One Art Elizabeth Bishop Analysis

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master” is repeated in the poem “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop, in every stanza. This repetition is because Bishop is trying to convey to her audience that losing isn’t a hard task at hand. Whenever you do lose you get used to it, and it is never a “disaster.” However, a closer look at the poem and the context within the poem reveals how Bishop truly felt, as well as the real meaning and emotion in the context of this poem.

One critic has said “...Bishop obliquely suggests that her losses far exceed the mere loss of keys or time ;”( Richter) which I don’t agree with. In the first stanza of the poem Bishop is trying to play off like losing stuff isn’t a big deal. You lose things every day so there is no need

Here, Bishop is starting to talk about more important aspects of life. In this stanza she is trying to get the reader to think deeper and reach into their soul, to think about losing places, such as a home, or a significant childhood place, and people. This stanza is meant to really get to reader to dig deep into their soul. Yet, as always, at the end of the stanza Bishop writes, “None of these will bring disaster.”(Line 9) Once again, she is brushing off that losing is not a big deal, and it won’t ever hurt, even when you lose things that have a meaning to

The loss that she describes in the fourth stanza is an actual personal item that she recollects; we feel the emotion starting to come out here. Her mother’s watch was the only thing that Bishop had left of her deceased mother, and although it is a small object, it had sentimental value to her. In this stanza she starts to pause more, which is her sadness for this loss coming out in her writing. “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” is repeated again, which is Elizabeth’s way of trying to shake off her emotions, and put on this tough act as if to say, even though this meant something to me, it still didn’t hurt to lose it.

Elizabeth Bishop tries to convince the reader, and herself, still in the fifth stanza by saying her loss of two cities, two rivers, and a continent, weren’t a “disaster.” Her “art” of not being affected by loss an act that is about to break. The pauses in this stanza are becoming more frequent, than in the last, helping to foreshadow what is to come in the sixth stanza, and the underlying of this