You Don't Have to Love Me
You Don't Have to Love Me - context Summary
Book of Longing, 2006
Published in Book of Longing (2006), Leonard Cohen's you don't have to love me
revisits his lifelong preoccupations with desire, devotion, and the coexistence of longing and renunciation. The poem, in free verse, frames erotic attachment as simultaneously sacred and self-negating: ritual gestures, prayerlike language and the image of absence underline a tension between wanting to be loved and accepting not to be. Placed late in Cohen's career, it echoes his spiritual explorations and autobiographical sense of paradox—love as both offering and surrender—within a compact, intimate lyric.
You do not have to love me just because you are all the women I have ever wanted. I was born to follow you every night while I am still the many men who love you. I meet you at a table I take your fist between my hands in a solemn taxi. I wake up alone my hand on your absence in Hotel Discipline. I wrote all these songs for you I burned red and black candles shaped like a man and a woman I married the smoke of two pyramids of sandalwood I prayed for you I prayed that you would love me and that you would not love me.
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