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Add Your New Review About The Song The Reviews about SUZANNE (page 1/1) ------ performed by Leonard Cohen Every time..... | Reviewer: Brian Rooney | 10/1/09 This song invariably takes be back to the late sixties when I was 18. I had a summer job at the Honey Harbour resort in northern Ontario (very much like the resort in the movie “Dirty Dancing”). The staff cabins were far removed from the main resort. Many evenings as most were drifting off to sleep, some one would play Suzanne on their record player. To this day this evocative tune allows me to visualize the setting of the cabins on the hillside, the dream like music sifting the trees. Great stuff. Thanks Leonard. bliss | Reviewer: Bill Nichols | 9/20/09 I listened to the song in two versions on YouTube just now and reread the lyrics and the review above. The odd, most moving thing was I burst into tears on hearing the song this time. Beyond reason, yes. Far out to sea in that ocean of love that the song alludes to, not romantic love in the usual sense but a serene, engulfing love of all that is and might be, an embrace of the garbage and the flowers, the lean outward toward love, forever, the prow of the great ship as Jesus walks upon the water or watches from his lonely wooden tower. Cohen seemed to channel the wisdom of his later years already in this song; there is none of the cute cleverness of a beginner performer strutting his stuff; the parallels with Dylan are all apt. they both sang from their heart in ways that defy reason and produce splendor and do so like that mythic troubador of love, Orpheus who descended yet could not quite trust the one who touched his perfect body and held the mirror; he had to look and it all shattered. cohen never looks (back?) but moves blindly on and in doing so sees more than we can hope to see with eyes and reason and the powers that sustain us for he has seen that even though he has no love to give her he he is hers for he has been her lover, forever.... could it be said, or sung, any better? imho | Reviewer: Anonymous | 6/4/09 this is simply what poetry is supposed to be. so simple and at the same time so complex you just want to swim in it. it is ineffably beautiful. so beautiful that, should you ever tire of it, it just might be time to go. Leonard Cohen's masterpiece | Reviewer: Steve Borrow | 9/29/08 This is a song about sailors, those of us set loose on the seas of chance and seeking to find meaning and love from all of the confusion. It is Leonard Cohen’s masterpiece, apparently inspired by a real woman. Suzanne is presented as a mysterious woman who, at one level is a mystic who holds up a mirror to the narrator, the looking glass self that enables him to find truth. At another level she is a siren, a mythical being, half woman and half fish, thought to have drawn sailors to their death by the irresistible allure of their beauty and exquisite singing. She draws our narrator to the edge of his journey, down to the harbour, a transit point where sailors pull into port to find emotional sustenance from time to time when on their life’s journey. He finds her oddly irresistible, not withstanding her apparent imperfections and, when the rational begins to intrude, is overwhelmed by her exotic sexuality and aroma (“tea and oranges that come all the way from china”, orange pekoe perhaps?). He succumbs to that temporary madness only true romantics know about: the fusion of two selves into one. Or, perhaps, he succumbs to the power of a truth she reveals. Jesus is also a sailor, a seeker of divine meaning who announces that: “all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them”. The allusion to Jesus is a commentary on the soul of man confined to its physical manifestation until death. Here, the metaphor of the sailor awash upon the seas of experience until the waters claim him or her at last (“Sea shall freed them”) is extended, and the soul – the pure manifestation of self – is freed at the time of death. Jesus was aware of his sacrifice and waited until “drowning men” or those in need of salvation could feel his love. Then we return to Suzanne and perhaps the most beautiful verse the great man has written:- “Now Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river. She is wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters, and the sun pours down like honey on our lady of the harbour, and she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers; there are heroes in the seaweed; there are children in the morning; they are leaning out for love; and they will lean that way forever; While Suzanne holds the mirror; and you want to travel with her; and you want to travel blind; and you know that you can trust her, for she's touched your perfect body with her mind”. In her passion and the affect she is having on the narrator, Suzanne has made the mundane seem surreal and magical. Again, at one level she has a saintly quality, our Lady of The Harbour. She is able to find beauty and truth among the physical corruption thrown up and rejected on the shores of the harbour. In the context of the metaphor of the sailor, these have been overlooked by the narrator as he has journeyed through life. There are heroic deeds and the promise of procreation and rebirth in the discarded remnants of his path ("garbage" and "seaweed"). On the other level, Sirens were known to hold up mirrors and admire their own beauty, but here Leonard Cohen’s Siren is perhaps projecting a narcissistic vision of her own dreaming, and for the moment the narrator is seduced by it. He is temporarily blinded to the decadence of her clothing and physical surrounds. He has reached the place only drowning men have been: a place that can only be reached by surrender to profound sensibility and repudiation of reason. He wants to follow her because his being has merged with hers and he is no longer able to check his decent. James Taylor has just released a new version of this song with Yo Yo Ma accompanying him on cello Add Your New Review About The Song