One Art By Elizabeth Bishop

Analysis over One Art by Elizabeth Bishop ROUGH DRAFT “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” writes Elizabeth Bishop in “One Art,” one of her famous villanelle from her forth collection of poems, Geography III. “One Art,” approaches loss in a covert manner, it’s not taken headstrong nor does it tackle the big issues, but rather refrains troubled by exile, the desire for home, and the loss of love. “One Art” is also claimed as one of Bishop’s most personal poems she has written, following with a catalog of mundane losses and accidents that quickly escalates to a series of disasters, many of them subtle allusions to Bishop’s life (Cone). So let us delve in and see how Bishop crafted this work. In “One Art” loss is all pervasive, with its unexpected self-irony, tells us “how to” deal with loss, to “master” the “art of
47, Schwartz). Bishop uses “-aster” and “-nent” as the two repeated sounds throughout the poem. We’ve got “master,” “faster,” “disaster,” “fluster,” “vaster,” and etc. Then we have “intent,” “spent,” meant,” continent,” and “evident.” So it’s all arranged in the rhymes. The narrative also moving progressively through the poem from insignificant things that one could lose, to much more difficult things to lose, and then finally ending with a person, one of the hardest things in our lives we have to lose and say goodbye too. The whole poems gives of a form of a claim that you may agree with or disagree with, that we need to be good at losing. It is an art that we must master and in fact is “not too hard to master.” By the end however, we can see Bishop admitting it can be a little hard, but the claim is that the art of losing isn’t hard to master. The art of saying goodbye, the art of healing after a loss, this is something we can master and something we can become good at. Bishop shows how hard it is by the time we reach the end In the opening stanza, an arrangement or group of lines in a