Leonard Cohen Appears To Have A Devotion To Armaments & Truly Problematic Stories That He Embellishes

Leonard Cohen Is Quite The Literary Marksman

There are too many allusions, references, and metaphors related to guns in Leonard Cohen’s work to provide an exhaustive list in this post. The following samples are some of my favorites.

From “Love Calls You By Your Name:”

Shouldering your loneliness
like a gun that you will not learn to aim,

From “Hallelujah:”

Well, maybe there is a God above,
But all that I’ve ever learned from love
Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you.

 From “Field Commander Cohen:”

Leave it all and like a man,
come back to nothing special,
such as waiting rooms and ticket lines,
silver bullet suicides,
and messianic ocean tides,
and racial roller-coaster rides
and other forms of boredom advertised as poetry.

From “Night Comes On:”

We were fighting in Egypt
When they signed this agreement
That nobody else had to die
There was this terrible sound
And my father went down
With a terrible wound in his side
He said, Try to go on
Take my books, take my gun
Remember, my son, how they lied
And the night comes on

From “The Lists” (Flowers for Hitler and Selected Poems 1956-1968)

Then it began again
the sun stuck a gun in his mouth

From “Why Did You Give My Name To The Police?” (Flowers For Hitler and Selected Poems 1956-1968)

You too must find the moment hopeless
in the Tennyson Hotel.
I know your stomach.
The brass bed bearing your suitcase
rumbles away like an automatic
promenading target in a shooting gallery

 From “I Dream Of Torturing You” (The Energy Of Slaves)

I dream of torturing you
because you are so puffed up with pride
You stand there with a bill of rights
or an automatic rifle
or your new religion

 From “Any System You Contrive Without Us” (The Energy Of Slaves)

Any system you contrive without us
will be brought down
You have your drugs
You have your guns
You have your Pyramids your Pentagons
With all your grass and bullets
you cannot hunt us any more

From “Bullets” (Flowers for Hitler and Selected Poems 1956-1968)

Listen all you bullets
that never hit:
a lot of throats are growing
in open collars
like frozen milk bottles
on a 5 a.m. street
throats that are waiting
for bite scars
but will settle
for bullet holes

From Beautiful Losers:

I loved the magic of guns.

And “The Favourite Game” is a literary gun range. Consider these three excerpts:

The gun proved he was a warrior

I saw a gun bleeding.

Note: As I noted in The Guns Of Leonard Cohen, the specifics of this reference to Cohen’s father’s gun is problematic:

Leonard Cohen’s father, Nathan Cohen, served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force during World War I and consequently possessed what Nadel (Various Positions) called “a military souvenir,” which Leonard Cohen describes in “The Favourite Game” as “a huge .38.”  The problem is that the only handguns Canadian forces were issued or allowed to purchase during World War I were .45 caliber pistols.³ Of course, “a military souvenir” could include any handgun Nathan Cohen came to own as a result of the war.  The .38 pistol in the image is the Smith & Wesson Military & Police Model initially developed in 1899 and subsequently used by the military and police forces in many countries.

http://1heckofaguy.com/2011/11/13/bang-bang-a-2nd-shot-at-leonard-cohen-guns/