One Art- The Good (Review)

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident

the art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster

Karen Press (Creative Writing instructor) had us bring in a poem that we knew that we either liked or hated. I brought in Elizabeth Bishop's poem One Art as one that I liked. 

When discussing it in class, Veronica Neufeld was able to describe the reasons why it was so appealing better than I. I find poetry hard to describe in terms of "I liked it because..." or "I didn't care for it because..." because, to me, it is a personal relativity that makes you connect with this kind of work. 

Neufeld said the poem was "pyramid-like", where the loss of small, trivial things occur at the beggining, like keys or mis-used hours. It then progresses into more personal or universally important things, like the mother's watch, houses, even a continent. All objects or things lost, small or vital, are monumental in the grand scheme of things. 

I liked the use of repitition in this poem with the words art, losing, and disaster. She uses the particular phrase "the art of losing isn't hard to master" at the end of every second stanza, as if trying to convince herself of this or her reader.


I think the tempo at the beginning of the poem is rather slow, but speeds up after the third stanza when she becomes more personal. The last stanza is very intimate, speaking of a lost lover or close friend. The words marked with exclamation points signify her intensifying emotions.


The final line conveys the finality of the loss. The "(Write it) like disaster" signifies shock and a great deal of emotion, which is a drastic mood change from the detached tone at the beginning of the poem. 


I feel that the way she arranged the stanzas, using Neufeld's pyramid of importance, with the loss of realms and continents before the line "even losing you" was ironic. It made me wonder if she was trying to say that losing material objects (homes), intangible or insignificant items will never make  you ready for the loss of a loved one.