Leonard Cohen / Ten New Songs / 1992
Here It Is
solemn, resigned, almost liturgical
This song is a litany that presents the whole span of a human life — luxury and squalor, sickness and death, love and its ending — as items being handed over, one after another, with the same flat ceremonial gesture. It reads like a benediction delivered without sentimentality, insisting that acceptance of everything, not selective gratitude, is what love actually requires.
mortality radical acceptance love as endurance rather than feeling religious ritual and blessing the leveling of high and low fortune
Who's speaking
An unnamed speaker addresses a generalized 'you' — possibly a lover, a child, humanity itself, or the listener directly — presenting each fact of existence as a gift being bestowed. The voice is authoritative and unsentimental, closer to a priest or a fate than a conversational narrator, and it never asks for anything back.
What happens
The song does not tell a story in sequence so much as accumulate one, moving from the trappings of status and comfort to poverty, drunkenness, illness, and finally death — first as an abstraction, then as something inherited by one's own children, then as a personal end nailed to a cross. Each stanza pairs a concrete image of fortune or ruin with the flat assertion that love covers it too, before the recurring refrain repeats the same binary of living and dying, greeting and farewell.
How it's built
Built as a litany or catalogue with a stable two-part engine: paired verses that each present opposite images (crown/cart, wine/sickness, dawn/death, hurried/gone) followed by an identical refrain. The repetition of the refrain functions almost as liturgical response, and the bracketed 'Here it is' functions as a chant or amen underscoring the whole. There is no bridge or key turn in the conventional pop sense; instead the images intensify — moving from objects to death to explicit crucifixion imagery — while the musical and verbal frame stays constant, so escalation happens entirely through content, not form.
Section by section
Opening verses
“Here is your crown”
The song begins with the trappings of power and privilege, immediately establishing the ritual cadence of presentation. The formality of the language strips away any sense that fortune is earned or particular — it is simply delivered.
Poverty verse
“cardboard and piss”
The same syntax that offered a crown now offers destitution, using blunt, unromantic diction to force the listener to accept that love, as the song defines it, must extend equally to degradation.
First refrain
The alternating declaration of living and dying, followed by a greeting that is simultaneously a farewell, sets up the song's central paradox: love and loss are announced in the same breath, not as sequential events but as a single utterance.
Sickness and death verses
“here is your death”
The imagery moves from personal ruin to mortality itself, and the address shifts to include a son and daughter, suggesting that death is not just the speaker's fate but something passed down, inherited across generations.
Closing verses
“Here is your cross”
The final verses invoke crucifixion explicitly, framing the entire cycle of gifts as a kind of sacrifice. The description of love as unpredictable in where it settles suggests that love is not chosen or earned but arrives indiscriminately, the way suffering does.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated opening word beginning most lines creates the cadence of a blessing or curse, reinforcing the idea that everything, without exception, is being presented as a gift.
- antithesis
- Each verse yokes opposite conditions together — royalty and homelessness, wine and illness, dawn and death — collapsing the moral distance between fortune and ruin under the same formula of bestowed love.
- religious allusion
- References to crucifixion imagery and marriage vow language recast romantic and mortal love as something closer to sacred covenant or sacrifice, rather than personal feeling.
- refrain as ritual response
- The recurring couplet about living, dying, greeting, and parting operates like a liturgical answer, making the song feel less like a narrative than a rite repeated until it becomes inevitable.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a meditation on unconditional acceptance — a vow-like insistence that love, if it means anything, must encompass wealth and poverty, health and sickness, birth and death, without preference. The recurring refrain about living and dying functions almost as a marriage vow extended to existence itself. An alternative reading hears the 'you' as addressed directly to the listener or to humanity in general, making the song less about a specific relationship and more a cosmic or theological statement about what it means to be alive: everything is handed to you, and love is simply the name for the fact that you must take all of it.
Context
Cohen wrote extensively about faith, mortality, and the entanglement of the sacred and the physical throughout his career, and this song fits that pattern closely, echoing marriage-vow language ('til death do us part') and crucifixion imagery to elevate ordinary and painful human experience into ritual. I do not have reliable specific biographical or production context for this particular track beyond its appearance on the stated album, so I am cautious about asserting more than the text supports.
Listen for
- the flat, incantatory repetition of the opening phrase and how it never varies in tone regardless of what follows it
- the pairing of luxury and squalor within the same verse structure
- the shift from generalized mortality to the specific mention of a son and daughter
- the vow-like phrasing in the refrain that fuses greeting and farewell into one line
- the escalation toward explicit crucifixion imagery in the final verses
About Leonard Cohen
Leonard Norman Cohen was a Canadian songwriter, singer, poet, and novelist. Themes commonly explored throughout his work include faith and mortality, isolation and depression, betrayal and redemption, social and political conflict, sexual and romantic love, desire, regret, and loss.
1934 - 2016 / Canada
Full biography and catalogue