Disaster in Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art

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Disaster in Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art Art is not life. More, it is a deception, mirroring experience and emotion, but never truly becoming that which it reflects. Art is attractive in that it is a controlled balance between rigid structure, which is too mundane for its purposes, and chaotic discord, which is too feral. Poetry is art. Loss is not. In her villanelle “One Art,” Elizabeth Bishop proves this to be so. The poem itself is an emotive crescendo, and while its speaker struggles to hold the pain of loss within the confines of art, its readers note the incongruity of such an effort. One word prompts them, and fuels Bishop’s crescendo with a momentum, a tone, and a coda; “disaster” impels the poem “One Art.” Fittingly, the crescendo begins softly. The poem’s opening stanza assumes a fairly impassive tone, which transpires from the speaker’s feigned indifference toward the prospect of losing. Though the immediate clash between Bishop’s title and its implication briefly upsets the mind from a logical standpoint, the speaker’s hasty assurance that loss is “no disaster” seem...

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