Leonard Cohen: Alexandra Leaving
There aren’t people in my life I’d rather forget. Oh, sure, there are people who have done me wrong and experiences I regret and wish I could do over, but as Mandela said, “I never lose. I either win — or I learn.”
So it goes. I’ve tried to memorialize each person who has left a strong and distasteful mark on my life by keeping him or her as a lesson to remember and improve. This is one of those.
My favorite Leonard Cohen song is “Alexandra Leaving.”
For me, Cohen’s music holds two great themes: the merging of earthly and spiritual love, and the embrace of mystery. Those two themes merge in “Alexandra Leaving,” perhaps more than in any other of Cohen’s lyrics, and the lyric speaks to the kind of pain most of us have experienced when a great love comes to an end. I began writing this piece below by way of a conversation with a friend, and finished it, perhaps hastily, for this challenge. It doesn’t answer the question completely, but I think it’s close enough to what I mean.
The Annotated “Alexandra Leaving”
The lyrics of “Alexandra Leaving” are based on “The God Abandons Antony,” by the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy. (More information about the original can be found by a simple online search.) There is thus a temptation to think Cohen’s lyrics must address the same topic, i.e., that of departing Alexandria, Egypt — or at least something closely related to it.
I don’t think that’s right. Cohen was a master at seeing and creating layers of meaning, and I think the idea of “leaving Alexandria,” as it were, did not impel Cohen to set that same topic to song, but rather suggested another subject and another angle for his own well documented and long-explored themes.
In that sense, I think Cohen’s discovery of Cavafy’s poem catalyzed the sentiments in “Alexandra Leaving.” But given the originality of Cohen’s lyrical voice, I think it’s more likely that Cohen’s lyrics were motivated by Cavafy’s original, not derivative of it.
The first theme in Cohen’s work is the merging of human love and spirituality, and the impossibility of separating the two. Or, in fewer words, he explored the idea that “God is love.” In many of his best-known songs Cohen intentionally blends the love of a woman — either an actual woman from his life (“So Long, Marianne,” “Suzanne”) or a character (the unnamed woman from the fourth verse of “Hallelujah”) who represents women but who is not a specific woman — with love for God.
The second theme regards acceptance of the world’s mysteries. As a Jew and a Buddhist, Cohen certainly knew that there are phenomena we cannot explain. Some of us may call that “God’s will,” but most of us, even believers, doubt that a single entity manipulates the world with something like puppet-strings. Like the Buddha, Cohen challenges us to embrace life’s mysteries — to spend spiritual energy understanding and making peace with them — rather than resenting the universe or shaking our fists at God for placing before us questions we cannot answer.
In “Alexandra Leaving,” Cohen achieves perhaps his greatest synergy of these two themes. The song’s topic is simple enough — the end of love — but in it he (and Sharon Robinson, his co-writer) challenge us to accept the departure as a part of the human spiritual experience.
What follows is my own deconstruction of the lyric. I stake no claim to any exclusive understanding of Cohen; I am only saying that this is how the song strikes me, and the sense I make of it.
Suddenly the night has grown colder
The god of love preparing to depart
The metaphor of a cold night represents love’s departure. (It puts me in mind of the Robert Hunter line, “Summer flies and August dies, and the world grows dark and mean.” “The Days Between,” the song in which that lyric appears, isn’t based on a specific poem, though Hunter’s four verses of 14 lines each do approximate sonnet form.)
Cohen’s phrase, “the god of love,” is intriguing here, since he often merges the ideas of god and love, rather than talking about a single god of love among many gods (like Aphrodite among the Greek gods, for example). Instead, “the god of love” suggests a way of giving love its own spirit, so that love isn’t just a concept, but an actual living thing born of the spirituality in all of us, and thus literally an “animate object.” In the lyric, the god of love and Alexandra become one and the same, with Alexandra giving to love the form of a woman, and the god of love infusing Alexandra with those qualities — wisdom, beauty, energy, spiritual alignment — that make her the lover of the song’s listener.
Alexandra hoisted on his shoulder
The listener is aware of Alexandra’s turning away from him; their love is dying. It appears that the god of love has “stolen” Alexandra, but he hasn’t — see further.
They slip between the sentries of the heart
A recurring theme in the song, Cohen reminds the listener that this did not happen suddenly; we saw it coming. Our heart wants to hold the love that is escaping, but the guardians (the sentries of the heart) are powerless to stop it. Alexandra, and love, slip through the mechanisms of our self-protection.
I think it’s important that “depart” doesn’t necessarily mean “physically.” Given the repeated line later about Alexandra’s sleeping “on your satin,” I think Alexandra remains at least temporarily in the same space as the listener, even after their love has run its course. As he often does, Cohen leaves the question unanswered.
Upheld by the simplicities of pleasure
They gain the light, they formlessly entwine
The “simplicities of pleasure” is a clear reference to sex — the idea that we can be fooled into believing that love remains because physical intimacy continues. When we’re involved in sex, the person and the love become one — “they formlessly entwine.”
And radiant beyond your widest measure
They fall among the voices and the wine
It’s still radiant. Sex with a former love can ignite all kinds of wonder and remind us of the power of mystery — but when it’s over, Alexandra and love simply recede, falling among the other voices in the listener’s life and the wine that was almost good enough itself to reignite the love.
It's not a trick, your senses all deceiving
A fitful dream, the morning will exhaust
The promised intimacy of sexual love isn’t “fake.” It’s just what it is, no more and no less, and that doesn’t make it less real or less powerful. We weren’t deceived into believing it was real — it was real. But just because it was real doesn’t mean love isn’t fleeting. Love may depart, but the mysteries of love remain.
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving
Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost
When you wake, you’ll know again that Alexandra’s love is leaving, and that she’s lost too. Alexandra’s love and Alexandra are “formlessly entwined,” one and the same.
Even though she sleeps upon your satin
Even though she wakes you with a kiss
There are measures of intimacy that remain, including the sexual love from last night and many nights past. She still sleeps next to you, she still wakes you with a kiss, she still cares for you and you for her.
Do not say the moment was imagined
Do not stoop to strategies like this
This is an essential part of the mystery in the song. When a love has left, it’s tempting to imagine that it wasn’t really love. (See also Eric Andersen’s plaintive “Is It Really Love at All?” — “Love, is it really love at all, or something that I heard love called?”)
Don’t do that, Cohen says. Don’t reject the love as a way of creating palisade around yourself; don’t skirt the chance to inhabit the moment deeply. It’s a real moment, the waning of love, and it’s painful. Look deeply into it. Don’t stoop to avoidance, don’t succumb to the easy path and miss this moment to be conscious.
As someone long prepared for this to happen
Go firmly to the window, drink it in
I love this couplet. The phrase, “Go firmly to the window,” is lifted outright from Cavafy’s poem, and Cohen has changed Cavafy’s phrase, “and listen with deep emotion,” to “drink it in.” The “window” is the window of memory, and looking through the window is replaying the history that Alexandra and the listener have made. Go “firmly,” Cohen says — as in “strategies like this,” he implores the listener not to shrink from the challenge of confronting the view from the window, not to deny his own memory.
Exquisite music, Alexandra laughing
Your first commitments tangible again
And here is what you find at the window of memory: visions of Alexandra laughing, the memories of your first days and your first expressions of love, memories made tangible by your willingness to engage them, and to accept that life and love are not one thing or the other, pleasure or pain. They are both. Drink them both in.
And you who had the honor of her evening,
And by the honor had your own restored
“Her evening” is a metaphor for the love she shared with you. You had her love and her shared sexuality. It was an honor, she was beautiful, love personified. And by that honor, your sense of yourself as a man was restored, as it is each time a woman loves a man. It is not necessary to believe that the listener’s honor was compromised before Alexandra appeared to him — though it’s possible. Rather, the exquisite beauty of intimacy itself restores a man’s honor again and again.
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving
Alexandra leaving with her Lord
A repeat of the chorus, and a reminder that Alexandra and Love remain the same entity. (Also a rhyme for “restored,” thank goodness!)
Even though she sleeps upon your satin
Even though she wakes you with a kiss
Do not say the moment was imagined
Do not stoop to strategies like this
A repeat of a stanza above.
As someone long prepared for the occasion
In full command of every plan you wrecked
When love departs, we yearn for explanations. Even if we knew it was coming, we become even more keenly aware of the wrongs we sowed, the anger we have directed, the petty grievances we could not relinquish. All of these constitute plans gone awry, and considered together they inherit a fullness, a logic, that soothes us, because we want to have a reason. (I am not among those who believe that “everything happens for a reason.” I think “a reason” is our feeble human attempt to make sense of things that do not make sense, and Cohen counseled repeatedly not to force things that defy reason into that realm.)
Do not choose a coward's explanation
that hides behind the cause and the effect
Looking for “a reason” is not merely a fool’s errand; it’s cowardly too. We want to pretend that love is not a mystery, that if we try hard enough, we’ll find the cause A that led to the effect B that became the cause B that led to the effect C. And voilá — we will finally understand why love departed.
Do not choose that path. You seek to understand, because it is easier than admitting you can’t. And you won’t understand — because you can’t. Love is a mystery. That is the only thing to understand.
And you who were bewildered by her meaning
Whose code was broken, crucifix uncrossed
When you wake, you’ll know again that Alexandra’s love is leaving, and that she’s lost to you. We were bewildered by what Alexandra meant — the wonder of her, the beauty, the way we loved. And now, at the end, we’ve solved the riddle — Alexandra simply meant love. Alexandra’s love and Alexandra herself are conjoined, “formlessly entwined.”
The phrase “crucifix uncrossed” vexed me at first — so obviously religious. But I don’t think it needs to be over-analyzed. On the one hand, it underscores the idea of God, in this case the “god of love.” But it’s also simply an elegant way of saying that the mystery has been identified, that the code (whether the code of love or the code of the crucifix) even when broken into its most elemental structures, still yields no “solutions” to its mysteries.
And so here at the end Cohen returns to his most basic themes, those of love and God, of beauty and sex, of women — compelling, but not solvable — and challenges us to accept that no matter how much we stoop, no matter how much we are tempted to shrink from the weight and play the coward, no matter how successfully we deconstruct the crucifix — we have no choice but to accept that there are mysteries we cannot solve, secrets of the spirit we cannot decipher, but with which we can only make peace.
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving
Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost
