One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art is a poem whose apparent detached simplicity is
undermined by its rigid villanelle structure and mounting emotional tension. Perhaps her
most well-known poem, it centres around the theme of loss and the way in which
the speaker – and, by extension, the reader – deals with it. Here, Bishop converts losing
into an art form and explores how, by potentially mastering this skill, we may distance
ourselves from the pain of loss. At eight months old, Elizabeth Bishop lost her father,
her mother then succumbed to mental illness and she later lost her lover to suicide.
Therefore, we may see this poem as in part autobiographical. In it, the poet presents a
list of things we may lose in life, increasing in importance, until the final culmination in
the loss of a loved one.
One Art Analysis
The title should not be overlooked. With these two small words, Elizabeth Bishop
encompasses the poem’s entire purpose: to remove the pain of loss by first levelling out
everything that we lose; from door keys to houses to people (One), and second by
mastering the fact of losing through practise (Art).
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
In the first stanza, Bishop sets out her intentions. She seems to affirm that loss is part
of the human condition: we lose both significant and insignificant things constantly and
should thus accept this as a natural part of life, and even master this practice so as to
remove any sensation of disaster we may take from it. These two points will
be repeated throughout the poem so as to emphasise them.
Lose something every day.
In the second stanza, she invites the reader in by naming two extremely common things
to lose: keys and time. The enjambment between the first and second lines causes us to
pause and contemplate how ridiculous is this ‘fluster’ that occurs when we lose our
keys. She eases us slowly into her idea: the universality of these two occurrences allows
us to relate and thus agree that indeed, this is not too hard to master and is certainly not
a disaster.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel.
The emotional tension begins to subtly build in the third stanza as Bishop incites us to
further our practise, broadening the scope of our loss. Here, the things we lose are more
related to thought and memory: people, places and plans that, with time, naturally
escape our head and no longer form part of our lives. This is harder for the reader to
accept and the familiar affirmation that this will not bring disaster becomes less
comforting. House keys and an hour here and there seem commonplace and natural
and to consciously lose these things to aid our mastering of losing does not seem too
difficult. Places, names and plans require a larger effort and a degree of emotional
distancing that the second stanza did not call for.
There is a subtle change from the third to the fourth stanza, a perfect split in keeping
with the poem’s rigid structure. Almost imperceptibly, the speaker switches from
addressing the reader to drawing on her own experience. It is here that Bishop begins to
undermine her meticulous structural details and carefully impassive tone. “I lost my
mother’s watch”, she states, an admission that seems to come from nowhere. However,
the casual tone is disappearing; the inexplicable mention of this personal aspect of the
speaker’s life has upped the emotional stakes. As the stanza continues, it becomes
clear that this is a further attempt to demonstrate the universality of loss. The picture
becomes bigger and the distance larger. The exclamation: “And look!” betrays yet more
emotion, despite it’s apparent offhand tone. Now Bishop tells us to look at our losses on
a bigger scale: the houses we lived in – not so disastrous except for the use of the word
“loved” here. Indeed, these were just places we lived in, but we nonetheless also loved in
them.
The first person speaker continues in the fifth stanza as the poet attempts to further
distance herself from loss. She is stepping further and further back and the picture she
is painting reaches a higher geographical level: to cities and continents. Nevertheless,
this is undermined by a wistful tone: the cities she lost were “lovely ones” and, although
she maintains that their loss was not a disaster, she does admit that she misses them.
Faced with this unusual outlook, the reader is forced to ask at this point: if the loss of a
continent is no disaster, what would thus constitute one?
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
The fifth stanza leads us to a brief look at the structure of the poem. The villanelle
allows for a break in its pattern of tercets and tight rhyme, giving away to
one quatrain with a repeated rhyme. Just as the structure cracks, as does the poetic
voice. The final stanza opens with a dash, which could perhaps be seen as an attempt
at a casual tone but in fact serves to slow the poem down here, allowing for yet more
emotion to permeate the final words. The reader is forced to consider this “you”, and we
see how the poem has taken a journey: starting with the little objects, going through
thought and memory, to houses, places and continents forming one huge picture until at
the end, zooming in on and pinpointing this “you”. A “you” with, as we infer from the
parentheses, a personality, a memorable tone of voice and gestures. A person lost; an
irreplaceable entity, in fact.
Here, however, instead of simply demonstrating the pain of losing this person, what
Bishop is doing is showing us how we can try to deal with this. Through the practise of
loss: recognising the little things we lose every day and looking at the bigger picture of
life and all the things we lose that are, objectively, not disastrous, we can help ourselves
to get through the pain of losing the most significant things. In One Art, the poet allows
us to take notice of the natural process of loss that permeates our life on an everyday
basis, and in this way prevent us from losing ourselves in the process.
If we read only the first and last stanzas of the poem we would perhaps find it unfeeling
and indifferent. Nevertheless, the poem as a whole reads more like a sympathetic list of
advice. Just as the act of losing is a natural part of life, as are the feelings of regret and
sadness that accompany it, reflected in the hints of emotion carried by the poetic voice.
Just as we find we can relate to losing our keys and our former houses, as we find
empathy in the description of the loss of a loved one. This idea has its ultimate echo in
the parenthesis in the final line: “Write it!” Bishop tells us, demonstrating how, by writing
her own experience of loss, she finds catharsis and an opportunity to share this
experience and thus perhaps help others to avoid disaster.
