One Art is a poem taken from the collection The Complete Poems, written by the American poetess Elizabeth Bishop.

By reading the title, I think the poem may be about the street art or an unusual art.

The poem is arranged into 5 stanzas of 3 lines each and an additional one of 4 lines, so it is made up of 5 tercets and 1 quatrain.

Carrying out a more precise analysis, you could detect a kind of pattern: the sentence “the art of losing isn’t hard to master” is repeated so many times (in stanzas 2,4,6 and at the beginning of the poem), that it could be considered as the refrain of the poem; the word “disaster” could be instead a prefect “counter-refrain”, because of its presence in stanzas 1,3,5 and 6. Another feature you may easily notice is the rhyme scheme ABA, except in the last stanza where it’s ABAA.

The register is quite informal, as shown by contracted forms, the imperative form of some verbs and, at last but not least, the very common words, used into everyday speeches. There are lots of figures of speech such as enjambments, assonances, consonances and alliterations. Even the title consists of a figure of speech, a metaphor: indeed, “One Art” suggests that your ability in losing things could be recognized as an art. The prevailing tense is present, just because poetess’aim is to make the reader aware that losing something isn’t a disaster; to achieve her goal, she gives some examples of what she has easily lost and she tells that, although it could sound scary, she was able to “survive”. “Even losing you”, she reflects at the end, “the art of losing isn’t too hard to master though it may look like a disaster”. So while at the beginning she is firmly still on her idea, now she can acknowledge that it might be a disaster. She changed her mind taking the fact of losing the loved one into consideration, the most painful experience.

While I was reading this poem and identifying myself with the poetess, I felt frustration, a sense of impotence and resignation, but also her attachment to all the losses.