After a couple of nun-related songs, let's turn two ethereal songs written by Leonard Cohen, but performed by the singer better known for covering Stephen Sondheim's Send In The Clowns. Both songs here are arguably finer moments from Collins's 1967 album Wildflowers, in which as well as her own and Cohen's, she also sang songs by Joni Mitchell and Jacques Brel. Collins was an active singer on the folk circuit, as well as political activist, associated with the likes of Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger and many others. Both songs have a different, melancholy beauty with her voice and guitar as well as orchestrations including flute, arranged by Joshua Rifkin.
Opinion is divided as to what Priests is really about. It references Joan of Arc, religious iconography and the difficulties of mixing earthly and divine love and also has echoes with Cohen's Dance Me To The End Of Love, Suzanne, and one of his poems from the 1961 collection The Spic-Box of Earth, titled The Priest Says Goodbye, which also mixes religious love and more specific sexual references – also shown below.
Sisters of Mercy also mixes the religious and the erotic, somehow coming out with an ambiguous sense of the platonic. Or does it?
And who will write love songs for you
When I am Lord at last
And your body is the little highway shrine
That all my priests have passed
That all my priests have passed?
My priests, they will put flowers there
They will kneel before the glass
But they'll wear away your little window, love
They will trample on the grass
They will trample on the grass
And who will shoot the arrow
That men will follow through your grace
When I am Lord of memories
And all your armour has turned to lace
And all your armour has turned to lace?
The simple life of heroes
The twisted life of saints
They just confuse the sunny calendar
With their red and golden paint
With their red and golden paint.
And all of you have seen the dance
That God has kept from me
But he has seen me watching you
When all your minds were free
When all your minds were free.
And who will write love songs for you
When I am Lord at last
And your body is the little highway shrine
That all my priests have passed
That all my priests have passed?
My priests, they will put flowers there
They will stand before the glass
But they'll wear away your little window, love
They will trample on the grass
They will trample on the grass.
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
Oh I hope you run into them, you who've been travelling so long
Yes you who must leave everything that you cannot control
It begins with your family, but soon it comes around 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 lights, you can read their address by the moon
And you won't make me jealous if I hear that they sweetened 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.
The Priest Says Goodbye – Leonard Cohen
My love, the song is less than sung
when with your lips you take it from my tongue --
nor can you seize this firm erotic grace
and halt it tumbling into commonplace.
No one I know can set the hook
to fix lust in a longing look
where we can read from time to time
the absolute ballet our bodies mime.
Harry can't, his face in Sally's crotch,
nor Tom, who only loves when neighbours watch –
one mistakes the ballet for the chart,
one hopes that gossip will perform like art.
And what of art? When passion dies
friendship hovers round our flesh like flies,
and we name beautiful the smells
that corpses give and immortelles.
I have studied rivers: the waters rush
like eternal fire in Moses' bush.
Some things live with honour. I will see
lust burn like fire in a holy tree.
Do not come with me. When I stand alone
my voice sings out as though I did not own
my throat. Abelard proved how bright could be
the bed between the hermitage and nunnery.
You are beautiful. I will sing beside
rivers where longing Hebrews cried.
As separate exiles we can learn
how desert trees ignite and branches burn.
At certain crossroads we will win
the harvest of our discipline.
Swollen flesh, minds fed on wilderness –
O what a blaze of love our bodies press!
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