Yvette Huddleston: If you find yourself in trouble, Leonard Cohen can probably help

The two met on a Greek island in the 1960s and became lovers; the song bearing Marianne’s name appeared on his 1967 album Songs of Leonard Cohen. They later parted but remained close.

When he heard that his old friend was very ill, Cohen wrote to her immediately. “You know I’ve always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom… our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine… I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.”

He managed to capture the essence of his feelings for her (past, present and even future) and to reassure her about the journey she was about to take – it didn’t avoid the painful truth of her situation and yet it was essentially a poem of hope. 

This is exactly what great poetry – and songs – can do. They can distil difficult emotions in a powerful, and in this particular case, comforting way. Lyric poetry is all about the big stuff – love, sex, life, death – and Cohen employed a poet’s sensibility in his loving action towards his dying friend.

That final journey has fascinated writers from the beginning of time. It is the ultimate human mystery about which countless poems, novels, plays and songs have been written. It was a subject that one of our greatest lyric poets Philip Larkin, returned to time and again. Larkin had rather an unhealthy preoccupation with death in his everyday life which he channelled into poetry where it was transformed into something not exactly noble but at least manageable in its inevitability. In his poem Aubade he wrote of “The sure extinction that we travel to/And shall be lost in always...nothing more terrible, nothing more true.” He also wrote, in my view, one of the most profound and affecting lines of poetry ever, and one which accords with Cohen’s own sentiments: “What will survive of us is love.” Both men have frequently been accused of being miserable doom-merchants, yet actually what they share is a dry wit along with a clear-eyed view of what really matters in life – and death – and an ability to express it beautifully. However bad things get, chances are Cohen and Larkin can probably get you through it.