Alexandra Leaving

Still one of Cohen's finest songs. He writes best when he collaborates with a woman--perhaps it is the muse effect, the Beatrice effect.

Besides being perhaps the most euphonious two-word combination in the English language, "Alexandra Leaving" says it all. Alexandra is the feminine form of Alexander. She is Alexander's consort. Alexander is the paradigmatic cosmocrator, world ruler. His consort, then, is the world--the physical world and the social or political world, fitly symbolized as a desirable woman.

It's a Buddhist song, a song of renunciation of the world.