Leonard Cohen / New Skin for the Old Ceremony / 1974
There Is a War
sardonic, weary, quietly menacing
Cohen catalogs a series of overlapping conflicts—class, gender, ideology, race—then collapses them into a single, inescapable condition he calls war, one that implicates domestic life as much as politics. The recurring taunt to "come back" turns the song into a bitter recruitment pitch aimed at anyone who thinks they've achieved peace or neutrality.
conflict as universal condition complicity and denial domestic strife as political struggle loss of innocence irony of pacifism
Who's speaking
A speaker who claims battle-hardened knowledge addresses a second person who has tried to opt out of conflict—possibly a former lover, a friend, or a stand-in for the listener; the tone suggests the speaker is not entirely trustworthy or stable, someone using war-talk to justify his own failures.
What happens
The song opens by listing wars along familiar political and social fault lines before narrowing to a personal relationship, where domestic love is reframed as another battlefield. The speaker admits his own defeat and blindness in that relationship, then widens the lens again to more categories of division, ending with an insistent, almost desperate demand to be heard.
How it's built
Built on a call-and-response pattern: verses that catalog wars alternate with a taunting chorus urging the listener back into combat. The choruses vary their final line each time, sharpening or shifting the taunt, while the verses escalate from abstract political binaries to intimate confession and back to abstraction, giving the song a circular, inescapable shape.
Section by section
Opening verse
The song begins by naming wars along the most familiar axes of power—economic and sexual—before undermining even the certainty that war exists at all, suggesting that disagreement about the nature of conflict is itself a form of conflict.
First chorus
“come on back to the war”
The chorus's invitation to return implies the addressee once left or denied involvement; the casual, almost recruiting tone treats war as an inevitable homecoming rather than something to avoid.
Domestic verse
“I call it service”
The scene of a shared home curdles when the female voice reframes love as obligation, exposing a private power struggle that mirrors the larger conflicts named earlier. The speaker's rising from her arms suggests retreat, not intimacy.
Second chorus
The taunts sharpen with accusations of tourism and warnings of hurt, suggesting the addressee's neutrality is itself a kind of privilege or naivety that cannot last.
Confession verse
The speaker admits to having once been passive and controllable, framing his prior self as a casualty of ignorance rather than peace. This reframes docility itself as defeat, not virtue.
Expanding catalog
The wars multiply to include race and arbitrary categories like odd and even, suggesting that any distinction can calcify into conflict, making the war metaphor totalizing and almost absurd.
Final chorus
“can't you hear me speaking”
The song ends not with resolution but with an urgent demand for attention, as if the speaker's whole argument has been an attempt to break through denial or apathy.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- War stands in for every kind of division—economic, romantic, racial, ideological—collapsing public and private conflict into one continuous state.
- anaphora
- The repeated structure of listing opposed pairs and repeating the chorus's invitation creates a drumbeat insistence, mimicking propaganda or recruitment rhetoric.
- irony
- The speaker mocks the addressee for avoiding war while himself describing domestic defeat and confusion, undercutting any claim to moral high ground.
- direct address
- The rhetorical questions and imperatives in the chorus create a confrontational, almost accusatory relationship with the listener, implicating them in the conflict.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats war as a metaphor for all structures of domination and resistance—class, gender, race—arguing that neutrality or private happiness is an illusion, since even intimate relationships reproduce these power struggles. A secondary reading hears the song more cynically, as the voice of someone using the language of political urgency to justify personal failure or manipulate a partner, which would make the speaker himself an unreliable prophet of conflict rather than a clear-eyed critic of it. Cohen likely intends both readings to coexist uneasily.
Context
Released in 1974 on New Skin for the Old Ceremony, the song reflects Cohen's recurring interest in framing personal and romantic entanglement through the language of larger ideological or historical struggle, a technique he uses elsewhere on the album. I don't have specific documented context about the song's composition or inspiration beyond the lyric itself.
Listen for
- the shift in tone from political listing to personal confession
- how the chorus's final line changes each repetition
- the deadpan delivery that keeps the taunt from becoming melodramatic
- the way domestic dialogue is folded into the same register as political rhetoric
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