Leonard Cohen

A small hotel, a cottage, a room lost somewhere just outside Edmonton, Alberta. Night, Canadian winter, the moon reflecting off the frozen surface of the North Saskatchewan River, its rays bouncing that glow through the windowpanes, spreading through the folds of the sheets, over the skin, the clothes scattered about, into the eyes. The artist, the poet, but above all the man, felt purified; a sense of dense gratitude, of immanent mysticism, swept through him, shook him, and then reconciled him with existence.

Leonard Cohen had been writing poetry since his youth. The acoustic bard, metaphysical folksinger, princely worshipper of earthly delights elevated to foretastes of the afterlife, comes only later, in a movement of spontaneous, mutual completion. It's 1967 when, in two hours, he writes one of the greatest songs in history — despite its terse three-and-a-bit minutes — which he would then include on his debut album, the legendary "Songs Of Leonard Cohen", cementing its status as an unrepeatable masterpiece: "Sisters Of Mercy".

The story, the backstory and what lies behind it are exactly as described above: the poet-songwriter had brought two women he'd hired for the night up to his hotel room to spend the night with him, whether for fun or as a remedy for an unbearable sense of loneliness. What follows isn't just carnal satisfaction, but a genuine, deep touch of spirituality that certainly pairs well with the "sacred love and profane love" of our own Fabrizio De André, grappling with entirely similar themes and ideas. While the two "sisters" sleep softly on the bed, the artist writes, as a kind of dedication, a poem, dashed off in a couple of hours so that it would be ready for when they woke up.

With this extraordinary song, whose direct forerunner — in terms of thematic grace, otherworldly elegance and harmonic construction — is "Winter Lady" (another gem featured on "Songs Of Leonard Cohen", ed.), Leonard Cohen manages, with remarkable concision and a total absence of embarrassment or rhetoric, to sketch out his own vision of earthly sacredness. Cohen simply ascends to heaven while remaining in the known world: the reading of the ideal woman found in Dante's "Vita Nova" is translated and expanded here, if you like even via the rocky paths of scandal (at least in the eyes of puritanism), rendered in crystalline notes, in the calmest of whispers, in shimmering arrangements that grow ever more charged.

The artist's is, above all, a vision then, and a vision no less than that other great monument to disquieting love and dreamy femininity, Blonde On Blonde by Bob Dylan. Cohen is also an impressionist painter: the winter, the darkness and the moon, the snow-capped mountains, the reflected and then amplified light; everything conspires to give the sense of an unrepeatable moment fixed in eternity, of the fleeting instant that nonetheless bears the imprint of cosmic revelation. Inner realities colour the atmosphere, the setting, the mood of nature itself.

It's precisely this precious convergence of microscopic events that represents the song's true source, its poetic and musical occasion, a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Cohen unspools, diffused within the gentle folds of the guitar arpeggios, an alternative concept of sin, redemption (mercy), and thus of love. The sense of guilt, and perhaps even of true transgression, lies in being deprived of the two harlot-nuns as confessors, the "sisters of mercy" (incidentally, a real monastic order now extinct), the two lascivious, otherworldly beings capable of purifying, healing, reawakening the soul of the wanderer, the wretched, the afflicted, the cuckolded, the fool, the ordinary man. The true sin, then, is to feel jealousy toward them, to be deprived of their presence, or worse still, never to know that these merciful angels exist at all.

This new reading of the beatitudes, Leonard Cohen's new gospel, opens with his voice alone. It lasts just one half-voiced invocation, an "oh", then the guitar begins its ternary sway, a subdued minuet. The first verse is nothing but a bare accompaniment between the poet's voice and his trusty guitar; by the second verse, the cloud of sound leaps almost immediately into the foreground, as if paradisiacal emotions had suddenly caught fire. It's a continuous, illusory yet pulsing crescendo of bells, accordion, maracas, bass drum, glockenspiel, cymbals, as though tumbling angels were descending from the sky to accompany the poet in his singing remembrance.

There's no real order to the sequence of verses and stanzas, of counterpoints or solo phrases; there exists only a pure accumulation of pulses and touches, which sometimes underscore the song's hushed emotion, sometimes decorate it with the greatest finesse, and at other times echo the cathartic spirit of the harmony. The climax comes in the penultimate verse, when this swarm of timbres becomes a genuine second voice, a voice that is almost cosmic, at once alien and feminine.

The song ends with the tonality of the instrumental bridge, a musical temperature that truly has something salvific and definitive about it: Cohen's, then, truly becomes an homily on universal love, a new yearning for peace and justice made of senses and sensations, imperishable gratitude, new existence. A religion founded on the search for indescribable moments, and therefore – precisely for this reason – merciful ones.

Truly unrepeatable is also the song in its entirety, but equally important for future generations who will find in this luxuriant dichotomy inspiration, style, and perhaps even a reason for living (one of the world's most important bands in gothic-rock will christen itself with this very title). And, perhaps, one of the reasons why Leonard Cohen will be remembered for centuries to come.

Oh the sisters of mercy they are not

Departed or gone,

They were waiting for me when I thought

That I just can’t go on,

And they brought me their comfort

And later they brought me this song.

O I hope you run into them

You who’ve been traveling so long.

Yes, you who must leave everything

That you cannot control;

It begins with your family,

But soon it comes round to your soul.

Well, I’ve been where you’re hanging

I think I can see how you’re pinned.

When you’re not feeling holy,

Your loneliness says that you’ve sinned.

Well they lay down beside me

I made my confession to them.

They touched both my eyes

And I touched the dew on their hem.

If your life is a leaf

That the seasons tear off and condemn

They will bind you with love

That is graceful and green as a stem.

When I left they were sleeping,

I hope you run into them soon.

Don’t turn on the light

You can read their address by the moon;

And you won’t make me jealous

If I hear that they sweeten your night

We weren’t lovers like that

And besides it would still be all right

We weren’t lovers like that

And besides it would still be all right.