One Art

“One Art” is a lyrical poem written by Elizabeth Bishop. It is a Villanelle poem. It has nineteen lines, divided up into six stanzas. The structure A, B, A (“master/disaster”, “intent/spent”) is applied throughout the first five stanzas of the poem and the last stanza is composed of four lines with a couplet at the end.

This poem begins rather boldly with the claim that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master” (1). The “art” of losing something seems to be the overall theme of this poem. It seems to suggest that there are just some things that are meant to be lost, regardless of how valuable they are to someone, and thus making it not a big deal when it seems to disappear.

“Lose something every day. Accept the fluster /of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. /the art of losing isn't hard to master” (4-6). This stanza seems to suggest that one should practice losing minute things like keys to a door so one could better handle loss. The idea is that if one is able to handle the insignificant losses, then they can cope with the bigger losses. We also learn that more abstract things like time can also be counted as a loss.

In stanza 3, the losses mentioned seem to grow more significantly even though they are still somewhat vague. “Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel/none of these will bring disaster” (8-9). This states that we forget certain places that we’ve been to and names of people that we have met, but it shouldn’t and doesn’t really affect us that much. People constantly forget names of people and places that they have been, and they haven’t been drastically affected.

In lines 10-12 is where things start to get a little bit more personal. There are things brought in such as “my mother’s watch” (10) which seems to be closer to the heart than the other things that were previously mentioned. The poem also states that “of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn't hard to master”...