mostly a Father's Day thing--the extent of my observance was
playing it on the guitar, posting it to a (local) poetry
newsgroup, and mailing it to you folks.
i've always liked. it resonates for me in some very personal
ways (my own father having "gone a-hunting").


i was also curious whether anybody was still ``out there''.
haven't seen any messages sent to the list in quite a while.
when traffic was high i was mostly lurking, but i'd be very
interested seeing it pick up again and getting involved.


i haven't dissected the metaphor too much with this one, but:


what is "the silver and the glass"? a modern highrise
(where only greed can enter, but spirit cannot pass)?
a mirror? (literally, a silver'd glass)


what is the "guardian heart" and how has he lost it?


perhaps most interesting to me is how the singer steps out
of the third person in the last stanza:
  he asked me to say goodbye (to you)
  and he warned me not to stop him
  I wouldn't, I wouldn't even try...
who is singing? mother?


re:
>From sco.sco.com!unix.sri.com!cole Sun Jun 16 22:21:13 1991


Why did you post the words to this song? I have some thoughts and
questions about it -- it's a song I didn't like at first, but have
grown to like more -- but do you have some comments, or did you
just like the song so you posted it? Or is it a Father's Day
thing? :-)

One thing about this song is I often transmogrify "your father"
into "your daddy" because of the nursery poem that goes:
        Bye-low baby bunting,
        Daddy's gone a-hunting
        To get a little rabbit skin
        to wrap a baby bunting in.
I wonder if Cohen thought of that when he wrote this song.


Being a woman I bristled a bit that "A woman cannot follow him/Although
she knows the way" ("It's a guy kind of thing", I imagine some macho
fellow saying, or, patronizingly, "Oh, women are too spiritual for this
sort of thing."). No need to point out that the journey the father's
gone on doesn't sound very desirable. What do you think are meant by
these two lines? What are "the quicksand and the clay"?


> what is "the silver and the glass"? a modern highrise
> (where only greed can enter, but spirit cannot pass)?
> a mirror? (literally, a silver'd glass)
Your interpretation makes lots of sense! I was wondering what that
meant.


  And he leaves a baby sleeping
  And his blessings all behind


I always thought it showed tenderness on the part of the father that he
had left his blessings behind, but I guess another interpretation could
be that he had actually lost his blessings -- left them behind for
good.


> what is the "guardian heart" and how has he lost it?
The easiest explanation is that he's lost his own soul, in
participating in the grim business of the world.


> perhaps most interesting to me is how the singer steps out
> of the third person in the last stanza:
>
>   he asked me to say goodbye (to you)
>   and he warned me not to stop him
>   I wouldn't, I wouldn't even try...
>
> who is singing? mother?
I like the drama of this, but it never occurred to me to think it
was the mother saying it. I have no interpretation for it.