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.
