Your father’s gone a-hunting
He’s deep in the forest so wild
And he cannot take his wife with him
He cannot take his child
Your father’s gone a-hunting
In the quicksand and the clay
And a woman cannot follow him
Although she knows the way
Your father’s gone a-hunting
Through the silver and the glass
Where only greed can enter
But spirit, spirit cannot pass
Your father’s gone a-hunting
For the beast we’ll never cannot bind
And he leaves a baby sleeping
And his blessings all behind
Your father’s gone a-hunting
And he’s lost his lucky charm
And he’s lost the guardian heart
That keeps the hunter from the harm
Your father’s gone a-hunting
He asked me to say goodbye
And he warned me not to stop him
I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t even try
This song, included on Various Positions (1984), seems at first a simple re-working of an old folk song. But it is much more complex than that. For what has the hunter gone “a-hunting”? Who, and of which gender, is the narrator? The context suggests she is the wife-and-mother of the hunter and his child, and that he has not gone hunting for food or fur or the necessaries of life. One plausible reading of the song is that it is the carnal world which the hunter is seeking, the mother and child left behind representing the spiritual world abandoned in that quest. Such an interpretation would certainly be consistent with Cohen’s known themes and interests at the time wrote the song.