In Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “One Art,” it starts as a “bittersweet, but nonetheless efficacious philosophy of survival but, as Bishop continues in the poem to list the items she has lost, “she progressively adds irony onto that first line” (Sircy 242). By the end of the poem it shows that “disaster has actually mastered her” (Sircy 244). Leaving the audience to believe “even though the poem is about falling away, from disaster, we instead fall towards the conclusion that we realize that the poetry itself affords us a mastery” (Shapiro 61). Additionally, that the poem is “a convincingly drastic approach to the archaic French form. It shows what drabness may for an all-too-golden repetitive form” (Shapiro 60). Even though Bishop’s poem was supposed