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The Limits of Love: Thomas Kinsella’s “Je t’adore” Lyrics by Perfectrhyme

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Thomas Kinsella’s “Je t’adore” is an intriguing and melancholy little poem, admirable for the amount of ambivalence it packs into a tiny space. Four lines long, it’s practically an epigram, and demands minute attention to its every word—particularly because almost every word is an evasion. Here it is in full:
Je t’adore
The other props are gone.
Sighing in one another’s
Iron arms, propped above nothing,
We praise Love the limiter.
I take the title as signaling the mixed feelings of the speaker, who can’t quite manage to say “I love you” in straightforward English. It’s a graceful cheat, as when Annie Hall’s Alvy Singer says, “Love is too weak a word for what I feel—I lurve you, you know, I loave you.” Romantic ambivalence becomes the single theme of the brief hymn to “Love the limiter” that follows. Formally the poem does indeed limit itself: to four short lines that hover around iambic trimeter, albeit without committing to it fully. The poem, like its speaker, is snugly confined but mounts a certain internal resistance—“struggle” would be too strong a word.
The diction choices mirror this state of self-contradiction. “The other props are gone,” the speaker states up front—with panic? exhilaration? We can’t identify these props precisely, but we understand them to mean anything that people substitute for love or a committed relationship: work, parties, friendships, or perhaps most importantly, a variety of lovers to whom one is not committed. All these things stave off what would presumably rush in to fill their absence: loneliness, dejection. Garrison Keillor has written that “a marriage, to be happy, needs an exterior threat.” The third line could be taken to remove or trivialize that threat—the speaker and his beloved are “propped above nothing”—or else locate it, with a bit of wordplay, in “nothing” itself. More ambiguous still is the interplay between the dominant verb of the poem, “praise”—which gains particular force through the two clauses stacked up behind it—and the object of that verb, “Love the limiter,” which carries the burden of closing out the poem.
The most important thing to notice about “Je t’adore” is that it’s one of those love poems you’d think twice, or three times, about giving to someone you love. Nobody wants to conceive of themselves as embracing with “iron arms,” or of providing a love that limits rather than expands (though of course most of us do). What critics might call “ambivalence” or, following Keats, “negative capability” here comes close to passive aggression: it’s a tribute that takes away nearly as much as it gives. Maybe the poem is just an internal meditation; maybe it’s addressed to someone who won’t fully catch its meaning; at best, it’s addressed to someone who maintains a similar skeptical reserve in matters of the heart. All of these are lonely possibilities to consider; but on the other hand, by wearing its evasions on its sleeve, the poem breaks through to a certain emotional candor: one that to some tastes might hold more meaning than a reductive “I love you.”
Credits
Perfectrhyme

Perfectrhyme

About “The Limits of Love: Thomas Kinsella’s “Je t’adore”” by Perfectrhyme

Read the complete lyrics to "The Limits of Love: Thomas Kinsella’s “Je t’adore”" by Perfectrhyme. On Lyrks you can follow along with the full text, explore the artist's discography, and discover related songs. The track is often categorized under Non-Music, Literature.

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