Wednesday, November 28, 2018

"If It Be Your Will": From Beauty to Apocalypse

[The poem in its entirety is at the bottom of this page. Here's Cohen singing it and here is  Antony Hegarty's cover of it.]

The title of Leonard Cohen's "If It Be Your Will" identifies his song as an invocation, a convention seen most often in the epics of yore, in which their authors sought divine assistance -- co-authorship, in a sense -- in completing their work.

But Cohen's title is in the conditional tense, and we don't expect that from invocations. In the Iliad, for example, Homer says "Sing goddess"; in the Odyssey, it's "Tell me, Muse"; and Milton's invocation in Paradise Lost is "Sing Heavenly Muse." No ifs, ands or buts there.


Cohen's deferential conditional clause is followed, three lines later, by "I will speak no more," then "I shall abide until / I am spoken for." Roughly paraphrased, "O source of my inspiration, if you want me to keep quiet, I will." Roughly, I say.

Between lines 1 and 5, there is an implied backstory: "If it be your will / That I speak no more / And my voice be still / As it was before / I will speak no more."

In an earlier time, "before," his voice was "still," a word whose frequent use belies its power. "Still" is really still, like the sound of the Grand Canyon's silence.


In the medieval lyric "I Syng of a Mayden," "still" is the sound of dew "falling" on grass, on flowers and on the stem from which the flowers grow -- each of which are similes for Mary's extraordinarily quiet, unruffled virginal conception.

"Still," in poetry anyway, can be a sacred quietness, a reverent hush, a break or gap in sound, and that's how the light gets in.

After this stillness, Cohen has spoken, but is now agreeing to "speak no more" and to "abide until / [He is] spoken for."

We shouldn't race past "abide," a word rarely used outside poetic or religious writings or university English departments' meet'n'greets. According to the International Bible Encyclopedia, the word is "used richly in the Old Testament King James Version by 12 . . . Hebrew words," meaning "await," "lodge," "remain," "continue" and "endure," among others.

In Cohen's context, I lean toward "await" and "endure," which he will do until he is "spoken for," a phrase meaning "unavailable," often due to wedlock. Could he mean he will abide until God proposes to him? As in, "Do you, L.Cohen, promise to sing my praises?"

Or did Cohen take poetic license in replacing "spoken to" with "spoken for"?

Before we look at the next stanza, we should point out another deviation from conventional invocations: Cohen doesn't call his listener a muse or a god. He doesn't give it a name at all, doesn't even capitalize "your" or "you." Nor does he name the auditor in "You Want It Darker," but that'll have to wait for another post.

The next stanza has an implied "but" before its first line. To paraphrase, "Even though I'm willing to quietly endure until you choose me, if you want someone with a truthful voice singing from a broken hill (a fallen earth?), I'm your man." This sentiment is restated in the following stanza by way of the ballad convention we call incremental repetition.

Then suddenly, with no transition (another ballad convention) the poem seems to revise its request:

   If it be your will
   If there is a choice
   Let the rivers fill
   Let the hills rejoice

****

Here's where the teacher who favors discussions over lectures asks her students, "What's different about this stanza? Anyone? Tody? Lester? The rhyme scheme hasn't changed. Still good ol' predictable ABAB. But what is the narrator's request now? Anyone? Who is the potential doer now? Is it the speaker? Zasu? Anyone? It isn't, is it? 

"In fact, in line 3, no one or no thing is speaking, right? The rivers are simply filling, perhaps due to winter runoff, the melting snow roaring down the hills like a semi-truck whose brakes are burnt out. Is that what you think? Okay! Does the speaker speak in the stanza's last line? Aldus? Is he even asking to speak? Or or is he asking for someone else to speak? What do you think? Hank, what does 'rejoice' mean?"

After a few uncomfortably still seconds, a student might well reply, "First, Ms. Dilbickenstiff, the rivers aren't filling, they're just being asked to be allowed to. Also, you didn't even ask about 'If there is a choice,' and I think that's a critical, maybe even existential conditional. Have you considered the possibility that the speaker is asking his listener to let nature speak for itself if there is a choice between him and nature?"

"Hmm. That's intriguing, Xavier. Why don't you look that up for homework and get back to us tomorrow. But I have another question: How is my name similar to Mr. Cohen's poem?"

Entire class responds in choral fashion: "Both of them use assonance, in this case repetition of the short 'i' sound, for example, 'will,' "hills,' 'rivers,' 'Still,' 'ring,' 'spill,' 'sing,' and 'kill,' Ms. Dilbickenstiff!"

"Good job, kids! Hahahaha! Tomorrow we'll go over Jimmy Webb's 'MacArthur's Park.' Class dismissed!

Smart kid texts the guy next to him: "She didn't even ask us why Cohen would do that."
****
The next stanza shifts again, this time from nature's rivers and hills to miserable humans. Literalists may be reminded of the nonliteral tale of Lazarus and Dives (the rich man) in which the former dies and is carried by angels to Abraham, after which Dives dies and is hauled off to Hades where he pleads with Abraham to "send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water to cool my tongue, for I am in agony in this fire" (Luke 16:19-32).

Literalists are my arch enemy, but I will concede that Cohen might have been alluding to this passage.

The literati, on the other hand, will see through the metaphorical "burning hearts in hell" to all of us who are in any way ill, broken, cast out, repressed, depressed, stifled, in a dark place, hoping to "gaze upon the chimes of freedom flashing.":

     
      Let your mercy spill
     On all these burning hearts in hell
     If it be your will
     To make us well


We're a long way from, "I'll speak if it's your will." What happened? Was Cohen sidetracked? Or did he have his narrator's perception change? 

What if, while awaiting a response to his invocation, pondering what praises he would sing, he saw a more urgent need, one that would preempt a Wordsworthian paean to nature? 

These questions remind me of my reductivist take on the Psalms: Their two topics are, one, "God, you and your creation are great" and two, "God, don't kill us." 

In Cohen's poem, while God (or whoever "you" is or are) is vetting the supplicant's resume, a still small voice moves him from Psalm topic one to Psalm topic two.

No longer an epic composer, the narrator becomes "An infant crying in the night / An infant crying for the light / And with no language but a cry"**:

   And draw us near
   And bind us tight
   All your children here
   In their rags of light

   In our rags of light
   All dressed to kill
   And end this night
   If it be your will

Just an aside: "And end this night" -- how many times have I asked for this since Trump was elected?


****
Three minutes before the bell, a teacher would pose these questions:

"Does 'bind us tight' make you feel safe in your mommy's arms or like a frustrated baby Jesus, his freedom abolished and his potential confined in swaddling clothes?

"Is 'rags of light' a paradox or oxymoron? Does it create an image or suggest an abstract condition?

"How does 'dressed to kill' change your reading of 'rags of light'? The former suggests you're going clubbing or to the prom. Does the context make the phrase more sinister?
Or is this guy dressed to kill?

"And speaking of sinister, are the poem's first two lines a foreshadowing of the last two? Do you interpret 'night' as referring to our benighted, ignorant, aimless, untethered, feckless condition or to ending the whole damn thing, our universe and all the others, total closing time, shut the door? If it's the latter, the narrator will certainly 'speak no more.' Am I right?

"Anyone? Zasu?"

*Editor's note: The author of this piece is clearly flummoxed over whether he is analyzing Cohen's art or Cohen's narrator's ambitious musings. Forgive him, if it be your will.

**From Tennyson's In Memoriam, describing how the Victorians felt when Science reared its ugly factual head.


And  here's the poem we've been discussing:
If it be your will
That I speak no more
And my voice be still
As it was before
I will speak no more
I shall abide until
I am spoken for
If it be your will
If it be your will
That a voice be true
From this broken hill
I will sing to you
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing

If it be your will
If there is a choice
Let the rivers fill
Let the hills rejoice
Let your mercy spill
On all these burning hearts in hell
If it be your will
To make us well
And draw us near
And bind us tight
All your children here
In their rags of light
In our rags of light
All dressed to kill
And end this night
If it be your will..

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