ONE ART - TEXTUAL ANALYSIS 2

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 the refrain of the poem and stays stuck in the reader’s mind.

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

The core message of the first stanza is that it is easy to lose ephemeral things (“their loss is no disaster”).

In the second stanza, using the imperative “lose” it is as if the poetess is inviting the reader to lose something everyday.

There is also a comparison of two daily elements, “lost door keys” and “hour badly spent”. It goes without saying that there’s a contrast between concrete, “lost door keys” and abstract, “badly spent hours”.

In the third stanza there’s another imperative, “practice”, as a consequence the reader knows that the poetess is still calling on him or her.

“Names” is a figure of speech, a metonymy, that the poetess uses to refer to people.

For the first time in the economy of the poem the speaking voice makes reference to what she means when she refers to what is not difficult to lose. She makes a list of what she means by non-tragic loss, “places”, “names” and “where it’s was you meant to travel”.

In the fourth stanza the speaking voice uses for the first time the subject personal pronoun “I”, thus gradually getting herself involved in the poem.

Indeed, even when she loses her mother watch or the last three houses she was fond of, it doesn’t create any tragedy.

Also in the fifth stanza the poetess uses three metonymies, “realms I owned”, “two rivers” and “a continent”, to refer to something enormous, not on the level of size but of emotional importance. Indeed, the reader do not expect somebody to own this elements.

The poetess says it is not a disaster, even if the loss makes her miss them.

Last but not least, in the last stanza, which is a quatrain that interrupts the regular pattern of the text mainly arranged in tercets, the speaker address a “you”, 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.

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.

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.

Furthermore, what is suggested between the lines is that that the most difficult element to lose is somebody, not something, possessions or places.