Elizabeth Bishop: Artful Poetic Structure

Elizabeth Bishop: Artful Poetic Structure and Form

Elizabeth Bishop's poem "One Art" is a poem that makes use of the tightly contained verse form of the villanelle to express a highly emotional topic, that of the loss of a person near and dear to the heart of the poet. The poem begins in a contained fashion, as contained as the villanelle form itself, but gradually the poet's words become more heated, personal, and specific until eventually, in the final stanza the contained villanelle form is deliberately broken.

The poem "One Art" is not about art, but rather about the experience of human loss. The poet makes use of the verse form to compare the loss of a loved one to a variety of experiences of physical loss, such as losing a kingdom. The poem begins in a fairly impersonal, instructional tone, but becomes more intimate until the final stanza is addressed to a specific individual, and to the poet herself.

The sense of contained emotion is evident immediately in the poem's first stanza. The poem begins: "The art of losing isn't hard to master." The powerful word "loss" is set against the crafted use of the word "art." The sense of initially curtailed emotion is reinforced by the use of the negative, as if the poem is trying to deny something, even to the poet herself, namely that losing is in fact, difficult rather than easy to master. The first stanza's ending with the powerful word "disaster" reinforces this sense of conscious denial of the pain of loss.

In the second stanza, the poet takes a counseling tone, as if trying to instruct the reader how to lose things: "Lose something every day." Of course, no one can deliberately decide when to lose something. Loss, by its very nature is out of human control, but the poet, again within the repetitive refrain of the lyric tries to convince herself of the ease of losing, by instructing an apparently generic reader.

The third stanza, which again takes an instructional tone, intensifies the sense of bottled up emotion. Like the first stanza, in keeping with the villanelle structure of repeated refrains, it ends in the word "disaster." However, the references to loss in this stanza have become more specific, such as lost keys. Only in the fourth and fifth stanzas does the poet's personal emotion break into the form of the poem, and the tone become more personalized and confessional: "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." Against the generic repeated line of the first stanza, the first-person narration sounds as if the poet is trying to convince herself, rather than instruct the reader.

Structurally, this sense of the pain of losing is intensified, as more irreplaceable thing are lost by the poet than a hour or keys, like watches and houses as the poem unfolds. The fifth stanza further personalizes and specifies the poet's loss and essentially raises the stakes of what has been lost in the past, as the poet admits she has lost kingdoms and entire realms. Then finally, in the last stanza, the poet's real emotion and purpose of writing the poem is unveiled. The poet turns from addressing an anonymous reader presumably seeking to learn how to lose, as the poet did at the beginning of the poem, to the lover the poet has lost.