the Cold War and the ongoing struggle for civil rights among the African American community.

Note in the following passages from “Blowin’ in the Wind” the author’s plea for awareness and action to address the injustices that existed not just in the United States but around the world:

How many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they're forever banned? ...

How many years must some people exist
Before they're allowed to be free?
And how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn't see ...

How many times can a man look up
Before he sees the sky?
How many ears must one person have
Before he can hear people cry?
And how many deaths will it take 'till he knows
That too many people have died?

Dylan is pleading for people to wake up and recognize the ugliness around them and the need to act to correct the injustices that they routinely ignore. Again, the United States was not yet heavily embroiled in the war in Southeast Asia. The Cuban Missile Crisis was still months away when the lyrics were written. All in all, things could have been—and would become—much worse. Dylan, however, was not oblivious to the wrongs he saw around him at that time. He was exasperated by the dearth of accountability he was witnessing among his fellow humans. Wars were still a prominent feature of global affairs and black people continued to exist under laws and practices intended to keep them subservient. The tone of “Blowin’ in the Wind” is sadness and anger.

Figurative language, a common feature of poetry and lyrics, are readily visible in Dylan’s lyrics. Indeed, the song’s title and refrain, “blowin’ in the wind,’ represents a use of repetition and idiom. The wind does not actually communicate messages to people; Dylan uses the phrase to emphasize the obliviousness of the injustices on the part of the public and the fact that people refuse to acknowledge problems that do not affect them personally. When Dylan sings that people do not hear the cries of others he asks rhetorically “how many ears must one person have” before he can hear those cries. When he asks, “how many years can a mountain exist Before it's washed to the sea,” he is alluding not to actual geographic formations but to the obviousness of problems that are ignored until it is too late.

Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" asks a series of rhetorical questions, some gentle, some searing. Rhetorical questions are questions for which the answer is obvious or already known. They are meant to make us think.

Dylan begins each stanza with a question that is more abstract than emotionally laden, such as "How many roads must a man walk down" before he knows he's a man? That is an important question to ponder, but it does not hit us in the gut.

Dylan will ask a question (or two) like the one above and then hit the reader/listener with a more gut-wrenching query: in the first stanza, it is 

Yes, 'n' how many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they're forever banned

Wow, how did we get from maturity to war? 

Dylan then brings in his refrain: that the answer is blowing in the wind. This refrain is ambiguous, meaning it can be interpreted in different ways, but one interpretation is that we already know the answer: it is out there, all around us, accessible, blowing in the wind. In the case of the cannon balls, for example, the obvious answer is that we know it is long past time for them to be banned--and if we do not, the song invites us to think about this.

The same technique repeats throughout. In the second stanza, Dylan again begins with a gentle and generalized question about how long the mountains can last, then moves to more pointed question: "How long can people live without being free?" and then moves into the gut punch: 

Yes, 'n' how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn't see

Again, the answer is blowing in the wind: we have already turned our heads away too many times; this is a statement all the more intense for people in the early 1960's, for whom the Holocaust was a living memory, and the civil rights movement a living reality.

The third (and final stanza I will discuss) repeats the same device of escalating the emotional heat of the rhetorical questions, the final one a gut wrencher:

Yes, 'n' how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died.

This poem/song aims squarely at our emotions in order to sensitize our consciences. Dylan's point is that enough evil has already occurred in the world for us to say "Let's stop." Enough. The language is simple and direct and for that reason, all the more powerful. It has a biblical quality: Jesus, for example, used rhetorical statements to awaken people, telling them if they had ears, then to hear and if eyes, then to see, as Dylan does when he asks:

How many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry

While we have to take any poet's interpretation of his work with a grain of salt (once a poem or work of art is released into the world, the artist no longer owns or controls its interpretation), Dylan has commented on this famous work, and his response points to the idea that many problems have simple solutions that do not require a roomful of experts to solve. The answers are accessible to anyone:

There ain’t too much I can say about this song except that the answer is blowing in the wind. It ain’t in no book or movie or TV show or discussion group. Man, it’s in the wind – and it’s blowing in the wind.  …But the only trouble is that no one picks up the answer when it comes down so not too many people get to see and know . . . and then it flies away. I still say that some of the biggest criminals are those that turn their heads away when they see wrong and know it’s wrong. I’m only 21 years old and I know that there’s been too many . . . You people over 21, you’re older and smarter.

Along the lines of the previous post, one of the most profound meanings from Dylan's song is the idea of embracing the unending questions that plague who we are and what we do.  In a setting where individuals are consistently searching for answers which seem elemental, but hardly are, Dylan's lyrics remind us of the fundamental challenges of being who we are in where we live.  For example, "How many years can some people exist/ Before they're allowed to be free?" is a great instance where we, as human beings, understand the need to be free, but also questions our tolerance for enslavement of others.  The implication in the song is that we, as individuals, are confronted with situations where our own sense of change is needed, and for this, we seek to find answers, solutions whose presence "is blowing in the wind."

Like many of Bob Dylan's songs (but not so much his topical folk songs of the early 1960s) "Blowin' in the Wind" feature lyrics that are fairly cryptic. At the same time, they are highly suggestive, evoking many of the social issues confronting the United States and the world in the early Sixties. Dylan has been typically evasive in discussing the meaning of the lyrics, mostly reiterating what he said in a 1962 interview:

There ain't much I can say about this song, except the answer is blowin' in the wind. It ain't no book or movie or TV show or discussion group, man. It's in the wind.

That said, let us look at some of the themes Dylan touches on in the song. In the first verse, he is clearly commenting on war. He asks: "How many seas must a white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand?" "Sleeps in the sand" is quite cryptic, and perhaps a bit of poetic license, but clearly the white dove is symbolic of peace. In the next lines he drives the point home by asking: "[H]ow many times must the cannonballs fly before they are forever banned?" In summary, the verse seems to be asking how long it will take until we, as a society, reject war as a means of settling our differences. 

In the second verse, Dylan begins by asking how long a mountain will exist before it is washed into the sea. This imagery suggests something monolithic gradually swept away by the tides of change. This seems to be confirmed by his fairly straightforward evocation of the civil rights struggle in the next lines. Asking how many roads a man must walk down before we call him a man, he then makes the point explicit:

Yes, ’n’ how many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free?
Yes, ’n’ how many times can a man turn his head
Pretending he just doesn’t see?

Here Dylan seems to be wondering how long it will take to wash away the edifice of racism--for whites to acknowledge the fundamental humanity of African-Americans by affording them equal treatment. Bear in mind that Dylan wrote this song at the height of the civil rights struggle, in 1962. 

In the final verse, he seems to tie together war and poverty, wondering how long we will tolerate injustice in general. "How many ears," he asks, "must one man have before he can hear people cry?" We cannot, he seems to be saying, continue to ignore suffering around us. 

So this song is ultimately about our willingness to confront and overcome the most urgent challenges facing humanity. How long will we continue to accept injustice in the world? "The answer is blowing in the wind." In other words, neither Dylan nor his listeners have the answers, but many of his generation found the questions worth asking in the 1960s.