“I have loved three and lost them thrice”

Richard Cantwell’s expression, “I have loved three and lost them thrice,” turns a private admission of patriotic love into a compact reckoning with loss, recovery, and an unfinished promise. As he speaks to the imagined girl and her portrait, the language moves from self-permission to arithmetic and then to vengeance: two of the three lost objects have been retaken, and the third, he insists, will be recovered. The bravado does not erase the losses; it makes them audible.

Admission and Address

The thought begins with a permission Richard has apparently been reluctant to grant himself: “If you love a country, the Colonel thought, you might as well admit it. Sure, admit it, boy.” The repeated imperative sounds like an argument staged within one mind. One voice offers a general proposition; another answers with a familiar, almost teasing command. Patriotism is presented not as an abstract duty but as an attachment that must be acknowledged, much like love itself.

The passage’s address shifts between inward speech and the girl before the portrait. Richard says the thought softly to her, though the surrounding scene finally makes clear that there is no girl there: the portrait remains only as it was painted. That separation gives the admission a double audience. He is trying to tell an absent beloved what he feels, while also permitting himself to name a country as something loved and lost. The intimacy of the address does not soften the national claim; it makes the claim personal.

The Count of Losses

“I have loved three and lost them thrice” establishes a pattern through its balanced numbers: three loves, three losses. Richard immediately revises that bleak total. “Give a credit. We've re–took two. Retaken, he corrected.” The accounting sounds almost like a report, but its self-correction exposes the effort required to make the statement exact. He first reaches for a rough, colloquial verb, then replaces it with the more formal “Retaken.” The correction registers both a soldier’s precision and a desire to count recovery against grief.

The sequence implies that the three beloved and lost things are countries: the thought has just named love of country, and the tally distinguishes two recovered from one still outstanding. The passage does not pause to explain the history behind each loss. Instead, its compressed arithmetic lets the reader feel the unevenness of recovery: two can be credited, but the count is not complete. The remaining one keeps the expression from becoming a settled celebration.

The Unfinished Promise

Richard attaches that remaining recovery to an image of Franco: “And we will retake the other one, General Fat Ass Franco on his shooting stick with the advice of his doctor and tame ducks and a screen of Moorish cavalry when he shoots.” The taunting, crowded picture makes the political target grotesquely specific, but it also interrupts the solemnity of the preceding reckoning. A promise of national recovery is delivered through insult and absurd detail, turning resolve into a performance of defiance.

That performance intensifies when Richard declares, “We will retake and they will all be hung upside down outside of filling stations.” The future tense presents revenge as certain, while the imagined punishment is deliberately brutal and public. It is a threat voiced in the scene, not an event shown to occur. Its excess reveals how far the passage has moved from the restrained admission that began it: the emotional sequence runs from confessing love, through naming losses, to fantasizing about retribution.

Meaning and Irony

The expression’s force comes from holding grief and confidence together without resolving the contradiction. “I have loved three and lost them thrice” gives loss the weight of repeated experience; the correction that two have been retaken offers a counter-account, but not a complete one. The promise to recover the last country looks forward, while the surrounding portrait scene returns the language to absence. Richard’s resolve is spoken into a room where the girl he addresses is not present.

The phrase therefore works both as a personal confession and as a compressed statement of unfinished national attachment. Its clipped self-address, revised tally, and increasingly extravagant threat make the emotion visible through changes in register: intimate, military, then vindictive. The final warning sustains the pose of certainty, but the unretaken “other one” remains the pressure beneath it. The passage’s bravado depends on the loss it cannot yet close.