Comes a time
when the blind man
takes your hand
says: Don’t you see?1
got to make it somehow
on the dreams you still believe
Don’t give it up
you’ve got an empty cup2
only love can fill
only love can fill
Been walking all morning
Went walking all night
I can’t see much difference
between the dark and the light3
And I feel the wind
And I taste the rain
Never in my mind
to cause so much pain
Comes a time
when the blind man
takes your hand
says: Don’t you see?
got to make it somehow
on the dreams you still believe
Don’t give it up
only love can fill
only love can fill
From day to day
just letting it ride
you get so far away
from how it feels inside
You can’t let go
’cause you’re afraid to fall
till the day may come
when you can’t feel at all
Comes a time
when the blind man
takes your hand
says: Don’t you see?
got to make it somehow
on the dreams you still believe
Don’t give it up
you’ve got an empty cup
only love can fill
only love can fill
Words by Robert Hunter
Music by Jerry Garcia
Compare Sophocles’ Oedipus. Tiresias is the blind man as well as the prophet. “If my eyes of flesh are closed, it is so that I can see better with the eyes of the spirit.”
Also compare the final line of the Dylan Thomas poem, “Was There a Time”:
Was there a time when dancers with their fiddles
In children’s circuses could stay their troubles?
There was a time they could cry over books,
But time has set its maggot on their track.
Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe.
What’s never known is safest in this life. Under the skysigns they who have no arms
Have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost
Alone’s unhurt, so the blind man sees best. 49
Again, as in “Ripple,” Hunter invokes the image of an empty cup. In tarot, the Cups represent the emotions, and indeed, “Comes a Time” addresses the malaise of feeling nothing—being so afraid to fall that you learn to turn off your feelings. “The day may come / when you can’t feel at all.”
The line echoes a poem by W. B. Yeats, “The Empty Cup.”
Between the Dark and the Light was used as the title for Jay Blakesberg’s collection of Grateful Dead photographs (2002).
Studio recording: Reflections (February 1976).
First performance: October 19, 1971, at Northrop Auditorium, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. The song never became part of the permanent rotation but reappeared periodically over the years.