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This song - DMTTEOL - has been & still is my favourite & means a lot to me. Sort of soundtrack to my life a period. What I really want to know is
the "meaning" of the song - the input so to speak, or inspiration to it.I've read Leonard saw a photo of a refugee girl & that sparked him to write the song...Please write in with your thoughts on this & what you know about it.
The black&white video is mesmerizing.... *bring back memories* *emotional*. Have to play it instantly.................!

As the individual human mind has many different facets so does it interpret art in many different ways. Time, place, personal circumstance may also throw a different light on the perceived meaning.

Death...? Holocaust...?

Hi Tony. I was listening the other night to Ten New Songs and durring Boogie streets I was struck by the idea of a child in a mothers womb listening to the low deep voice of the father and the high tone of the mother. The deep voice of an eternal father and the high of the maternal mother circling around his. Leonard's voice and songs pull me into that warm trust level.

Craig

Dance me to the end of love I have always interpreted as a lovemaking session, the end of love meaning climax.

It's about marriage and monogomy (separatly). Like most of leonard's songs it is a very intense love song. I always find it very passionate and urgent which is why, i suppose you could say it was a chronicle of love-making but I think there is more to it than that.

Wien 11/05/88 : "I wanna go to that place where one is free from love,and one is free from God,and one is free from song,and one is free from politics.I'll try to get there in this song called "Dance me to the end of love". - Leonard Cohen

Source : http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pilgraeme/

"My question is : Is it better to know poet´s biography and all connecting things in details, or to let some space for fantasy?" - Bruna

Source : viewtopic.php?p=43407&highlight=greg#43407




There is two schools. And a third one that mix both. It is for us to choose among them I guess.

For me DMttEoL means lets go where Love/Life is leading us, its pure purpose.

Never ask an interpretation of any form of art...

It is up to you to decide... Let your soul guide you.

To me the end of Love would be peace, clarity, and happiness. I think that is what people are attempting to come to in any love relationship. I've always taken this song about wanting to do it (life, in sense) gracefully like a dance. I've never read that quote by him but it only reinforced what I think and feel about it.

Like many of Cohen's songs on the Various Positions album I find listeners can easily came up with many interpretations. Hence the "various positions".

Dance me to the End of Love always struck me as a song that could have been the soundtrack to Orwells 1984.

"touch me with your naked hand, touch me with your glove".

The end of love is the final curtain and the dance is the final experiences before the end.

I've always seen in Cohen's work big universal themes but if you look again you alway see maters that are only concern of the heart. This is what makes Cohen a true artist and this in my opinion is the theme that reoccurs in the Various Positions album. The more I listened to it the more things like this stuck out.

For me Dance Me To The End of Love is about societies last dance before the flood. And that flood is a totalistarisium. Forgive me for not elaborating any further but see for yourselves. Oh and forgive the spelling mistakes also.

Hi All,

I just found this thread, very interesting how everyone loves to look at this particular song. Theories that run from 'Love in Auschwitz' to the very pinnacles on which the Gods love.

Like all of Leonard's songs, to me, this is open to interpretation. It could go either way. In many directions. Sometimes just on a persons' mood.

I don't think 'touch me with your naked hand/touch me with your glove points to the 'end' of anything. I think its another erotic image. Sometimes that bit of silk between the flesh and the flesh ...

I think this song is a good example of why we love Leonard. It means something a bit different to each of us. It personalises the song. We all have our own relationship with it.

Linda.

It is more fun to come up with your own ideas then hear what the artist was thinking. Like any artform it is an expression and everyone sees interpets from their point of view or it is a projection on how they see the world. The artist gives their art and we see ourselves through it.

I find this song to be a bittersweet love song. The music the beginning sounds very sad, then it sounds like Jewish music. I see a young couple, not yet married, in her mother's home war is going on all around them. Their demise is imminent, but they are so much in love they just want to dance with each other. Very romantic and sad at th same time, love is a very powerful emotion.

The song is a cry out for transcendent oneness, the kind which two dancing lovers approach. The kind of which individual "panic" (the "secret life" to which Cohen refers elsewhere) is the antithesis. This transcendence is tantamount to being in love, to living in a harmonious state without which life, like an unloved mind, amounts to panic, the corollary of a mind uncomfortable with its mortality, of a mind with no lover with whom to resist death's inevitable presence.