Poem Analysis: One Art By Elizabeth Bishop

One Art In the poem One Art, the author, Elizabeth Bishop, uses the villanelle form to give structure to an otherwise scattered mind. The poem starts with the loss of unimportant or recoverable items, the poem works its way to objects that are irreplaceable, increasing the apparent grief, all under the façade of isolation from grief. Bishop makes a sort of list, each item with their own meaning. The narrator seems to remain separated until the final quatrain were they begin to break down, changing the tone, altering refrains, and adding parentheticals. The poem begins by saying, things want to be lost, that when they are it is not a catastrophe, that you can easily master loss. I believe the phrase “the art of losing isn’t hard to master” may be a sort of coping mechanism. Since they cannot control the things that are lost to them, they could at least control the effect its absence has on their emotions.

The keys are mundane and replaceable, the only true grief it causes is from the inconvenience of having to find or replace them. The poem says you lose something every day, you should accept the fluster of having to find these lost items. It moves on to nonphysical things, you lose the names of people you knew, of places you were going to travel. Then to sentimental objects like former homes or a mothers watch.

By the fourth stanza it’s apparent that the separation the narrator has with these losses is a façade. There is an almost audible excitement when the narrator is reminded of her old homes.

In fifth stanza the narrator is no longer offering advice, but reminiscing on her past life and some of the “realms” she has lost. The narrator is remiss but maintains that losing them didn’t cause a disaster. This stanza contrasts the previous ones, the narrator admits to missing or grieving the lost objects. It is apparent that the narrator doesn’t quite believe what their saying any