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Martin writes:
his warehouse eyes represent his longing for her, as empty as a warehouse waiting to be filled with her beauty.
...The song is a celebration of a woman's inner and outer beauty, and the singer is asking if she wants to share her life with him. He's asking the question we all ask at the beginning of a serious relationship:
Will you accept me with my loves and hates, my quirks and yearnings, my passions and peccadilloes, my weird history and my wild ambitions, all my "stuff," and take it all in and let it become part of you and your life?
Can I leave it by your gate, sad-eyed lady, will you let me in?
And his voice is filled with such PLEADING! He's listing what he will bring to her, if she lets him inside. And, in the song, the singer feels as we always do at these times, that no else understands the woman as he does, no one else really sees her radiant beauty and eternal sorrows.
Martin writes again:
Now that I've been singing this magnificent love song to myself (in the sense of "in my head," not "to" myself) after posting about it, a few more thoughts:
I think much of its power is subliminal; it comes less from what the words mean than from the emotion Bob puts into them (so often the case with him). It comes from the images the song evokes and, as much here as anywhere in his work, the sound of the words. Like his striking use of assonance in lines like "sAIntlike fAce and your ghOstlike sOUl," or "basement clOthes, and HollOw face," or "gYpsy hYmns."
He seems to be pleading for her love, and the intensity of his pleading is emphasized by the song's length and the repetition of the questioning chorus. Without saying it outright, he's begging PLEASE! PLEASE! Listen to me! Like someone who won't get off the phone or leave your house even though you have resolved the issue, perhaps by saying you need time to think it over.
Even the harmonica at the end repeats it, like he's calling up at you from the bottom of the stairs as he leaves, "I love you. I love you. You're beautful."
The symbol of a "gate" is used in many Dylan songs, as a sexual metaphor, but mostly, I think, in imploring someone to open up and let him in to the secret self he alone sees behind those sad eyes.
He is all of us, when we're in love.
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