the title's prophecy. In the last verse the son says what he will do next: go back into the darkness and keep telling the world what he has witnessed. Dylan delivers it alone with his guitar, steady and grave, the question-and-answer frame borrowed from an old ballad.