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Elizabeth Bishop's poem "One Art" is clearly about loss. She tells the reader that in the first line: "The art of losing isn't hard to master...." She might have called the poem "One Lesson" instead of "One Art," because on the surface she pretends to be telling other that loss is a natural part of life, something we have to accept and learn to live with. She suggests a sort of Zen-like approach to loss: instead of letting it bother us, we should embrace loss. She then lists losses she has experience in her life. She has gotten past them; losing things does not "bring disaster."
Her first example is trivial -- misplacing one's keys. She suggests that individuals are not so important that they should be upset over looking for a set of keys for an hour. The reader knows already that she is not being realistic: looking for one's keys for 5 minutes is a minor nuisance, but searching...
It's about the loss of her soul mate, someone she loved with all her heart and soul. All the things she lists serve as a comparison for that last, great, disastrous loss for her. She doesn't come out and tell the reader how her heart is broken. Instead, she compares it to other losses in her life.
From that framework, she is right: searching for keys for an hour is nothing compared to losing a great love. However, each loss mentioned is greater than the one before it. The second one is a loss of dreams: she meant to travel, but can't remember where she meant to go now. She suggests that it was not a terribly compelling desire if it was so easily forgotten, or lost. But at the same time, she shows us that…
Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell The publication in 2008 of Words in Air: The Collected Correspondence of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop offers the reader a privileged glimpse into the long and emotional friendship between two major postwar American poets, who were each an active influence on the other's work. Bishop would enclose a poem in a 1961 letter to Lowell, claiming the draft "undoubtedly shows your influence" but also noting
I pulled over and called out to him, while being very conscious how ludicrous I sounded, did he by any chance know of a church where there was to be a poetry reading tonight?" The man did indeed tell Simic where the church was, indicating that poetry can serve as a means to uplift and communicate the universality of human experience. Social alienation and isolation that accompanies the immigrant
What many of these other people have to say about themselves and their situation an about the change of hear they may have now that they have heard Pippa sing could be fodder for a dramatic monologue in the way Browning would later shape that form. The poem covers an entire day, New Year's Day, a day of remembrance and renewal, a day of change from one year to the
The characters of God, Stan, and Jesus are also significant in this epic and because they are considered valuable in their roles in the poem, we can assume that Milton found similar value with these characters in life itself. Through these characters, Milton is presenting not only a hierarchy but also a way in which things should operate. God's supremacy is unquestionable in this realm and demonstrated early in
shape and to create our modern world? The modern world was shaped by a range of events and powerful people. One of the first most influential people was Clovis. Clovis was the founder of the Merovingian dynasty of Frankish kings, and one who defeated the Roman rule in Gaul along with defeating a range of Germanic people, creating the kingdom that is known as France nowadays. Most notably, it was
What has been determined to date is Machaut's masterful use of language and syntax to help amuse and entertain his intended audiences, and in an era absent the Internet, cable television and the popular press, it is not surprising that his works were well received. For instance, as De Looze points out, "Guillaume de Machaut gravitates toward equivocal signs: insomnia, colors that can have diametrically opposed meanings, plays on