ONE ART

One Art is a poem written by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop.

From the title, the reader could think that the poem is going to talk about a form of art, like painting, sculpture or writing.

But after the first lines you will understand that your idea was wrong and the poem hasn't nothing to do with the art in general but with the art of losing.

The poem is organized in 6 stanzas.

The first five of them are of 3 lines each and the rhyme scheme is ABA, while the last one is of 4 lines and the rhyme scheme is ABAA.

There are a few expressions and words used multiple times during the poem as the line”The art of losing isn't hard to master”, that is repeated for four times or the word “disaster”, also used a few times. This repetitions are used to underline the key-words of the poem, the object of the composition.

The tone used is very melancholic, as the poet was resigned of her situation.

The language is easy to understand, with words taken from the everyday register, and it is fairly formal, as pointed out by the contract forms usedalong the poem.

There are also some figures of speech as metaphor, used in the title and illustrating the message of the poem itself, enjambement, used to break phrases and emphasize their meaning, assonance and alliteration, that give to the lines rhythm and musicality.

In this poem the poet talks about the art of losing, referring to the ability to learn to react to the losses that the life reserve us.

In each stanza she treats of different levels of losing, as if she was following a climax, starting with the loss of places and names, then with her mother's watch and the houses where she lived and finally with the loss of the person she loved.

She talks about the loss as something that looks as disaster, as something that brings with her only loneliness and sadness.

All the losses she talks about refer to events happened in her life as her parents' loss, the different houses she lived in during her childhood after becoming an orphan, the continent where she had lived all her youth until she left it to move to Brazil, where she had known her wife and then she lost her too.

After all this pain, she tries to transform the loss into something that looks less painful, forcing herself to write that the loss of love is a disaster, bringing together loss and poetry as one art.