Like a bird on the wire,
like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.
Like a worm on a hook,
like a knight from some old fashioned book
I have saved all my ribbons for thee.
If I, if I have been unkind,
I hope that you can just let it go by.
If I, if I have been untrue
I hope you know it was never to you.
Like a baby, stillborn,
like a beast with his horn
I have torn everyone who reached out for me.
But I swear by this song
and by all that I have done wrong
I will make it all up to thee.
I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch,
he said to me, “You must not ask for so much.”
And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door,
she cried to me, “Hey, why not ask for more?”
Oh like a bird on the wire,
like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.
A classic Cohen song, whose themes of freedom and infidelity are core subjects of his work, it was originally included on Songs From A Room (1969). The title image derives from Cohen’s time living on the Greek island ofHydra in the early Sixties. After the first telegraph wires were installed, birds began to use them as a perch. “I would stare out of the window and think how civilisation had caught up with me and I wasn’t going to be able to … live this eleventh-century life I had found for myself.”
A live version, included on Live Songs (1973), contains some lyrical revisions. In the first stanza, the phrase “I have saved all my ribbons for thee” is replaced by “it was the shape of our love [that] twisted me”, while in the second “I hope you know it was never to you” gives way to “I thought a lover had to be some kind of liar too”. In the live version included on Field Commander Cohen – Tour Of 1979 (2001), the “knight from someold-fashioned book” is replaced by “ a monk bending over the book”
A later live version, included on Live In Concert (1994), replaces the fourth stanza with “I don’t cry, don’t..., don’t cry, I don’t cry no more / It’s all over now, it’s over babe, don’t cry no more / I say don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry anymore / It’s over, it’s finished, it’s completed, it has..., it has been paid for”. It is doubtful that these amendments significantly improve the song.