Take This Waltz

I completely agree with AnsleyLC.

My interpretation is that the writer dated a singer and she died.

The ten pretty women (possibly part of her family), the shoulder where Death comes to cry, the lobby with nine hundred windows and the tree where the doves go to die are all in the chapel; the piece that was torn from the morning as it hangs in the Gallery of Frost is apparently a flower wreath.

He still wants her of course and the chair with a dead magazine could be a memory or as he is sitting in the funeral home. I believe the 'cave at the tip of the lily' is the entrance to where they put her to rest (mausoleum), and the hallways where love's never been, is its halls.

Not sure how "on a bed where the moon has been sweating" ties in, but in a cry filled with footsteps and sand, are people walking with the casket and crying.

With its very own breath of brandy and Death Dragging its tail in the sea (he's drowning in drink).

There's a concert hall in Vienna Where your mouth had a thousand reviews is the part that makes me think she was a singer. And it ties with the bar where the boys have stopped talking as they are all sad (blue).

Mostly though it is the next verse, the: “Ah, but who is it climbs to your picture with a garland of freshly cut tears?”, because this depicts him visiting her resting place and taking flowers.

Finally, the attic where children are playing, I think is heaven, where he must go to be with her soon and as another poster said, the sheep and the lilies are a reference to the Book of Solomon.

Some of the imagery is distinctly sexual and even violent.

"Oh I want you, I want you, I want you On a chair with a dead magazine In the cave at the tip of the lily In some hallways where love's never been"

Seems to me to be about taking a girl's virginity.

The song as a whole seems to be about love and lust, entropy and decay. The very last verse evokes images of the singer and the girl he's singing to withdrawing into each other and into nature.

just my impression or is this song the perfect soundtrack to the life of Corto Maltese. Truly poetic, truly beautiful, it reveals a secret world of love, loss, life and death. Probably my number 1 song by cohen, "but i may be wrong" ;) Amazing, though

I'd heard an interpretation before of this song as being about a dead lover, the first verse taking place in a church, at her funeral (the "tree where the doves go to die" is a crucifix, and the "piece torn from the morning" is her body lying in a cold casket, on display in a "gallery of frost"). The interpreter gave the second verse as him stealing a moment alone, thinking how much he wants her with him again, right here, "in a chair with a dead magazine" in some reception or waiting room, or in one of the church's lonely hallways. As for "the cave at the tip of the lily," I see him looking at funeral flowers and thinking the hollow made by a lily's curved petal looks like a beautiful place to hide away with her. She might have been a singer (leaving her adoring fans "sentenced to death by the blues"), but that would be such a literal interpretation compared to the rest of the song, I'm easily willing to surrender that part. -_^

The bit of my own that I have to add is that, after having this song looping in my head for two days, the still-mysterious last verse kind of slapped me upside the head. If all of the above is where you go with the song's meaning, I'm pretty sure that in the last verse, the singer drowns himself.

He says he will dance with his (dead!) lover wearing a disguise, like at a masquerade ball--and he's going as a river. He'll "bury his soul" with "the moss", and "yield to the flood of your beauty." And to speak of laying down or giving up one's cross is sometimes used to mean giving up the world's difficulties and ugliness for the rest at the end of life. Then to top it all off, she will "carry [him] down"? I dunno, guys, I'm pretty convinced! XD

Looking at all that, it makes me think the "waltz" he's offering her throughout is the broken (probably drunken--"breath of brandy and death") remainder of his life now that she's gone.

The poem is about Lorca's doomed relationship with Salvador Dalí and was written in his period of deep depression followed by creative/spiritual rebirth during a year long trip to NYC and Cuba. Dalí had a ton of sexual hang-ups and though their relationship was intensely emotional, as soon as things turned physical he freaked out and rejected Lorca, living out a weird, closeted half-life with his nymphomaniac wife Gala, with whom he claims to have only slept once with no interest in ever repeating the experience.

Tons of imagery in here is drawn straight from their letters one to the other, but all in all, this is a song of frustrated, closeted love that ends in a prophecy of martyrdom (re: the myth of Hyacinth, and Lorca's obsession with the archetype of queer martyrdom in St. Sebastian and his frequent predictions that he would end up so martyred, as he did when he was shot by one of Franco's "black squads" at the outset of the Spanish Civil War).

Incidentally, the lines

there's a bar where the boys have stopped talking they've been sentenced to death by the blues

is a brilliant addition of Cohens, and relates to an anecdote about the night Lorca was introduced to fellow (doomed) gay poet Hart Crane by a mutual bilingual friend. Crane suggested they go out to this gay speakeasy he liked, and their friend walked along with them, translating as they chatted about their mutual love of Walt Whitman. When they got to the bar, their translating friend, who was straight, felt really uncomfortable so said he'd come back later to pick up Lorca. Unfortunately, Crane spoke no Spanish, and Lorca spoke no English, so they split up, and when their friend returned a few hours later, he found the crowd of sailors in the bar split fairly evenly with half surrounding Crane as he told dirty jokes, and half trying to follow Lorca as he played old flamenco songs on the piano and led (something of a) drunken sing-along.

Within a couple of years, both of them would be dead, indirectly "sentenced to death by the blues." Hart found the closet incredibly stressful and spiraled down into alcoholism and depression, eventually jumping overboard to his death following a brutal gay-bashing onboard a ship in the Caribbean, whereas Lorca's post-Dali depression led to a sense of drive and purpose in stretching the boundaries of theatre as a means of activism to better the lot of women and gays in profoundly misogynistic/homophobic Spain, which ultimately led to his assassination by the fascists (who it so happened wore blue uniforms).

An amazing song, Cohen paints a picture in your mind of this beautiful yet terrible place he describes. It's not heaven... it's not hell, it's just beauty mixed with sadness.

The lyrics are actually a translation, or rather interpretation, of a poem by Frederico Garcia Lorca called "Pequeño Valz Vienes." An interpretation because as a translation, it seems, it is not perfect and is slightly altered by Cohen to fit the context and rhythm of the song. I like how he has an almost roundabout way of saying things. It's really poetic. I really like this song.

I absolutely love the bit from "And I'll dance with you in Vienna" onwards. Maybe it's the harmony or something, but it's so beautiful.

I agree with all three of you. In "All your sheep and your lilies of snow" I think there's some biblical imagery from Song of Solomon: 1:7 Tell me, you whom I love, where you graze your flock and where you rest your sheep at midday. 2:1 I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys. There's nothing about snow in Song of Solomon, but the reference could have been representing the purity described in the book.