One Art Analysis Essay

In Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”, a speaker expresses the ease in becoming acclimated to the process of losing things. Namely, the poet contends that small, mundane objects like door keys are meant to be lost. These insignificant objects prepare individuals to accept bigger, meaningful losses. The speaker remains unnamed, but is evidently familiar with loss. Because the poem is written as if it were conversational advice to the audience, the poet seems older and wise in regard to the art of losing. She speaks with a sense of understanding and intimate experience, using personal pronouns “I” and “you” (12, 8). The speaker is very direct and yet there are underlying emotions that become clear in the tone and diction.

Most of the poem has a seemingly nonchalant, unworried tone. The speaker continuously reiterates that “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” (1, 6). Losing inconsequential objects like “names” or a “mother’s watch” strengthen an individual’s ability to cope with the loss (8,10). At times, the

She uses the verb “lose” in nearly every line, giving little meaning to all the objects that are displaced. It is not until the final stanza that she uses the word “shan’t,” an outdated term (17). In using such a traditional word, the poet tries to distance herself from “losing you” as much as possible (16). In the fifth stanza, the words are no longer palpable objects, but rather places. Nonetheless, even losing pairs of “cities” or “rivers” and even a “continent,” exaggerations of things in the poet’s possession, don’t produce an effect like the loss of “you” (13, 14. 17). Finally, this “may look like disaster” although the poet previously alleges the loss of other items “will [not] bring disaster” (19, 9). This was the biggest loss the poet experienced. It becomes evident that the physical objects are metaphors for intangible or abstract losses like emotional attachments with another