Analysis of the poem “One Art”

Reading the title, I expected the poem be about art; I thought it could be about one specific type of art that can maybe be important for the poet.

The poem is organized in six stanzas and it hasn’t a regular patter, indeed the first five stanzas have three lines and the last has four lines. The poem has also the rhymes and their scheme are ABA and ABAA in the last stanza, but in the realty the first A of the last stanza is a consonance, because of the repetition of only one consonant.

In the first three tercets the poetess speaks about general situation of losing, in the last three she speaks about her own experience. The speaker says that losing things/objects is not so important. She says also that, indeed, becomes more difficult when we lose people and significant conditions, for those situations we need to learn the art of survival after a loss, it must become an art for us, something we can do easily, because in life it happens a lot of times to lose them. So, within the poem is contained a suggestion that the poet gives the reader, that she can give because of her experience in the field of losses. In the last stanza the poetess speaks to a “you”, that isn’t the reader but somebody she has lost, this stanza is a direct speech and we understand it from the symbol “- “.

As I said before, the poem hasn’t a regular pattern, indeed the last stanza has more lines than the other, so it maybe contains the most important message of the text.

In the poem there is the repetition of the sentence “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” three times and of the word “disaster”, I think to stick the concept, that is the central one of the poems, and the word in the mind of the reader. There are also some consonance (es. losing further, losing faster) and alliteration (es. Verses 2 and 3, repetition of -th), maybe to focus the attention of the reader on some words. In the test is used an informal language with an everyday lexis, making it easier for the reader to identify with the speaker. In the poem there is the use of past, future and present tenses. The past forms to refer to the speaker’s losses over time, instead the present tenses to show her current nostalgia and regret but also transforms her experiences in universal truths. Finally, there is the use of some figure of speech like the metaphor and the enjambement. The first is present in the title and is used to create surprise in the reader, the second is used to create sense of advancement in the poem (es. Between verses 2 and 3)