Dance Me to the End of Love
An adaptation of Gloria Horton-Young's post about the song
Welcome to new subscribers and regular readers! Thank you for joining me for today’s song, “Dance Me to the End of Love” by Leonard Cohen. For Japanese students, vocabulary words in bold are provided in Japanese below. TOEIC (PBT) 450+, Eiken 2, CEFR B1.
Today’s song is called, “Dance Me to the End of Love”. This article is based on a post by the best-selling author here on Substack, Gloria Horton-Young and our correspondence. She has very kindly allowed me to summarize and adapt the article for learners of English. Below, she tells us the meaning and the importance of this song.
If you are a native or near-native speaker of English, I encourage you to read Gloria’s unique and breathtakingly moving poetry and prose at “She Who Stirs the Storm”. You can read the original of this article here:
(690 words - adapted from an article by Gloria Horton-Young)
When I first heard the song, I thought it was a love song—loving someone until the very end. Yes, it is that, but it has a much, much deeper meaning. When I learned more about the song, it sent chills down my spine.
I learned that the songwriter, Leonard Cohen, wrote the song based on a horrible act that the Nazis did in the concentration camps. They forced musicians to play in an orchestra. Except, the audience was the line of prisoners that was marching to the gas chambers. This knowledge changed the song for me forever. Now, every line feels like a knife to my heart, beautiful and, at the same time, shocking and painful.
The "burning violin" isn't just an image for a poem anymore. It is the actual musicians forced to play the background music to genocide.
When I hear Cohen beg, "Dance me to the end of love," I can only imagine the final moments of countless victims walking to their deaths. The Nazis made fun of them in a cruel parody of beauty.
Sometimes, that story feels too heavy for me to carry.
I studied more about this history. I learned that the Nazis arrested many other groups: people with disabilities, members of the LGBT community, people who spoke out against the government, Black people, and others who didn’t follow the government’s rules. I am a woman in a same-sex marriage. I have the terrifying thought that the American government is taking steps to take away my rights and my freedoms. Could the same thing happen to me simply for loving someone?
Cohen's song reminds us of how cruel humans can be to each other. And yet, the song also shows there is love and beauty in spite of such horror. I hold onto that hope, even as fear seems to capture me.
Cohen's "Dance Me to the End of Love" has become more than just a song to me. It's a reminder of the atrocities we must never forget or allow to be repeated. It's a warning of how quickly things can change. But it's also a promise of the power of love and art to protect our humanity even in the darkest times.
So, I tell myself: we need to love the people in our lives with strength, gentleness, and courage. We need to care for our country, too. Not by ignoring its mistakes, but by facing them and trying to make things better. We have to take care of its spirit. That’s a very, very important job.
Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
Let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of
Oh, dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the wedding now, oh, dance me on and on
Dance me very tenderly and dance me very long
We're both of us beneath our love, we're both of us above
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the children who are asking to be born
Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn
Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in
Touch me with your naked hand, touch me with your glove
Dance me to the end of love
In the end, Cohen's song reminds us that even in the face of unspeakable horror, we have a choice. We can give in to fear and hatred, or we can choose to dance - to love, to create, to resist. It's a dance that requires courage and a promise to keep our humanity. In this dance, we find our strength, our community, and our hope for a future where the violins cry no more.
Vocabulary
it sent chills down my spine 背筋が凍る
concentration camps 強制収容所
beg 嘆願
cruel 残酷
disabilities 障害
terrifying 恐ろしい
atrocities 残虐行為
humanity 人間愛、人情
ignore 無視する
gather in 優しく包む
olive branch オリーブの枝
homeward 家路へ
dove 鳩
tenderly 優しく
outworn 使い古された
shelter 隠れ家へ
naked 裸で
unspeakable 言葉にできない
resist 抵抗する
Photo:
Lit candles sit on a podium during a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, May 6, 2024. The Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933 and killed about 11 million people, including more than six million Jewish people because of racial and political ideologies. (U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Trevor Calvert) Wikimedia Commons, public domain
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Dear Louise,
Reading your adaptation of Gloria’s reflection took me straight back to the roll call square at Buchenwald.
I spoke of this moment in the Walk through Buchenwald documentary—how it felt to stand on that ground, where the silence itself holds memory. As I read your words and heard Cohen’s lyrics echo again, I found myself back there. And somehow, in my mind, I could hear the song being played. Not literally, of course, yet with a clarity that chilled me to the bone. A haunting overlap of past and present.
“Dance me to the end of love” is no longer a romantic line. In that space—on that square—it becomes a devastating echo. One that carries the unbearable weight of forced beauty, of musicians made to play as others were marched to their deaths.
You captured the layered ache of that truth so gently, and with a quiet strength that moved me. Love, art, resistance—these are not separate forces. In times like these, they are one and the same.
Thank you for adapting Gloria’s powerful piece and bringing it into a space where even learners of English can feel the full scope of what this song carries.
With respect and remembrance,
Jay
What you have written brings his song to a whole another level of passion and pain. Thank you for sharing his work.