"Dance Me to the End of Love" is a 1984 song by Leonard Cohen. It was first performed by Cohen, on his 1984 album Various Positions. It has since been recorded by various artists, and has been described as "trembling on the brink of becoming a standard".
In an interview, Cohen said of the song:
| “ | 'Dance Me to the End Of Love' ... it's curious how songs begin because the origin of the song, every song, has a kind of grain or seed that somebody hands you or the world hands you and that's why the process is so mysterious about writing a song. But that came from just hearing or reading or knowing that in the death camps, beside the crematoria, in certain of the death camps, a string quartet was pressed into performance while this horror was going on, those were the people whose fate was this horror also. And they would be playing classical music while their fellow prisoners were being killed and burnt. So, that music, "Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin," meaning the beauty there of being the consummation of life, the end of this existence and of the passionate element in that consummation. But, it is the same language that we use for surrender to the beloved, so that the song — it's not important that anybody knows the genesis of it, because if the language comes from that passionate resource, it will be able to embrace all passionate activity. | ” |
In 1996, Welcome Books released a book called Dance Me to the End of Love, as part of its "Art & Poetry" series; the book featured the lyrics of the song alongside paintings by Henri Matisse.
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Famous quotes containing the words dance and/or love:
“When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
Folk dance like a wave of the sea....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“It seemed to me pretty plain, that they had more of love than matrimony in them.”
—Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774)