Sixteen years, sixteen banners united
Over the fields where the good shepherd grieves,
1
Desperate men, desperate women divided,
Spreading their wings 'neath the falling leaves,
Fortune calls, I step forth from the shadows
To the marketplace, merchants and thieves hungry for power,
My last deal gone down, she's smelling sweet like the meadows
Where she was born on midsummer's eve near the tower.
The cold-blooded moon, the captain waits above the celebration,
Sending his thoughts to a beloved maid,
Whose ebony face is beyond communication,
The captain is down, but still believing that his love will be repaid.
They shaved her head, she was torn between Jupiter and Apollo,
A messenger arrived with a black nightingale,
I seen her on the stairs and I couldn't help but follow––
Follow her down past the fountain, where they lifted her veil.
I struggled
2 to my feet, I rode past destruction in the ditches
With the stitches still mending 'neath a heart-shaped tattoo,
Renegade priests and treacherous, young witches
Were handing out the flowers that I'd given to you.
The palace of mirrors, where dog-soldiers are reflected,
The endless road and the wailing of chimes,
The empty rooms, where her memory is protected,
Where the angels' voices whisper to the souls of previous times.
She wakes him up forty-eight hours later, the sun is breaking
Near broken chains, mountain laurel, and rolling rocks,
She's begging to know what measures he now will be taking,
He's pulling her down and she's clutching onto his long, golden locks.
"Gentlemen," he said, "I don't need your organization,
I've shined your shoes, I've moved your mountains and marked your cards,
But Eden is burning: either get ready for elimination
Or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards.
"Peace will come with tranquility and the splendor
On the wheels of fire, but will offer no reward
Where the false idols fall and cruel death surrenders
With its pale ghost retreating between the king and the queen of swords."
3
1
This song has some long sentences of strung-together thoughts, images, and scenes, which always proves to be difficult to represent with regular punctuation. The way that I have chosen to deal with it (as in most other songs) is by simply connecting each of these shorter sentences, adverbial clauses, etc., together with commas until I feel that a new thought-process has begun, which is hard to define exactly, but I also try to make sure that each "sentence" actually has a subject and a verb and is not just a series of dangling participles, participial clauses, etc.
2
As an example of an egregious (yet insidious) error on the part of those who compiled Dylan's book of lyrics (or those who compiled the versions that eventually appeared on bobdylan.com, etc.), this word is transcribed as "stumbled", which might not at first seem like a big deal, but when one thinks about it (especially in conjunction with the fact that the word is obviously "struggled" –– obvious because there's two chances to hear it and because it makes a lot more sense in terms of the meaning of the line), one has to ask oneself, "What would it mean to stumble to your feet?"
3
I choose to believe that this last half-verse is a continuation of the quote from the second half of the previous verse since its tone seems to be in a similar vein, but it isn't necessarily part of the quote.