Galactica Final Episode - thoughts

[Sam Cogley]

This really ties in at an audio forum...
I found this interesting tidbit on the Wikipedia page about "All Along the Watchtower" - I was looking for Dylan's thoughts on his composition. Instead, what first grabbed my eye is what a critic had to say:
Christopher Ricks has commented that "All Along the Watchtower" is an example of Dylan's audacity at manipulating chronological time: "at the conclusion of the last verse, it is as if the song bizarrely begins at last, and as if the myth began again."

Dylan's own comments mirror that thought:
"I haven't fulfilled the balladeers's job. A balladeer can sit down and sing three songs for an hour and a half... it can all unfold to you. These melodies on John Wesley Harding lack this traditional sense of time. As with the third verse of "The Wicked Messenger", which opens it up, and then the time schedule takes a jump and soon the song becomes wider... The same thing is true of the song "All Along the Watchtower", which opens up in a slightly different way, in a stranger way, for we have the cycle of events working in a rather reverse order."
WikiLink

"All this has happened before, and all this will happen again." Methinks the choice of that song was in no way a fluke. If it was, that's one whale of a coincidence.