ANALYISIS - One Art

Considering the title, the reader expects to be going to read a text about art, like painting or sculpture for example. The adjective one could be symbol that the text is about an important single art. Going on reading the text, we understand that art is a metaphor for the human's behaviour for losing objects, which is not really an art.

The text consists in six stanzas of 3 lines, while the last has 4 lines. The rhyme scheme is ABA, and ABAA in the last stanza ('gesture' that is an assonance), which might be more important than previous five ones, because it interrupts the regular pattern. Moreover, there are many enjambments, which add a discursive aspect to the poem and give continuity to the reading.

The poem is about the sense of loss: the writer wants to tell the intelligent reader that we don't need to feel so sad after a loss because it is no disaster. At start, she writes about what we as humans lose easily, like door keys or some hours, however, going on with the reading, the things lost come more important, ending with love.

In the text we mostly find present verb tenses, because she is communicating her present nostalgia for something lost in the past, expressed in past tenses.

Therefore, the text seems to be a suggestion from the speaker, or even a message for herself. The poetess, writing about the sense of loss, was referring to the losses in her life, which have taught her a lesson, and the loss she is facing and learning from: the separation from his partner. The general intention is to teach herself (and the intelligent readers) to not be so sad after a loss, also after a love loss, though it is the most difficult to overcome.

Last but not least, in the poem, there are many figures of speech, as an incremental repetition, that is ‘The art of losing isn’t hard to master’. Moreover, there is an alliteration and a consonance in the second and third line.