One Art Analysis Essay

Elizabeth Bishop’s poem: One Art displays the surface layer, the simplistic response a person would give another person on dealing with a loss, “it’s not hard to master.” Bishop introduces her poem by saying: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” to anyone who would read this poem by the first line it would be conceivable to scoff and say that she’s crazy! But Bishop adds to her argument that losing isn’t difficult because, “we lose things everyday.” Mundanity breed’s comfort, and Bishop attempts to convey the reader to her side of thinking by showing us the mundane objects that one could, and does lose everyday. We “accept” the lost of these small objects and we even schedule the “fluster” and expect the “hour badly spent” on our way to our day activities: she does succeed in proving that the art of losing is not hard to master.
There is almost a level of discomfort in the continuation of her poem, as if Bishop doesn’t feel as if she’s convinced herself that loss is easy. It appears as if her abstract argument cannot be resolved by raising the simplicity by which we lose trivial objects every day. So, in order to prove her thesis correctly she needs to bring in abstract ideas as well, therefore she brings forth losing her “…mother’s watch” which can be understood as a metaphor for the time she had with her mother or even simplistically the memories associated with the watch should mean something to her thus disproving her thesis, but again she answers the end of the stanza with: “The art of losing isn’t hard to