Cohen's Passionless Catholics
Poem "St. Catherine's Street" Explores Loss and Longing in Montreal
As a young poet, Leonard Cohen was preoccupied with passion and mythic imagery. In "St. Catherine's Street" he examines how one diminishes the other.
Leonard Cohen’s early career as a poet was spent exploring passion, both spiritual and sexual. In “Saint Catherine’s Street,” from Let Us Compare Mythologies, he examines the loss of passion through the triumph of Catholicism in his hometown Montreal.
Nuns and Fear: Catholicism in Montreal
The poem opens with nuns in their habits on a tram in Montreal, creatures almost monstrous: “Towering black nuns frighten us / as they come lumbering down the tramway aisle” (1-2). At the time, the street was a thoroughfare in an English-speaking working class neighbourhood. As the majority of Catholics in Montreal were French-speaking, these nuns are interlopers.
Though they might not belong, the nuns wield power: “amulets and talismans caught in careful fingers / promising plagues for an imprudent glance / So we bow our places away / the price of an indulgence” (3-6). These last few lines denote a superstition that by rights should not be Cohen’s. Cohen, a Jew, would not believe in indulgences, but the speaker gives away his seat as the price of one.
This demonstrates the power of the Catholic Church in Montreal, that even those who are not Catholic are forced into reverence. The earth would not shatter if the speaker did not give up his seat, but the mores of the time and place are such that he does not feel he has a choice. There is an impotence in his position, but he gives up his seat with biting sarcasm.
Sex and Loss: Sensual Expansion
Later, the poem becomes more earnest: “There are no ordeals / Fire and water have passed from the wizards’ hands / We cannot torture or be tortured / Our eyes are worthless to an inquisitor’s heel / no prince will waste hot lead / or build a spiked casket for us” (12-17). A sense of loss overrides the poem’s earlier irony: not for torture, but for magic lost. In Montreal, the greater sacrifice becomes giving up one’s seat on the tram.
It becomes more sensual in subsequent lines: “Once with a flaming belly she danced upon a green road” (18).However, she loses power: “Now the tambourines are dull / at her lifted skirt boys study cigarette stubs / no one is jealous of her body” (21-23). She is no longer attractive. It could be aging, but mythic figures don’t age. She hasn’t changed — the world has.
The speaker goes from explanation to inquiry in subsequent lines: “How can we love and pray / when at our lovers’ arms / we hear the damp bells of them / who once took bitter alms / but now float quietly away” (29-33). When these things have changed and diminished, what is love? What is prayer?
Passion and Death
The seventh stanza finds the crux of the matter: “Will no one carve from our bodies a white cross / for a wind-torn mountain / or was that forsaken man’s passion / enough to end all passion” (34-37). The passion of humanity, then, has been absorbed by Christ’s sacrifice — passion in the sense of pain, but also in a broader sense. Fire and water have slipped from the fingers of humanity.
In the end Cohen returns to Montreal’s nuns on the tram. No longer towering figures, these women are fleshless, passionless creatures: “are they really clever non-excreting tapestries/prepared by skillful eunuchs” (40-41). They are diminished like everything else, no longer frightening. One wonders if the speaker would give up his seat for them now.
Cohen’s concern with the effects of Christianity on human passion is clear in this poem. He detects a shadow over Montreal, represented by these nuns on the tram: something that dominates but is itself diminished.
