The Faith

Cohen gets away with highly religious lyrics where Dylan cannot; indeed where most poets have not been able to.

Why? Perhaps because nobody understands him.

The lone comment on this song at the "Song Meanings" website:

I don't know how this song has yet to be commented on :|

That said, I'm not really able to figure out the meaning just yet, but I do love this song.

 I'm surprised. I would not have thought it was that subtle. What could be more obvious than the title?

OK, here's a quick sketch:

First stanza is the story of creation, whether you want to read it Biblically or in Darwinian terms. It starts in the sea, without consciousness ("blind") –darkness on the face of the deep. Then it emerges to see the light—and God created light, his first creation. Wild regret? Original sin. That suggests the religious meaning is primary, not the Darwinian one.

Club/wheel/mind –the progress of human culture. Hunting to agriculture to literacy.

Love is presented as the essential driver behind all of this. In evolutionary terms, love is sex, leading to reproduction and evolution. In religious terms, God is love, and he makes the world and man as something to love. Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” relationship.

Blood/soil/faith—this second trinity is paralleled with the first. Blood = club, soil = wheel, faith = mind. As the club is grounded in blood, and the wheel is grounded in soil, so the mind is grounded in faith. Faith is the proper place and medium of mind.

“These words you can’t forget/Your vow” surely refers to the covenant of God (with Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, the people of Israel); antidote to the wild regret of the first stanza. Covenant is religion, literally "binding." There is a secondary allusion, no doubt, to the marriage vow, as sex consecrated, becomes love. Hence, religion is a love affair with God that ends in marriage. To God.

“A grave on every hill” – from the evolutionary standpoint, every birth implies a death. Hence love creates death. From the religious standpoint, though, each grave is a consummated marriage to God. That the cross/star/minaret is on a hill, and the graves are mentioned after this, suggests that the religious meaning is the dominant one. The upward journey of “evolution” ends in the “holy place” on top of the hill.

As an aside, fellow Montrealers will notice an allusion here to Cote-des-Neiges cemetery and the cross on top of Mount Royal.

"Love aren't you tired yet?" Is ambiguous. The Buddhist longing for an end to the wheel of becoming. A desire for the end of the world. Or a hint that it is time for you and your lover, God, to slip off to bed.