ONE ART - TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

Considering the title the poem might be about art. The intelligent reader is curious about which art the poetess is writing about, it might be one specific art or perhaps it might be about the general concept of making and looking at art.

Simply giving a glance at the lay out, which is how the poem looks on the page, you can easily realise that there are five tercets and one quatrain.

Even the lay out strikes the reader on a visual level, thus it is a sufficient reason for the reader to proceed with the reading.

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master “ opens the poem and is repeated in the second, the forth and the sixth stanza. It’s slows the rhythm of the poem.

The minor variation “the art of losing‘s not too hard to master” leads the reader to wonder the reason why the poetess has changed the usual expression. It might be because of a outset of realization and resignation by the poetess.

Also the word “disaster”, which appears in the first, the third, the fifth and the sixth stanza could be read as a “counter”-refrain.

The rhyme scheme is ABA, and ABAA in the last stanza, whose first line, “gesture”, is more a consonance, with “faster”/“vaster”/“disaster”, than rhyme.

The speaking voice address a “you”, in the quatrain, who is not the reader, but the person she has lost.

Her tone is almost resigned to the inevitability of loss.

Using the “you” the poetess reminds the reader that loss is an universal condition of every human being’s life.

The speaker is talking about the simplicity of losing everyday things, the reader can evince that by the reference to daily objects like watch or keys, and loved ones due to distraction, loss of memory, lack of time, exile, the end of love, or death.

The prevailing tense used by the poetess is present, it might suggest that loss is a living-in-the-present condition. It exists today, thus as a consequence it exists everyday.

Also the main sentence type, affirmative, and the use of numbers, that give a sense of concreteness, seem to confirm what has just been said.

Furthermore, “marked” punctuation, such as exclamation marks, “look!” “Write it!”, hyphens, brackets or other signal implying emphasis or a change of addressee, “(the joking voice, a gesture I loved)”, slow the rhythm of the poem and stay struck in the reader’s mind.

In light of what has just been figured out , the poem itself can be read as a metaphor: “One Art” may suggest that the art of losing and the art of writing poems are one and the same. We refine our ability to lose things, making it an “art”.

The message suggested by the text is that every reader one day will become master at “the art of losing”, and although any loss may initially be experienced as disaster, you have to learn that life goes on as before.