Our Lady of the Harbor

In his song “Suzanne”, Leonard Cohen attempts to reason out his mixed feelings for the girl that he considers his lover. While referring to her as “half crazy” and even claiming that he has “no love to give her,” he eventually contradicts all of this by the end when he speaks of wanting to be with her. Through diction appealing to pathos as well as contradictions, this song tells the story of a young man (you) who is trying to reason out his feelings for a girl and doesn’t seem to know where to go in their relationship from here.

The first, third, and fifth verses are much more abstract and tell the story behind the song. There is a girl named Suzanne who is this narrator’s lover. In the first and last of these three verses, the narrator tells of time that he has spent with this girl and what he experienced when he spent the night beside her on the river. When he beings the story, it seems that what he is saying is meant to be taken literally, that what he is saying is actually the story. However, the last verse of these three is full of deep metaphors for how she makes him feel or what she makes him see through their love, such looking “among the garbage and the flowers” and seeing “there are heroes in the seaweed.” Also in the second line of this stanza he speaks of how she is “wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters” and compares her to “our Lady of the harbor,” implying she is humble, but still magnificent in her own right.

Yet, in the third verse, the subject of the song changes completely. Cohen speaks about Jesus and how he gave himself up in order to show the world what he would do for them. By discussing how “only drowning men could see him” and Jesus saying that ‘All men will be sailors then, until the sea shall free them,’ Cohen is comparing Jesus giving himself up to his own situation with Suzanne. Even though he recognizes the situations to be very different and that Suzanne is nothing like Jesus (for example, he calls her “half crazy”), he does compare how they both have been broken and have opened his eyes.

On the other hand, in the second, fourth, and sixth verses, there is much repetition. Aside from the indirect object changing from her to him from the second to the fourth and then back to her in the last verse, they are essentially the same. The idea behind each one is different though and has