The Bible exhibits the standard of whatever genre of literature it contains. In the Bible are found the quintessential models of the proverb, the parable, the historical narrative, the letter, and so on. Poetry is acknowledged more universally than any other genre, though, as reaching its acme in the Bible. One can only look down from the Bible’s poetic heights; even haters of God have admitted this. When the Bible reader peruses poetry that is less than biblical, then, he will compare one with the other. If Solomon’s Canticles have been labeled ‘restricted’ by ancient Jewish doctors and certain Christian sects, it is not going too far to say that they would call the poetry of Leonard Cohen ‘licentious’—what today would be dubbed ‘pornographic.’ That said, not all of Cohen’s poetry is distasteful; Leonard Cohen is, if judged on the basis of poetic ability, a poet indeed. Unlike postmodern poetry, his poems evince poetic elements and manifest actual communication. Before my conversion to Christianity, I experienced an awakening to nature, art, and literature. This Awakening and this Faith dovetailed, the latter following closely upon the former. It was during this dovetailing period that I read a volume of what Cohen had written, not without, however, due to my growing zeal for God, blotting out his foul allusions and naughty words as I went. I don’t know if I would have noticed the licentious, and therefore blasphemous, character of his ‘Hallelujah’ if it had been one of the poems included in the book. But I would have been no more naïve about it, I guess, than those persons are who sing it as if engaged in the supernal religious exercise of their lives. It is a conspicuous proof of how debased we have become that crowds would cheer the singing of that song and that singers would line up to sing it; as it happens, even kids are encouraged to lend their voices to sacrilege, which is what an amalgam of worship and sexual innuendos amounts to.
Desire is unsatisfied longing. Man’s unsatisfied longing for women has not tailed off with time, not since “men began to multiply on the face of the earth” and “the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair” (Genesis 6.1, 2.) Man’s desire for women has been the hinge upon which lives, be they great or small, have swayed; and events, be they of passing moment or of lasting consequence, have swung. This feral desire, therefore, has always been a chief subject on the point of the poet’s pen, quill, or (in the case of Gilgamesh) reed stylus. The droit du seigneur—the right of a lord to couple with his serf’s bride-to-be—may be traced back, not merely to medieval Europe and feudal France, but to when the oldest book presently known to man was written, which was when either Noah or his immediate descendents still walked the earth. “He will couple with the wife-to-be,/He first of all, the bridegroom after./By divine consent it is so ordained:/When his navel-cord was cut, for him she was destined” (The Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 15.)
Inside the recesses of the sin nature, there lies in man the desire to have, not one, but many women. This desire lurks inside every man, though for the sake of peace with their wives or girlfriends, men will deny that it does. This desire overcomes the man when he stirs it up and makes it his focal point. This especially happens to the poets among us. Two such poets are King Solomon 3,000 years ago, and Canada’s own Leonard Cohen.
