"Chimes of Freedom" has been widely discussed by Dylan's many interpreters, including biographers, journalists, academics and music historians. Critic
Paul Williams has described the song as Dylan's
Sermon on the Mount. In this later style, which is influenced by 19th century French
symbolist poet
Arthur Rimbaud, the poetry is more allusive, filled with "chains of flashing images." In this song, rather than support a specific cause as in his earlier protest songs, he finds solidarity with all people who are downtrodden or otherwise treated unjustly, including unwed mothers, the disabled, refugees, outcasts, those unfairly jailed, "the luckless, the abandoned and forsaked," and, in the final verse, "the countless confused, accused, misused, strung out ones and worse" and "every hung-up person in the whole wide universe." After "Chimes of Freedom", Dylan's protest songs no longer depicted social reality in the black and white terms which he renounced in "
My Back Pages", but rather use
satirical surrealism to make their points. In
Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet, Seth Rogovy called the song Dylan's "supreme poetic achievement." Rogovy described the song's "simple" scene: […] a couple takes refuge in a doorway of a church during a thurderstorm. Period. But never has a storm been so dynamically, so
electrically, described. In six eight-line stanzas, Dylan paints a hallucinatory vision, a sensual display of lightning piercing darkness, revealing an unjust world and a world of redemption. Wrapped up in the song is all that has come before: the civil right symbolism of ''Blowin' in the Wind
, the apolcalyptic surrealism of A Hard Rain's a- Gonna Fall
, the tolling of a new day in The Times They Are a- Changin'.'' Rogovy suggests an answer to one of the main questions asked in Dylan's lyrics by stating: "...The answer was blowin' in the wind out in the night in question; the answer is in poetry; the answer, my friend, is in a transcendent vision of universal freedom and justice for all". In his 2012 book
The Lives of Bob Dylan,
Ian Bell follows Heylin in speculating that the genesis of "Chimes of Freedom" might lie in the verses Dylan wrote at the time of the Kennedy assassination, which contain the line "as cathedral bells were gently burnin". Bell also notes that the song echoes the imagery of "
The Drunken Boat /Le Bateau ivre" by
Arthur Rimbaud: "I know skies split by lightning, waterspouts/ And undertows, and tides: I know the night/ And dawn exulting like a crowd of doves". Bell asserts that "Chimes" was "certainly something new, but also something flawed". He describes the song as both thrilling and "loosely and horribly overwritten". Bell suggests the theme of the song is that liberty took many forms, personal and political, civic and artistic, spiritual and physical. The significance of "Chimes" for Bell is that, although the song is too over-wrought and self-conscious to be a total success, it showed Dylan demolishing the barrier between poetry and song: Anyone reading "Chimes" on the tyrannical page might pause before calling it a poem. Anyone listening would hesitate to call it just a song in the manner of "
She Loves You" or anything written for the mass market in the 20th century . If it wasn't poetry, what was Dylan doing? In
In Search of the Real Bob Dylan,
David Dalton, one of the founding editors of
Rolling Stone magazine, commented that the song was written at the same time as "Mr Tambourine Man". Dalton gives a literary reading to the lyrics of "Chimes" as worthy of significant literary merit stating: "Dylan begins to type, 'Electric light still struck like arrows'... Lightning is an agent of change in classic American literature: it is the storm after which everything changes—the lightning storm in
Moby-Dick, the storm in
Huckleberry Finn, and the one in
On the Road, just outside New Orleans. 'Lightning that liquifies the bones of the world,'
William Burroughs called it." Dalton continues with a comparison of Dylan's writing of the lyrics in "Chimes" to
Jack Kerouac and states: "The scenes in 'Chimes of Freedom' are lit up as if by strobe light—the way the Bible was written, they say, in brilliantly illuminated pictures. Dylan uses a cinematic method of writing, like Kerouac's—with slow motion jump cuts, and freeze frames." ==Cover versions==