Poetry: "One Art" (Elizabeth Bishop)

Some poems stay with you and even hunt you down if you ever try to escape them, then punch you in the stomach when you read them, no matter how many times you've read them before. "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop is one such poem.

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.

Now, listen to her reading it (from the Voices and Visions program on Bishop, Annenberg Multimedia Collection) (but don't forget to come back!) :

http://www.learner.org/catalog/extras/vvspot/video/bishop.html

Gulp. This is a slow-building Villanelle, that takes a look at what we know to be the common emotional disasters of life and the seeming ease with which they overtake us.

The clear, laconic voice of this poem gives the lines their strength. We are lured into the seeming simplicity of the opening phrases, and don't realize that we are being faced with a ghastly truth until it is too late to back out of reading the closing words. Once we accept the small vacant spots where former familiar objects used to reside, implies Bishop, we should really be able to inure ourselves to increasingly larger losses and become immune to the nostalgia their absence can bring -- "Lose something every day," she says, as if practicing this art will help us harden our hearts or ignore our pain.

However, her sardonic voice creeps into the lines, showing that the sadness is there, no matter how she might cling to memory or the feigned "devil may care" nonchalance of the poem. Moving through time, like moving through space, leaves the past behind. The poem invites us to consider what we have lost to the past; what objects, places, homes are gone. It's easy to lose them.

But it's a disaster, every time.