Bob Dylan - It's All Over Now, Baby Blue Lyrics Meaning

The song is about a once beautiful woman, who throughout her life has used her looks to get whatever she desired, now aging and having to face a life in which she will need to make her own way to survive, when she had never even though she would need to.

You must leave (time offers no options to getting older) Take what you need you think will last (Nothing last forever)

But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast.(Time waits for no body)

Yonder stands your orphan with his gun. (An orphan is something you gave birth to and then abandoned, either by choice, or necessity. A gun is something you fight to the death with. She gave birth to a selfish carefree life style and fought as long, and as hard as she could to hang on to it. But age and the loss of her power to manipulate with her beauty, means she now 'must' abandon that life style)

Crying like a fire in the sun (Nothing could be more futile than a fire in a blazing sun. What the future holds for her with the passage of time is beyond her control...crying about it is futile, nothing can be done)

Look out, the saints are coming through. (Again, her situation is as inevitable as death itself) And its all over now baby blue (Your gigs up sis, karma has run over your dogma)

The entire song fits this narrative, it 'all' fits, so I'm just gonna skip to the highlights from here.

The highway its for gamblers, you better use your sense. Take what you have gather through coincidence (Keep in mind the time period in which the song was penned and the social norms of that time. At her age 35-40 maybe, most women are married, settled, secure in a family home. She gambled that she would land on her feet to, but didn't. Now she's on the hard lonely road of life and having to make her own way. She never had to learn any street smarts to get by so she will now need to use the skills she picked up by coincidence from those who had supported her in the past)

The empty handed painter from your streets (Like her life so far, an empty handed painter paints nothing, achieves nothing, is pointless) Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets. (crazy patterns are also like her life to this point, meaningless) The sky to is folding under you. (When young, the sky is the limit, we look to the sky to dream. As we age, we reach our limit, we no longer look up and dream what might be, we look back to what they might have been.

Sea sick sailors, reindeer armies and the lover who just walked out the door represent all the men in her life who have come and gone and won't be coming anymore. The taken blankets and moving carpets are the material things they took with them when they went leaving her with nothing.

Leave your stepping stones behind, something call for you. (She can no longer chose the easy path, the path walked on the back of others. Age has now chosen her destiny and she has no choice but to follow the ugly path that lay ahead. Forget the dead you left behind, they will not follow you. (This narcissist woman has lied and cheated all of her adult life, she has never been with a man who didnt end up hating her...no past love is coming to her rescue) The vagabond wrapping at her door and standing in the clothes that she once wore is the new, old and poor her, the her she had hoped would never find her but has...and strike another match go start a new, well that's her refusing to accept her new reality, she's going to kick and scream all she can but its pointless,she might just as well go light another fire in the sun because there's no one left to listen...Bob always did write such cheery little jingles about women in a tail spin....once upon a time you dressed so fine.