Leonard Cohen – Take This Longing Lyrics

This song was written for Nico, whose real name was Christa Pfaggen, as Cohen stated live in Hannover, in 1979:

I wrote this song long time ago for a German girl, her name was Christa. She had another name that she used in America, but I found out that her name really was Christa. The most wonderful thing about this girl which I discovered after I had given this song to her and sung it for her was that she was deaf. She never even heard it but she kept nodding her head in deep appreciation. This is the song I wrote for her.
However, it took a while for Cohen to actually record the song, as he said in a note from the Greatest Hits compilation textbook:

Buffy St. Marie recorded an early version of this called The Bells. It took me six or seven years to get a version for myself. I began it while listening to Nico sing at the Dom on 8th Street in 1966. I broke the code in Asmara and finished the song in the shed on St.Dominique Street in Montreal last year.

As a bonus, here is a song featuring both Cohen and St. Marie:

Take This Longing Lyrics by Leonard Cohen

Many men have loved the bells
You fastened to the rein
And everyone who wanted you
They found what they will always want again
Your beauty lost to you yourself
Just as it was lost to them

Oh take this longing from my tongue
Whatever useless things these hands have done
Let me see your beauty broken down
Like you would do for one you love
Your body like a searchlight
My poverty revealed
I would like to try your charity
Until you cry, “Now you must try my greed.”
And everything depends upon
How near you sleep to me

Just take this longing from my tongue
All the lonely things my hands have done
Let me see your beauty broken down
Like you would do for one you love

Hungry as an archway
Through which the troops have passed
I stand in ruins behind you
With your winter clothes, your broken sandal straps
I love to see you naked over there
Especially from the back

Oh take this longing from my tongue
All the useless things my hands have done
Untie for me your hired blue gown
Like you would do for one you love

You’re faithful to the better man
I’m afraid that he left
So let me judge your love affair
In this very room where I have sentenced mine to death
I’ll even wear these old laurel leaves
That he’s shaken from his head
Just take this longing from my tongue
All the useless things my hands have done
Let me see your beauty broken down
Like you would do for one you love

Like you would do for one you love