The chorus in the Dylan song is "The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind". For many of the students they receive the refrain by saying that "the journey is long and these people have no place to rest their heads".
"How many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?"
My students think: "These poor doves!"
The Taiwanese majority sees simply a very tired soldier on a long march who has no time to see the stars:
"How many times must a man look up,
Before he can see the sky?"
In short, most of the class of Taiwanes students focused on the straining and stoic momentum expressed in the text. Well over the majority did not interpret it as a hopeful, marching, protest song.
In short, these students would concur with Bob Dylan himself, who had said, " "This here ain't no protest song or anything like that"."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zY_cM0_6vA
On the other hand, I do have to admit that a few of the students--interestingly most of them were males--did find that the song of Dylan's conveyed a bit more hopefulness and a readiness to march on. However, this was a tiny minority
WHAT DO OTHERS INTERPRET?
In the future, I think that I will try to get students to look online for their own favorite interpretation of a song, poem, or text. Here is, for example, one of the more popular interpretations of Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" currently online:
" This song, to me, is about how knowledge and enlightenment is right in front
of us but we cannot see it (just like the wind.)
"how many times must the cannon
balls fly
Before they're forever banned?' and
"how many deaths will it take till he knows
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