Love Minus Zero / No Limit

A song by Bob Dylan

“My love, she speaks like silence.” Some have read this line as a jab, an insistence that the poet’s true desire is for his love to just shut up. But this is wrong, as it isn’t sustained by the lines that follow:

My love, she speaks like silence,

Without ideals or violence.

She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful

Yet she’s true like ice, like fire.

People carry roses

And make promises by the hours.

My love she laughs like the flowers.

Valentines can’t buy her.

The silence with which the poet’s love speaks isn’t really silence, but a vital clarity and stillness in a world of cheap and empty talk. She’s not a doormat, she’s an oasis, as true and essential as the elements – as ice, as fire. There’s a purity to her speech, and to her.

We don’t get the lover’s perspective, of course. Sometimes silence really does mean silence. But if “speaks like silence” is ever-so-slightly barbed, it’s a necessary barb, a complication that strengthens the expressed sentiment even as it troubles it. The verses that follow make clear how much value the poet finds in his love’s wisdom – how “there’s no success like failure / and that failure is no success at all,” how “she knows too much to argue or to judge.” Speaking or silent, the poet’s lover is his anchor.

And the poet, or rather the singer, makes clear that this dependency is mutual. His vision of his lover is a reflection of what he hopes to be for her. Hence the conclusion of his song’s final verse:

The wind howls like a hammer.

The night blows cold and rainy.

My love, she’s like some raven

At my window with a broken wing.

He cares for her, too, when she needs it. When she needs him, he is there. That this need only emerges at the song’s end is not a reflection of the lover’s value. Rather, it is a sign of her strength.

The title of this song, “Love Minus Zero / No Limit,” is a fraction. Its value is infinite love.