Summary Of The Poem 'One Art' By Elizabeth Bishop

In the poem “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop, the speaker’s attitude is reflected through the situations he has been through and the most evident one is his experience with loss. Through verse form and colloquial language. Bishop conveys the speakers attitude throughout the poem to be nonchalant, ultimately demonstrating that “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” even if it is the loss of a loved one.
In the first fifteen lines, Bishop describes the attitude the speaker feels towards losing objects on a daily basis as easygoing and unsympathetic. The first and third lines become the refrain of alternate stanzas and final two lines of the poem. Throughout the poem, Bishop’s verse becomes a model of repetition. The first line “The art of
The speaker begins to tell the stories of loss when the “practice of losing farther” came. He loses his “mother’s watch, two cities and lovely ones, two rivers, and a continent.” However, the biggest and most significant loss was that of “losing you.” Even though it seems as she becomes more reflective upon this situation there is still a hint of irony because even then there is a “joking voice” saying “I shan’t have lied.” The speaker is still stubborn and thinks that losing is insignificant and easy to get over. In the end, the speaker says “the art of losing’s not too hard to master,” implying that “you” is another object, but this object has more value and it is a small “disaster.
The poem “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop conveys the significance and suffering in the loss of someone. Even though the speaker attempted to put up a front about not caring for the loss of material objects, he realizes that it is painful to lose a beloved person. A person is never prepared for the pain and suffering after a loss and everybody deals with it differently, the title ironically suggests that there is more than just “One Art” to losing someone and that was his one way of dealing with