The Villanelle

How Elizabeth Bishop dramatizes the art of losing in “One Art” is uncanny. One art is a poem that makes people to think twice before losing something. Bishop overstates in her poem how losing something can be an art. She expresses the art of losing in her poem as if losing something and mastering lost in a way to make it an art can be a splendid act. The poem is regular, symmetrical and falls into stanzas. In a well composed poem, Bishop tries to lie to herself about the absence of pain when she lost things by listing from the insignificants to the more important ones.
Elizabeth provides a suave segue into the final stanzas by her short discussion of places and homes, which help us notice that the poem is actually about the loss of a loved

In addition, its intricate structure gives the fames of it, and the resulting difficulties it can present to writers. ‘’The villanelle has nineteen lines, divided up into six stanzas.’’ The first five have three lines and last stanza has four. The form follows a very specific rhyme scheme. In Bishop’s poem, all the lines rhyme with either "master" or "intent." The villanelle’s limitation does not interrupt Bishop of a conversional flow which makes the poem amazing. To further complicate things, there are two refrains, which are lines that are repeated several times. Bishop sticks constantly to one refrain, which become practically a choir, "the art of losing is not hard to master," and she slightly modifies at the end: "the art of losing is not too hard to master." Theoretically, the villanelle should have a second line like this, that’s repeated throughout the poem. Bishop, however, takes some liberties here, and instead of actually repeating lines verbatim, her second s refrain always ends in the word "disaster" (lines 3, 9, 15, and 19). Bishop’s loosely stays around this meter, and many of her lines have the characteristic sound of iambic pentameter, but she allows her lines to have some flexibility, keeping them at either ten or eleven syllables

Bishop probably was a little wild in her youth, but now, she become into someone elegantly calm and composed. We know that the speaker traveled a lot and has lived in her share of different places. Her experience was perhaps the one that has taught her that no matter how terrible a loss seems, people always survive. Her poem sounds like it wants to transmit a lesson; even though thing seems pretty bad, it is not the end of the world. The phrase repeated throughout the poem, "The art of losing isn’t hard to master" (1.1), impulses us to get comfortable to the idea of loss and to acceptance of it. Underneath this placidly resigned surface, she was transmitting the feeling that she still feels each loss