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Leonard Cohen’s Approach to Death in His Later Songs
Leonard Cohen’s Approach to Death in His Later Songs To understand Cohen’s relationship with death one also has to examine his broader personal landscape – his feelings about loneliness, love, relationships, faith, religion and God. I deliberately use the word „feeling“ because Cohen recognized that existential questions like death could not be explained by intellect alone. Throughout his forty-year career exploring the human condition, his views evolved and became more prominent as he aged, particularly reflected in later songs that increasingly confronted mortality. Cohen’s years as a Buddhist monk also had a profound influence on his view of death. He stated in an interview “This activity [Zen meditation] is designed to produce an experience that you might call religious or spiritual belief.” When asked if Zen for him was a replacement for Judaism he responded that he was very happy with his religion and was not looking for something to replace it. Yet in one sense this contradicts other thoughts he had on religion. “I don’t want ever to set myself up as an enemy of organised religion because those churches, those mosques, those synagogues, they give comfort and solace to millions and millions of people, and real comfort and real solace …” Yet in “Steer away” he tells his listeners or himself “to steer away past the ruins of the altar and the mall.” In this he is guiding his listeners also to avoid religion as man’s creation of structures to worship their God and to avoid “the fables of creation and the fall”, which can mean that old religious explanations don’t give clear directions anymore. For Cohen, the loss of direction does not end with panic or rebellion. It simply is the point where he must continue without relying on inherited certainties. He does not seek any new answers but he reverts towards the truth shown by his aging body and the nearness of death. It is here that Cohen’s concerned him, nor do he look for other new explanations. Instead he moves forward trusting the honesty of his own experiences of life. The songs of this late period create a pathway to follow to the end of his life in his undramatic approach to death. „Leaving the Table“: A Direct Confrontation with Mortality The song most directly concerned with death is „Leaving the Table,“ written when Cohen knew he was dying. In this work, he openly confronts his own mortality without negotiating with God, love, faith, or spiritual certainty. The act of „leaving the table“ reinforces Cohen’s view of God as something before which one can lay everything down – even identity itself. God appears not as a judge or means of salvation, but as a horizon against which all human striving dissolves. The opening lines establish the song’s central metaphor. Cohen admits that death is imminent and that he is departing from life with all it contains: human love, struggle, faith, and doubt. The table can also be interpreted as a card table where he has lost the game, admitting his death as defeat. He expresses the feeling of detachment from people he once loved or knew in old age. The „picture frame“ may belong to God or to a former love—this remains deliberately unclear and unanswered. When Cohen questions whether he ever truly loved or even knew the name of this „you“ – whether a past relationship or God – he reflects on how what seemed like love at the time has now become distant. The „crying shame“ is that intimacy has transformed over time into sorrow, audible in the singer’s voice itself. The love and intimacy have so thoroughly disappeared that he feels he no longer knows the person he once loved. Yet there is no aggression in this distance. He feels no bitterness, expressing only acceptance of the situation. He needs neither lawyer nor surrender, makes no claims and takes no aim. The love he had in his youth, with all the desire it brought, has subsided. He now feels at home and at peace with himself. The „wretched beast is tame.“ He no longer searches for the intimacy of a relationship or does he seek any response. The emotional fire he once possessed is no longer needed and can be extinguished. The two parties – whether human or divine—have realized there is nothing more to gain. The relationship has run its course, with separation occurring quietly over time rather than ending suddenly. Little by little, they are cutting the cord. The relationship is dead and has reached its natural conclusion. The lyrics express acceptance throughout. Although the opening words might be construed as angry and resentful, they are simply cold and factual. The entire song conveys fact without emotional need, though the sweetness of memories does appear. The lyrics contain no bitterness or anger — only surrender. This is the rusty voice of an old man approaching death with calmness and gentleness, delivered as nothing more that make his departure tragic but shows his farewell into tragedy but speaks with a tone that is kind, a certain affection toward the life he is leaving. „Going Home“: Celebrating the Return He no longer seeks the intimacy of a relationship or pursues any quest. The emotional fire he once possessed is no longer needed and can be extinguished. The two parties – whether human or divine – have realized there is nothing more to gain. The relationship has run its course, with separation occurring quietly over time rather than ending suddenly. Little by little, they are cutting the cord. The relationship is dead and has reached its natural conclusion. „Going Home“ celebrates the end of life as a return to somewhere known—perhaps a point of departure, but familiar and comfortable. Like „Leaving the Table,“ the lyrics express acceptance, but this acceptance conveys humility. Again, what might seem angry or resentful is simply cold and factual. The song presents fact without emotional need, interspersed with the sweetness of memories and the restoration of sweetness. The desire to write „a love song, a manual for living with defeat“ presents love as something incomplete yet worthwhile, helping one navigate the human condition. Without bitterness or anger, the lyrics speak only of surrender. The burdens of life, both emotional and material, are laid down as the self surrenders to something greater. Once more, we hear the rusty voice of an old man approaching death with calmness and gentleness – a whisper, words recited more than sung, minimal music, simple language. He does not turn his farewell into tragedy but remains kind, almost affectionate toward the life he is leaving behind. The song is not one of doubt but an admission of faith in returning to something greater than the self. This faith faces death without fear or resistance, approached instead with calmness and the willingness to let go. In both songs, Cohen demonstrates a mature acceptance of mortality that transcends intellectual understanding. His approach is characterized by surrender rather than struggle, peace rather than fear, and an almost tender affection for the life being released. Death becomes not an enemy to be defeated but a horizon toward which one moves with grace and gentle resignation. In these final songs, Leonard Cohen shows us something rare: someone facing death truthfully, without which is peaceful and ready for what comes. Whether leaving the table of everything which life holds, voicing in „Treaty the impossibility of finding divine by steering through the devastation of life Cohen remains without drama in his confrontation with death as in „Steer your Way“. He feels neither anger nor the need to negotiate with a power which is beyond words or human understanding. He simply is prepared to let go of life. What makes the later songs of Cohen so impressive is their humanness. We hear the voice, reduced to a whisper which has almost ceased to sing, but speaks. It is describing what he holds to be the truth. His lifelong yearning for understanding, for divine love, for God has ceased, he is tired of searching. The contradictions which were a torture during his life – the emptiness between human and divine, between desire and peace remain unresolved. They become larger than the mere self. The final message of Cohen is that there are questions which don’t require an answer as there is none. The only answer for Cohen is to progress with awareness, the eyes still open to encounter the unknown not with fear but with calm and dignity. Leonard Cohen’s “Treaty” stands as one of the most haunting compositions on his final album, released only days before his death in November 2016. It is a song about love, loss and the quest for reconciliation between divine and human love. The lyrics of the song remain simple with the almost complete absence of multiplicity of meaning. A treaty, by its very nature, presupposes a conflict, even war. Cohen invokes this idea of a spiritual battlefield where human longing and divine silence confront each other, seeking an impossible accord. Throughout his career, Cohen’s “you” has always been elusive, shifting in identity from lover to God, from muse to absence itself. In “Treaty,” this ambiguity remains unresolved. The “you” may mean a lover or a deity or even a fractured part of the self. When Cohen was asked about the meaning behind the word “treaty,” he explained that it spoke of negotiation between two forms of love – “ both these loves utterly impenetrable and unknowable, one to the other.” This statement lies at the core of the song: it is an awareness that the divine and human love are impossible to unify. The treaty is a plea for reconciliation of what can never be reconciled. But awareness of this does nothing to bring about abandoning this longing on the contrary, it increases it. The song is a lamentation for connecting the two, the worldly and the divine, something unattainable. The voice we hear is weary from decades of searching for meaning “I’ve seen you change the water into wine… I’ve seen you change it back to water too.” This later change amounts to disillusionment.This is Cohen speaking as the old man who has seen too much, whose love for the divine and the world alike has become mingled with sorrow and fatigue. There is also profound remorse running through the lyrics. When he confesses, “I’m so sorry for that ghost I made you be / Only one of us was real and that was me,” a deep sadness which can be felt throughout the lyrics” Cohen acknowledges how destructive idealization of the lover can be ones love can turn what is loved into a mere projection. It is an acknowledgement that intimacy is destroyed by the imagination of the lover, that it becomes an illusion. The yearning that elevates love also estranges it. Cohen’s symbolism grows darker with the line “I heard the snake was baffled by his sin, he shed his scales to find the snake within.” The serpent, self-aware yet unchanged, becomes a mirror of human limitation. No matter how much one seeks purification or transformation, the essence remains untouched. “The poison enters into everything,” he admits; sin, in this sense, is not a moral flaw but an ontological condition – an inescapable taint of being alive and conscious. The song’s haunting return at the end of the album, as a purely instrumental reprise titled “Treaty (Reprise),” transforms its earlier despair into something luminous. Stripped of Cohen’s voice, the music itself takes over the work of reconciliation. Scored simply for violin and cello, the piece ascends toward a quiet, almost sacred stillness. Without words the listener is is confronted with beauty. This brings to mind again the earlier invocation from “If It Be Your Will”: “If it be your will that I speak no more, let my voice be still.” This silence, the dissolution of the singer ’s voice and its replacement by music is Cohen’s final artistic gesture. In the wordless beauty of this closing version, the long search concludes—not with triumph, but with acceptance. The treaty may never have been signed, yet the longing itself, carried to the end, becomes a form of peace. “Come Healing,” released in 2012, feels like both a lament and a prayer — is the prayer to be made whole again in death. It is not about fearing death but welcoming it as an ultimate act of healing. one has the feeling that the voice of someone ready to be released and is prepared to make peace with everything he lived – a man gathering all the pieces of his life, wanting to make peace with everything he’s lived But it could also be heard as the voice of something greater – perhaps God, or love itself – calling him home, asking him to finally lay down his burdens. The “me” in that line hovers beautifully between the human and the divine, as if both are speaking at once. “The fragrance of those promises you never dared to vow” conveys tenderness and attaches great beauty which still holds on to what we have never fulfilled in life, be they the dreams we never chased or the words we never spoke. It’s about the beauty that still clings to the things we never quite fulfilled – the dreams we never chased or the words we never spoke. Even in failure, there’s something sacred. And the “splinters” we carry – those small, sharp reminders of pain – are the traces of our suffering, and maybe of the faith we’ve lost along the way. Then the song shifts. The background voices rise like a quiet choir – soft, ethereal, almost angelic – turning the piece from sorrow into something like prayer. It stops being a lament and becomes an act of surrender. When Cohen sings, “Behold the gates of mercy,” this feels like an invitation to regard death not as a punishment death but as compassion. He suggests that we don’t deserve either salvation or suffering – that death, in its mystery, is beyond fairness. It’s sacred, neutral, a crossing rather than an ending. To seems to say that human love has its constraints — it creates longing. He looks at the great contrasts in life, light and darkness, good and evil, suffering and redemption. In that balance, he finds peace. Light – or death itself – breaks through the darkness of imperfection, and in that moment, body and spirit, shadow and light, become one. When he sings of “troubled dust,” he’s talking about all of us – the anxious, mortal creatures who tremble before the unknown – yet within us, he believes, lies something divine, a love that’s whole and untouched. In the end, Cohen no longer sees death as punishment, but as reunion -the soul coming home. That’s the heart of “Come Healing”: the idea that the final mercy isn’t to escape death, but to meet it peacefully, knowing that everything fractured in life is, at last, made whole. “Steer your way “ is a song based on Kabbalistic wisdom, which teaches that our world is shattered, that the divine is found in the fragments. Cohen has expressed this earlier in other lyrics – „There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in“ – but here he guides our journey with precision through the ruins. The song to do so has the the form of a map through the devastation. past the ruins where both capitalism, our social home, and human forms of worshiping the divine have crumbled, through the uncomfortable truths which acted as our foundation, through the betrayals we’ve inflicted and have endured. „Steer your heart, precious heart,“ he urges, acknowledging how deeply these wounds reach. Yet Cohen offers no compass bearing, no promised land. This absence is deliberate – in Kabbalistic thought, the soul’s ultimate destination transcends language, resists naming, eludes all cartography. And when he confesses „please don’t make me go there, though there be a God or not,“ faith shows itself it not taken as certainty but as the courage to question, to doubt incessantly but all the while continuing to move forward. The song’s wisdom is found in the fact of refusal: to refuse the world’s false „truths“, to refuse certainties we believed in yesterday and to refuse to let our suffering define our path. Instead, we are to travel conscious of life’s illusions, awake to its beautiful lies. The destination, if there is one, dissolves into the journey itself – that act of steering through darkness with eyes open, heart still beating, still seeking, still moving toward what cannot be named. In these final songs, Leonard Cohen shows us something rare: someone facing death truthfully, without which is peaceful and ready for what comes. Whether leaving the table of everything which life holds, voicing in „Treaty the impossibility of finding divine love, with a prayer to be made whole again in „Come healing or through steering through the devastation of life Cohen remain without drama in his confrontation with death as in „Steer your Way“. He feels neither anger or the need to negotiate with a power which is beyond words or human understanding. He simply is prepared to let go of life. What makes the later songs of Cohen so impressive is their humanness. We hear the voice, reduced to a whisper which has almost ceased to sing, but speaks. It is describing what he holds to be the truth. His lifelong yearning for understanding, for divine love, for God has ceased, he is tired of searching. The contradictions which were a torture during his life – the emptiness between human and divine, between desire and peace remain unresolved. They become larger than the mere self and merit no explanation. The final message of Cohen it that there are questions which don’t require an answer as there is none. The answer for Cohen is to progress with awareness, with eyes still open to encounter the unknown, not with fear but with calm and dignity.
