Poem Commentaries: ONE ART by Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art” revolves around the art of ‘loss’. In the beginning, the poem seems to have a light and informal air to it, but as we progress through it, it becomes more serious, but the poet still tries to maintain the light air.

The poem opens with the statement “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” The first stanza is slightly comical, as according to the poet, “things” have been personified. She thinks that she has only lost them because they had the desire to not be found. Thus, she concludes that it’s no disaster. I also think that the poet is referring to childhood, because at that time, when things are lost, one does not put much value to it.

The second stanza progresses into adulthood, where the poet makes daily life sound monotonous and repetitive, to an extent that when something is lost, one looks at it as a problem or time badly spent. In this stanza she wants one to accept the loss, and calm down.

The third stanza opens with the poet telling us to practice “losing farther, losing faster,” like how once a person reaches old age, they begin losing their memories. Maybe in this stanza, the poet is trying to make a reference to Alzheimer’s [a condition where in one’s memory is lost]. And even in the fourth stanza, the poet’s thoughts seem addled and jumbled, and she doesn’t seem too sure of anything. Again, this resembles old age. Since the third stanza may have an Alzheimer’s reference, I think that the poet is referring to someone else in that stanza, and that that person was someone she loved and how that person may have Alzheimer’s and has forgotten her.

In the fifth stanza, she talks about all that she has lost in terms of land—[“I lost two cities… two rivers and a continent.”] She may be talking only in terms of the places she lived, but she may also be referring to all the relationships and societal bonds she had when she lived in those areas.

The last stanza, the poet makes it evident that she has lost someone she loved dearly. Because of the Alzheimer’s reference, I think that she doesn’t literally mean that the person has passed away, but the memories they shared have been erased from her loved one’s memory. The closing lines of the poem—“the art of losing isn’t hard to master/though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.” The last line of this stanza is opposite to that of all the other stanzas, which end in her saying that it’s ‘not a disaster’.  The “(Write it!)” also seems as if she’s forcing herself to admit that this, ‘losing’ her beloved, is a disaster, even though she’s lost so much, and that she didn’t expect that this would be harder than any of those.

The title, “One Art” seems as if the poet was accepting loss as an art, but not too enthusiastically. It seems as if she wants to accept all that she lost and move on.