Loss In Elizabeth Bishop's One Art

Elizabeth Bishop experienced her fair share of loss in her lifetime. Her father’s death, her mother’s hospitalization, her lover’s suicide, her separation from her home — each of Bishop’s most intimate possessions were taken from her. These loses inspired Bishop’s ideology that “[the] art of losing isn’t hard to master,” (Bishop). As the central and recurring theme of “One Art,” this message epitomizes what Bishop has spent her whole life trying to convince herself: the more we practice losing, the more immune we are to the pain that comes with it. Bishop sets the structure of the poem as a villanelle, a fixed form of poetry that brings a cycle of repetition and building intensity. She pairs this firm structure with a cool and collected tone in spite of the fact that the

Bishop begins listing things that have been lost in the second tercet with “lost door keys, the hour badly spent,” (Bishop). By pairing these two vastly different objects, lost keys and lost time, so closely together, Bishop minimizes their individual importance, suggesting that there are much more significant things to be lost (Richter). The next stanza takes it a step further with, “places, and names, and where it was you meant / to travel,” (Bishop). These are human beings and places, both of which Bishop loved to explore, but even losing them will not “bring disaster,” (Bishop) suggesting there is something even more to be lost. In the next stanza, the reader finally sees something personal to Bishop: the loss of her mother’s watch. Ending with a period stops the reader, allowing them to make the connection between this keepsake and its underlying meaning; Bishop mourns the loss of her mother and her memory. Still, the structure keeps Bishop’s emotions in check as she continues the cycle of the poem, reminding herself that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master,”