Orla Jeanes

Staff Writer

“In Montreal spring is like an autopsy. Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth…From the streets a sexual manifesto rises like an inflating tire, ‘the winter has not killed us again!’”

• Leonard Cohen

View from le Musée des Beaux Arts, taken by Orla Jeanes

To all that find themselves with this article in hand: congratulations! — you’ve made it through another one of this city’s infamously long and cruel winters. The light at the end of our bleak and frosty tunnel grows bright as we enter the prelude to summer, a short period during which the city regains its vitality, and with it, the delight of all those anticipating the warm months ahead. 

As any person tends to be with their hometown, the world-renowned singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen was intimately acquainted with the particularities of Montreal. Through poetry and prose, he repeatedly paid homage to his beloved ville natale, proving just how closely he knew its streets, its women, its politics, and its seasons. In his own words, the Westmount-born poet described his relationship with the city as one in which he had “to keep coming back to Montreal to renew [his] neurotic affiliations.” 

Leonard Cohen was no stranger to the phenomenon of spring in Montreal. Undoubtedly, he would have recognized the crowding of sidewalks on the first sunny day of the year, our habit of shirking off our coats in below ten-degree temperatures, and the optimism that renews the spirits of Montrealers as winter reaches its long-awaited end. 

His most famous ode to spring in Montreal lies within the pages of his book Beautiful Losers, in which he chronicles the season’s infiltration of the city. He compares its arrival to that of a warm current that “flows over Ontario like a dream” and “sneaks into Québec,” envelopping the entire island with “the buds and the fertile smell” of springtime.

In his novel A Ballet of Lepers, the McGill alumni salutes his old stomping grounds by capturing the celebratory sight of the once-again “crowded” university campus filled with  “people sitting on the grass, eating their lunches and watching spring change the trees.” Following the reemergence of all those who had been hiding away indoors, he writes of how you can tell “spring [is] definitely on the city” when it seems as though there are “people at every corner, just lingering.”

“Like any other Montrealer, Cohen took part in the casual, yet highly appreciative rejoicing that takes place with every new occurrence of this warmly welcomed season.” 

Over the years, Leonard Cohen made an eastward migration across Montreal, detaching himself from his identity as the son of an affluent Westmount family, and eventually settling into a frugal lifestyle in the heart of the Plateau. Nestled in between rue St. Dominique and St. Laurent Boulevard, his home for the last four decades of his life stood facing Parc du Portugal, a small square in which he’d frequently be seen sitting on a wooden bench, either gazing at the city or conversing with passerbys. Featured in This Beggar’s Description, a documentary about his friend and fellow poet Philip Tétrault, he is filmed doing exactly so whilst drinking a jar of V8 tomato juice and reminiscing of triumphant thumb wars against Pierre Elliott Trudeau. 

It was here that the humble Montreal poet would have witnessed the beginning of many springs, spending gentle mornings in the midst of chirping birds perched on budding branches and enjoying the soft sunlight beaming down on the remaining mounds of melting snow. He himself referred to the season as “a spring so sweet it seems like a prize for endurance.” 

Late March in Parc du Portugal, taken by Orla Jeanes
The longing for warm weather, most often either followed or preceded by a certain bitterness towards winter, is horribly familiar to the residents of Montreal. Come the end of March, when we find ourselves cursing the cold whilst trudging through the onslaught of yet another snowstorm, our only wish is for it to be over. Between the months of November and April, our love for the city, buried under a resentment of the cold, is put in great peril. As dreams of leaving for distant tropical lands become harder to resist, all that’s left for us to hold onto is the promise of an eventual spring. So, we wait, our thoughts echoing the words of Leonard Cohen, reminding us of just what city it is that we’ve been patiently waiting on: “it’s Montreal…Montreal on the very threshold of greatness.”