When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
Look out your window and I’ll be gone
You’re the reason I’m trav’lin’ on
Don’t think twice, it’s all right

These lines are from Bob Dylan’s song “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” written in the early 1960s and released on his 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Emerging from the Greenwich Village folk scene, Dylan was adapting traditional folk idioms into sharply personal songwriting. The song is widely understood as a farewell addressed to a lover, delivered in the plainspoken, traveling-musician voice common to folk balladry. Its mixture of tenderness and bite helped establish Dylan’s early reputation for emotionally complex, conversational lyrics that sounded traditional while feeling unmistakably contemporary.

The speaker announces an imminent departure—gone by dawn—framed as both necessity and self-protection. The “rooster” and “break of dawn” evoke folk imagery of rural timekeeping and the ritual of leaving before confrontation. “You’re the reason I’m trav’lin’ on” shifts blame outward, yet the refrain “Don’t think twice, it’s all right” performs emotional distancing: it sounds like reassurance but also functions as a cutting dismissal. The tension between the calm surface and the underlying resentment is central to the song’s power, capturing how leave-taking can be simultaneously liberating, regretful, and accusatory.

“When your rooster crows at the break of dawn / Look out your window and I’ll be gone / You’re the reason I’m a-travelin’ on / Don’t think twice, it’s all right.”