"One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop

The poem “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop is a lyric poem with narrative elements. The unknown speaker of the poem describes to us his/her meaning of loss. Falling under the category of lyric suggests that this poem requires an effort from the reader in order to grasp the full meaning behind the poem. Moreover, not only are readers required to evaluate it—hence the lyric aspect—but also, they are told small series of events within the poem, making it partially narrative. For instance, this can be observed when the narrator tells us about losing certain things, such as losing his/her “mother’s watch” (10)—this is telling us about something, an event, and therefore, it is narrative.  

            Bishop carefully designed the form, or structure, of this poem. Not only does it flow and sound beautifully, it is thoroughly organized. With the first 5 stanzas containing three lines each, readers are able to jump from one thought to the next easily due to the organization and the A-B-A rhyme scheme within the first 5 stanzas. The last stanza, however, we notice not just a change in the overall structure of the poem, but also an emotional transformation within the speaker—which will be discussed later on. Overall, the form of this poem allows its audience to be able to skim through it and comprehend the main points the speaker is addressing. In order to appreciate the poem on a deeper level, the reader must break it apart—thought by thought, statement by statement—and decipher the speaker’s “hidden” message.

            Clearly, the speaker in “One Art” is desperately attempting to convince readers to “lose something” and that losing things in life is no arduous task. In fact, the narrator in the poem appears extremely calm and confident when it comes to convincing readers just how easy it is to lose things. The speaker talks to us about his/her misplacing and losing things, for example: “I lost two cities, lovely ones. . . . Some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent” (13-14). As the message seen on the surface of the poem—its skeleton, its structure—is clear, it is important to know that what brings this “skeleton” to life are its “flesh and heartbeat”. Thus, the poem comes to life when the audience fully realizes the precise message the speaker tries to convey.

            If the poem is skimmed through, most would agree that the speaker is trying to persuade us to lose objects, cities and people—things in general. But, is the speaker truly trying to convince us of “losing” in life? Or, is (s)he really just trying to silently scream, to reveal us something more behind that main message? What is that “something”? What is the speaker’s purpose? Questioning everything about the speaker and the poem itself are vital in order to understand what is being communicated to the audience. Some of the clues that hint at the “hidden” purpose within the poem can be perceived in the language of the poem. Specifically, repetition plays a significant role in the delivery of this true message embedded in the poem. The words “master” and “disaster” are present in almost every stanza as well as the remarkable phrase “the art of losing isn’t hard to master”. With repetition, the poet is pointing directions to the readers. Perhaps Bishop wants to stress that to master something does not necessarily lead to something positive, but it can actually lead to a disaster, such as it is the case here.

            The reality is that the speaker perhaps took the matter of “losing things here and there” for granted—it was taken lightly. As a result, before (s)he knew it, (s)he lost a significant other (which is the climax of the poem, the peak)—not realizing the pain at that exact moment, but later, when it was already too late to fix. The speaker starts off on a more positive note, but as we move from one stanza to the next, there is a shift in the mood and tone of the poem. Going back to the idea of emotional transformation discussed on the second paragraph, Bishop builds up the emotions as we move along the poem. She starts us off on a somewhat confident attitude—sure and convinced that this “losing” idea works and “you should do it too”—yet as the speaker is telling us how (s)he did it, (s)he realizes what (s)he has done. (S)he has lost everything…but most importantly she has lost love. The speaker says, “I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster” (15)—trying to convince him(her)self that the events were not a “mess”. Towards the end, the speaker looks back and evaluates his(her) actions and says to him(her)self, “Wow, I guess it really isn’t that difficult to master losing what we love…”—it is as though (s)he blames him(her)self for letting that other person go. Notice the break at the beginning of the last stanza (see below). That delay represents thought and evaluation of his(her) actions in the past… Thus, the speaker comes to the realization that her efforts to convince the reader are in vain because losing is way too easy and she regrets doing it and not realizing that she’s let that happen—though (s)he does not tell us directly, we can infer it in the change of his (her) language.

“--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.” (19)