Leonard Cohen, Singer of the Bible

Leonard Cohen, Singer of the Bible Mary Anne O'Neil Although Leonard Cohen only recently achieved rock star status, two of his most popular works, “Suzanne” and “Hallelujah,” achieved fame years before their composer. Both are inspired by the Bible, an influence Cohen readily avows. In a 1993 interview entitled “I am the little Jew who wrote the Bible,” he says, “at our best, we inhabit a biblical landscape, and this is where we should situate ourselves without apology….That biblical landscape is our urgent invitation…Otherwise, it's really not worth saving or manifesting or redeeming or anything, unless we really take up that invitation to walk into that biblical landscape.” His faith has left a mark on his songs not always fully recognized by a secular audience that might be more interested in the rhythm of the music or the octogenarian Cohen's energetic performance style. But if we discount the central place the Bible plays in his art, we also miss the connections between Cohen and earlier European artists who, from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century, used poetry and song to praise and express the soul's longing for God. I am referring to devotional poetry, a genre that was especially popular in England, France, and Spain during the Counter Reformation period of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. John Donne, Robert Southwell, and George Herbert were all devotional poets, as were their French contemporaries Jean de Sponde and Jean de la Ceppède. The genre is represented in the twentieth century by Paul Claudel, Charles Péguy, and Pierre Emmanuel in France, and Gerard Manley Hopkins and T.S. Eliot in England. Devotional poetry often uses symbolism derived from a method of biblical exegesis dating back to the earliest years of Christianity called typological, or figural, symbolism. Typological symbolism operates on four levels: literal, allegorical, moral, and mystical. Typological symbolism provides a way of understanding the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible as the unified story of humanity's sin and redemption with applications to moral conduct in this world as well as to the quest for eternal life. It allows us to read the stories of Genesis and Exodus as historical truths but also as allegories of Christ's life, guides to right behavior, and pre‐figurations of the Second Coming. “Suzanne” of 1967 is the earliest song in which Cohen draws upon the typological tradition. It seems to begin as a love song: The singer goes to a room by a river with a “half‐crazy” woman named Suzanne, whose hospitality runs the gamut from serving tea to allowing the man “to spend the night beside her.” If the would‐be lover is reluctant to make any commitment to Suzanne, she soon “gets [him] on her wavelength” by assuring him that “[he's] always been [her] lover.” The second stanza unexpectedly switches to the gospel story of the Redemption. Cohen calls Jesus a sailor who watches over drowning men from a “lonely wooden tower” and utters a prophecy that mankind will eventually be freed by the sea. The final stanza imagines the speaker of the first lines walking with Suzanne, who is outlandishly dressed in “rags and feathers/ From Salvation Army counters” and who stimulates the man's imagination to find, “among the garbage and the flowers” of the river, signs of heroism, as well as love and optimism for the future in the faces of children. Part of the song's appeal comes from the sudden shift from Suzanne in the first stanza to Christ in the second. Water imagery supplies the connection between them. The river of the opening lines is the St. Lawrence in the artist's native city of Montreal. In the second, Cohen alludes to Matthew 14:25–33, where Jesus walks upon the Sea of Galilee. In the Gospel of Matthew, the walk upon the Sea of Galilee comes after the miracle of the loaves and fishes. Christ leaves his followers to pray in solitude, sending his disciples in a boat to the other side of the sea. When a storm arises, Christ walks on the water to reassure the frightened disciples. The...

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