one art poem thesis

One Art Summary & Analysis by Elizabeth Bishop

Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
Poetic Devices
Vocabulary & References
Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
Line-by-Line Explanations

“One Art” was written by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. The poem is a villanelle , a traditional form that involves a fixed number of lines and stanzas and an intricate pattern of repetition and rhyme. Through this form, the poem explores loss as an inevitable part of life. The speaker considers what it means to experience loss over and over again, and whether it is truly possible to “master” the experience of loss and grief. “One Art” was included in Bishop’s final collection of poetry, Geography III , which was published in 1976.

Read the full text of “One Art”

The Full Text of “One Art”

“one art” summary, “one art” themes.

The Inevitability and Pain of Loss

Line-by-line explanation & analysis of “one art”.

The art of ... hard to master;

so many things ... ... is no disaster.

Lose something every ... ... hard to master.

Then practice losing ... ... will bring disaster.

Lines 10-12

I lost my ... ... hard to master.

Lines 13-15

I lost two ... ... wasn’t a disaster.

Lines 16-17

—Even losing you ... ... shan’t have lied.

Lines 17-19

It’s evident ... ... it!) like disaster.

“One Art” Symbols

Line 10: “I lost my mother’s watch.”

“One Art” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

Line 1: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master;”
Line 6: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”
Line 12: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”
Line 18: “the art of losing’s not too hard to master”
Line 3: “to be lost that their loss is no disaster.”
Line 9: “to travel. None of these will bring disaster.”
Line 15: “I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.”
Lines 18-19: “the art of losing’s not too hard to master / though it may look like ( / Write / it!) like disaster.”
Line 1: “losing”
Line 3: “lost,” “ loss”
Line 4: “Lose”
Line 5: “lost”
Line 6: “losing”
Line 7: “losing,” “losing”
Line 10: “lost”
Line 11: “loved”
Line 12: “losing”
Line 13: “lost,” “lovely”
Line 16: “losing”
Line 17: “love”
Line 18: “losing’s”

End-Stopped Line

Line 1: “master;”
Line 3: “disaster.”
Line 5: “spent.”
Line 6: “master.”
Line 7: “faster:”
Line 9: “disaster.”
Line 11: “went.”
Line 12: “master.”
Line 13: “vaster,”
Line 14: “continent.”
Line 15: “disaster.”
Line 19: “disaster.”
Lines 2-3: “intent / to”
Lines 4-5: “fluster / of”
Lines 8-9: “meant / to”
Lines 10-11: “or / next-to-last”
Lines 16-17: “gesture / I”
Lines 17-18: “evident / the”
Lines 18-19: “master / though”
Line 5: “lost door keys, the hour badly spent.”
Line 7: “losing farther, losing faster:”
Line 14: “some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.”
Lines 16-17: “(the joking voice, a gesture / I love)”

Alliteration

Line 1: “losing,” “master”
Line 2: “many”
Line 3: “lost,” “loss”
Line 7: “losing,” “farther,” “losing,” “faster”
Line 10: “lost,” “watch,” “look,” “last”
Line 11: “last,” “loved,” “went.”
Line 14: “realms,” “rivers”
Line 16: “losing,” “joking,” “gesture”
Line 17: “love,” “lied”
Line 19: “look,” “like,” “like”
Line 1: “art,” “losing,” “isn’t,” “hard,” “to,” “master”
Line 2: “so,” “many,” “seem,” “filled,” “intent”
Line 3: “lost,” “loss,” “disaster.”
Line 4: “Lose,” “something,” “day,” “Accept,” “fluster”
Line 5: “lost,” “door,” “badly,” “spent”
Line 6: “art,” “losing,” “isn’t,” “hard,” “master”
Line 7: “practice,” “losing,” “farther,” “losing,” “faster”
Line 8: “places”
Line 9: “to,” “travel,” “will,” “disaster.”
Line 10: “lost,” “my,” “mother’s,” “look,” “last”
Line 11: “last,” “loved,” “went”
Line 12: “art,” “losing,” “isn’t,” “hard,” “to,” “master”
Line 13: “lost,” “two,” “cities,” “lovely,” “vaster”
Line 14: “realms,” “owned,” “two,” “continent”
Line 15: “it,” “wasn’t,” “disaster.”
Line 16: “losing,” “joking,” “ gesture”
Line 17: “love,” “lied,” “It’s,” “evident”
Line 18: “art,” “losing’s,” “not,” “too,” “hard,” “to,” “master”
Line 19: “it,” “look,” “like,” “Write,” “it,” “like,” “disaster.”
Line 1: “art,” “hard,” “master”
Line 2: “things,” “filled,” “with,” “intent”
Line 3: “disaster”
Line 7: “practice,” “faster”
Line 8: “places,” “names”
Line 10: “lost,” “watch,” “last, or”
Line 11: “last”
Line 12: “art,” “hard,” “master.”
Line 13: “cities,” “vaster,”
Line 14: “rivers,” “continent”
Line 15: “miss ,” “it,” “disaster.”
Line 18: “art,” “losing’s,” “too,” “hard,” “to,” “master”
Line 19: “like,” “Write,” “like,” “disaster.”

“One Art” Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

(Location in poem: Line 1: “master;”; Line 6: “master.”; Line 12: “master.”; Line 18: “master”)

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “One Art”

Rhyme scheme, “one art” speaker, “one art” setting, literary and historical context of “one art”, more “one art” resources, external resources.

The Bishop Archives at Vassar College — Elizabeth Bishop attended Vassar College and her papers are now stored in Vassar’s Special Collections. Visit the Vassar Archives & Special Collections website to learn more about Bishop’s papers stored at the library.

Audio of “One Art” in Reaching for the Moon — A 2013 Brazilian film, Reaching for the Moon, explores Bishop’s life in Brazil and her relationship with the architect Lota de Macedo Soares. Although the movie misinterprets the poem “One Art” as about Bishop’s relationship with Soares—the poem was, in fact, about Bishop’s last partner, Alice Methfessel—the movie includes a recitation of the poem by the actress Miranda Otto, who played Bishop. In the scene, Bishop reads the poem to her friend Robert Lowell.

Biography of Elizabeth Bishop — Learn more about the poet's life and work.

The Drafts of “One Art” — Read more about Bishop’s writing process and how “One Art” changed over the course of 17 drafts in this essay at Modern American Poetry.

"Elizabeth Bishop's Art of Losing" — Read this article from The New Yorker to learn more about Bishop’s life, including the circumstances that gave rise to the poem “One Art.”

LitCharts on Other Poems by Elizabeth Bishop

Crusoe in England

Filling Station

First Death in Nova Scotia

The Man-Moth

The Mountain

Everything you need for every book you read.

A Short Analysis of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘One Art’ is a poem by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79), first published in the New Yorker in 1976 and included in her collection Geography III the following year. The poem, which is one of the most famous examples of the villanelle form, is titled ‘One Art’ because the poem is about Bishop’s attempts to make loss and poetry into one unified ‘art’: to ‘master’ what she calls the ‘art of losing’.

You can read ‘One Art’ here ; below, we offer an analysis of Bishop’s poem.

‘One Art’ : summary

Elizabeth Bishop begins ‘One Art’ by asserting that it is easy to deal with loss. So many things in life seem to be designed to be lost, that losing them should not be viewed as a disaster.

Next, she entreats us to try to lose something every day if we can. It might be lost front-door keys (an item commonly lost or mislaid) or lost time (an hour wasted doing something unproductive). After all, it isn’t difficult to master this idea of losing things.

Once we have learnt to lose these small, insignificant things, we should set our sights higher, or rather ‘farther, faster’: we should forget the names of things, or forget places we have been, or places we intended to visit on our travels. Forgetting any of this, she assures us, will not bring about disaster.

Bishop then proffers a personal example: she lost her mother’s watch, and then the last-but-one of the three houses she has lived in. This, too, was easy: after all, it isn’t hard to ‘master’ this ‘art’ of losing things.

Now the losses get even bigger: two cities, which the poet had presumably left behind. These were beautiful cities she was fond of. She even ‘lost’ two rivers and a whole continent, leaving them all behind. Although she misses them, it wasn’t so terrible to lose them. It certainly wasn’t a disaster.

In the poem’s final quatrain, Bishop turns to address an unidentified ‘you’: she tells this addressee that even losing them, with their endearing jokey voice (a gesture the poet loves), can be lost, the poet can admit without having lied.

She then concludes by reaffirming her earlier statement that it isn’t ‘too hard’ to ‘master’ the ‘art’ of losing things which we hold dear in our lives, although it may look like disaster.

‘One Art’ : analysis

‘One Art’ is a subtle poem whose force derives in part from the ambiguity of the word ‘hard’, which appears in the first of the poem’s two refrains. In the context of the poem, ‘hard’ can mean both ‘difficult to achieve’ and ‘difficult to cope with emotionally’.

Clearly, the former is true but the poem – with its litany of dearly-held things the poet has lost, including a loved one in that final stanza – invites us to question how true the second is. It may be ‘easy’ to lose loved ones – indeed, it’s sadly inevitable that the people we love will die – but it isn’t easy in the other sense: that is, it isn’t easy to get over that loss.

‘Losing’, too, clearly carries several different meanings in ‘One Art’: losing one’s keys isn’t the same as ‘losing’ a continent (parting with it or leaving it behind when one moves to another continent), for instance. Even ‘master’ is carrying two subtly distinct meanings: both ‘achieving’ and ‘overcoming’. One masters the violin, while one has to master one’s fears. These two types of ‘mastering’ are not exactly equivalent.

It is partly because of these fine differences in meaning that ‘One Art’ succeeds where many villanelles can fall prey to deathly flatness: as William Empson once observed, the difficulty with writing a villanelle is to stop it from dying as it goes on.

The various meanings of the words ‘hard’ and ‘master’ mean that each time this refrain is repeated throughout the poem, it takes on a slightly different meaning, becoming both more apt and more ironic: apt because we come to realise how many things we must ‘lose’ in the course of a life, but ironic because we realise that, contrary to what the poem appeared to be saying, it is a disaster to lose many of these things.

‘One Art’ comes to have the air of someone whose shoulders are shaking with sobs even as they wipe tears from their eyes and reassure us that they’re not crying.

‘One Art’ is an example of a villanelle . As its name suggests, the villanelle is a French verse form, yet this French form took its name from an Italian one: the word derives from villanella , a form of Italian part-song which originated in Naples in the sixteenth century. The villanelle comprises nineteen lines made up of five tercets (three-line stanzas) and a concluding quatrain.

As the Oxford English Dictionary summarises it, ‘The first and third lines of the first stanza are repeated alternately in the succeeding stanzas as a refrain, and form a final couplet in the quatrain.’

In addition to the restrictive pressure of these recurring refrains, the rhyme scheme of the villanelle is also tight: aba aba aba aba aba abaa . Bishop innovates slightly with these restrictions, employing pararhyme or half-rhyme (‘fluster’, ‘gesture’) in a couple of the lines, while her frequent use of enjambment or run-on lines prevents the individual lines of ‘One Art’ from becoming too self-contained.

After all, the poem is about how all of these various forms of loss can be unified into ‘one art’. (Contrast Bishop’s villanelle with one by William Empson, ‘ Missing Dates ’, which utilises mostly end-stopped lines.)

In addition to these modifications to the villanelle form, Bishop doesn’t repeat the second of her two refrains in full throughout the poem: only the final word, ‘disaster’, and the general sentiment expressed in the line remain constant throughout. But the repetition or near-repetition of the two refrains serves a very particular purpose in ‘One Art’.

In some villanelles – Sylvia Plath’s early poems using this form spring to mind, as do Empson’s poems – the repetition carries the force of mental paralysis and deadlock: the poet finds themselves returning to the same narrow obsessions again and again. But in ‘One Art’, it is more of an unravelling of a fragile belief than it is the hardening of an inevitability.

That is to say, Bishop begins in a casual yet sure and certain enough manner: it isn’t hard to master the art of loss, after all, so what’s all the fuss about? The poem seems to shrug.

But as the villanelle develops and those refrains recur, we start to suspect that the poet is kidding herself: as she’s trying to convince herself of this axiomatic truth, all of the evidence is leading her away from it.

The subtle shift from the initial ‘losing isn’t hard’ into that closing ‘losing’s not too hard ’ (ah, so it is hard, after all) reveals the fissure that has opened up in the speaker’s thinking.

That final ‘ Write it!’, desperately italicised and enclosed within parentheses for emphasis and isolation, seems to admit, finally, that all writing comes from loss, and from trying to work through that loss. Writing is consolation, and for consolation to happen, something must, after all that, have been lost.

2 thoughts on “A Short Analysis of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art’”

Pingback: 10 of the Best Elizabeth Bishop Poems Everyone Should Read – Interesting Literature
Pingback: 10 of the Best Examples of Repetitive Poems – Interesting Literature

Comments are closed.

Discover more from Interesting Literature

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Type your email…

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop

“One Art” is written by one of the pioneer American poets, Elizabeth Bishop. It was first published in the magazine, The New Yorker in 1976, and later included in Bishop’s final collection, Geography III (1976). This poem is considered one of the most brilliant villanelles ever written in the English language. According to critics, it is an autobiographical expression of Bishop. Bishop wrote this poem during the time she was separated from her partner, Alice Methfessel, four years before her death.

Bishop, in a highly descriptive manner, presents microscopic details of all the things she lost, making it a poem about loss. The poetic voice claims to lose is like “art” that can be practiced or won over, something that can be dazzlingly “mastered,” but that is exactly where the irony of the poem lies. The bold claims she makes as she professes the art of loss are only a meek attempt to understand and internalize her own losses and how to deal with them.

Read the full poem “One Art” below:

“One Art” is often referred to as Bishop’s autobiographical poem and one of her most famous works. Through this poem, she takes readers on a journey of the losses that she has to endure throughout her life. The poem starts with a bold exclamation that losing is an art that is not hard to master. In fact, it is the intention of certain things to be lost and that is no disaster. Losing is an everyday act, similar to losing a key or wasting some hours. It is not a thing to fret over. One should practice losing and practice it as much as one can. It is not just limited to external physical or abstract objects but losses are also very intrinsic in nature.

One can certainly forget names, places, and memories, and this too is not a disaster. As the poem moves forward, the first-person voice is introduced. This poetic voice claims that she has lost her mother’s watch and three houses until now. She goes on to talk about losing ginormous things like cities, realms, rivers, and even a continent. This allegorical description of the losses paints a poignant picture of her sufferings. The enormity with which she depicts her losses is almost hyperbolic. From this point onwards as the poem builds up, there is but one loss that she speaks of, and it is the loss of this “you.” Yet ironically, she still claims that losses are not hard to master and neither are they catastrophic.

Structure & Form

Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” is a villanelle, a fixed verse form with origins in French baroque. A Villanelle has nineteen lines made up of five tercets (three-line stanzas) and concluded by a quatrain (four-line stanza). There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes in this form. Bishop does not closely adhere to the fixed villanelle form. She improvises the refrains but keeps the tercet-quatrain structure intact. In the first three tercets, she uses the third-person, objective point of view. The rest follows the semi-personal, first-person perspective.

Rhyme Scheme

The rhyme pattern employed in “One Art” is ABA, making the rhyme in the first and third lines repeat in an alternate pattern in every stanza. Bishop does not employ fixed rhymes, rather she uses several half-rhymes or slant rhymes. For instance, the words “or” and “master” rhyme imperfectly in the fourth tercet. Besides, there is a mosaic rhyme between “last, or” and “master.”

Meter & Scansion

“One Art” uses iambic pentameter, a metric form denoting five iambs in a poetic line. Ten syllables made up of five pairs of repeating unstressed (short) and stressed (long) syllables comprise this metrical scheme. The scansion of the poem gives a clear understanding of how this meter is used.

The art / of lo /-sing is /-n’t hard / to mas /-ter; so ma /-ny things / seem filled / with the / in- tent to be / lost that / their loss / is no / di- sas /-ter. – Lose some /-thing eve /-ry day ./ Ac- cept / the flus /-ter of lost / door keys ,/ the hour / bad -ly/ spent . The art / of lo /-sing is /-n’t hard / to mas /-ter. – Then prac /-tice lo /-sing far /-ther, lo /-sing fas /-ter: pla -ces,/ and names ,/ and where / it was / you meant to tra /-vel. None / of these / will bring / di- sas /-ter. – I lost / my mo /-ther’s watch ./ And look !/ my last ,/ or next /-to- last ,/ of three / loved hou /-ses went . The art / of lo /-sing is /-n’t hard / to mas /-ter. – I lost / two ci /-ties, love /-ly ones ./ And, vas /-ter, some realms / I owned ,/ two ri /-vers, a / con- ti /-nent. I miss / them, but / it was /-n’t a / di- sas /-ter. – — E -ven/ lo -sing/ you (the/ jo -king/ voice , a/ ges -ture I love )/ I shan’t / have lied ./ It’s e /-vi- dent the art / of lo /-sing’s not / too hard / to mas /-ter though it / may look / like ( Write / it!) like / di- sas /-ter.

The poem begins with an eleven-syllable line, thus having a feminine ending (a line ending with an unstressed syllable). It is followed by a perfect decasyllabic line with the unstressed-stressed, iambic rhythm. The lines ending with the syllable “-ter” are feminine, creating an unrestricted flow to the next line. Besides, some occasional use of trochees marks the shifts in the speaker’s chain of thoughts, such as in the ending of line 5 and the opening of the last quatrain (line 16).

Literary Devices & Figurative Language

Symbolism is a poetic technique in which marks, signs, or words are used to represent abstract ideas, qualities, or associations. The meaning of symbolic words differs from their actual literal meaning. There are a few notable symbols in “One Art”:

The lost “mother’s watch” represents the difficult relationship that Bishop had with her mother whom she lost at a young age, because of her being institutionalized and then her death.
The loss of “names” and “places” also represents a sense of isolation and a loss of identity she might have felt.
Lastly, the loss of “three loved houses” represents her childhood that was spent moving from one place to another leading her to have felt uprooted every time. The use of symbolism features the psychologically complex mind of Bishop.

The predominant irony that is followed throughout “One Art” is that the speaker, in a very didactic and instructive tone, is trying to tell readers that loss is like an “art” and that it can be “mastered” through practice. But as the poem progresses, it turns out that it is to her own self that she is trying to explain the fact as she tries to reassure herself that loss is no “disaster” after all. The poem then becomes a type of lesson imparted by a master or an artist, who has most evidently witnessed a lot of losses throughout her life and has abundant experience. But as the poem breaks in the parathesis—( Write it!)—the readers are introduced to the ironic self of the speaker that preaches the inevitability of losses and has an indifference towards them, but still struggles to accept their pervasiveness.

The speaker in “One Art” portrays all her losses to be of equal magnitude and tries to create an indifference towards each one of them. She simplifies life, but ironically life can never be that simple, a fact remains in the undertone of the poem as she enlists all the things that she has lost. Such complex and ambiguous emotions are included through a tightly restrained form, suggesting irony to be the core of the poem.

Imagery is the use of figurative or descriptive language to create a picture or image in readers’ minds. Stanza three makes use of a number of images, like “cities,” “realms,” “rivers,” and “continents.” These images help readers to imagine something enormous, which is a representation of all that she has lost. The extent of her loss can only be compared to the images present in the poem.

Alliteration & Assonance

Alliteration is the repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of closely placed words. It occurs in “ m aster;/ so m any,” “ f arther, losing f aster,” “ m y m other’s,” “ l ook! my l ast,” etc. Assonance is the repetition of the vowel sounds in neighboring words, such as in “los i ng i sn’t,” “l o st my mother’s w a tch,” etc. These devices add to the momentum of the poem. It seems to bring to the surface that there is just so much that the speaker has lost that she is exasperated, but the restraining structure keeps her from falling apart.

A metaphor is a poetic device in which a word or phrase may denote one object or an idea when taken literally but is used to denote something else, suggesting an association or comparison. The predominant metaphor that is present throughout the poem is an analogy formed between losing as a form of “art.” This suggests that coping with loss becomes an emotional skill that can be mastered through practice. Something that is only suffused to be felt is commodified into a skill. This makes “One Art” a metaphoric verse.

Refrains are lines that are repeated several times in a poem. There are two refrains in “One Art,” and one of them is entirely repeated: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” Bishop is inconsistent about the second refrain, and instead of using it in exact words, she only repeats the words “disaster” at the end of each refrain. The last stanza includes both the refrains.

The repetition of these lines is important. They represent the obsession of the speaker with defeating loss, mastering it, and not feeling rejected. She tries to make sense of the absence that she felt through a retrospective repletion. It acts as intrusive thought occurring when following a course of action. The refrain and rhymes also provide a kind of speed and force to the poem, which in turn has a rather large impact on readers.

The first line of the third tercet contains a repetition of the word “losing,” denoting a sense of urgency or rush. This also hints at the extent of human loss. There is an ironic repetition of the word “last” in the fourth tercet. Furthermore, in the next tercet, Bishop repeats “two” to denote the number of “cities” and “rivers” she lost touch with.

Line-by-Line Analysis & Explanation

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

The first line or the first refrain remains unchanged and is repeated throughout “One Art.” It ends with a semicolon, indicating a kind of pause. This was a deliberate choice made by the poet which instills a sense of confidence in the tone, leaving no room for uncertainties. The claim that is being made here is that losing is an art that is not difficult to “master.” The second line is accompanied by an enjambment at the word “intent,” which introduces a jerk in the initial confidence of the poetic persona. This suggests that it is the “intent” of certain things to be lost. It is as if they want to be lost (a use of personification), yet it is no “disaster.” The second refrain ends with the word “disaster” each time. Bishop took certain liberties in changing the initial wording of this refrain.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

The first line of the second stanza sounds like a command. It states that losing something is an everyday activity. The speaker tells readers to practice it through her tone. The brevity and abruptness of the sentence suggest that she has no patience in clarifying the details. Those who have already experienced the disconcert of losing door keys or an hour spent unproductively can relate to her.

The two examples exhibited are essentially different: the “key” is a physical object and the wasted “hour” is an abstract one. But the suggestion remains that they are both small and unimportant things hence losing them is not so substantial. In the last line, she restates that the art of losing should not be too hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

The third stanza starts with yet another command. The speaker makes an attempt to inform readers about the specifics of this art and how it is to be done: “losing farther” and “losing faster.” The repetition of “losing” implies a sense of rush that the poem takes forth. This suggests a sense of urgency as the speaker further enlists her losses. The loss of keys or an hour is inconsiderable compared to the things mentioned here.

From line eight onwards, the speaker illustrates the losses that affect the mind. These are not tangible. She talks about losing “names” and “places,” meaning the loss of memories. In the ninth line, she reassures readers that even losing such things as those memories and consequently the emotions will not “bring disaster.” It will not be such a grand matter.

Lines 10-12

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

The first line of this tercet indicates a sudden shift to the first-person, personal voice from the third-person perspective. Up until now, the poetic voice seems to be an instructive one, making commands and giving instructions, but the shift in the point of view denotes that the poet is now addressing herself rather than the readers. She uses her own voice to hint at her own losses, like losing her “mother’s watch” a symbol of a loose mother-daughter relationship. Then she makes an exclamation, “And look!”, in an attempt to attract readers’ attention to her losing “three loved houses.” Yet again after detailing these threads of losses, she uses the first refrain that the art of losing is not that hard to learn. The objectivity the poetic persona tries to maintain hitherto sounds somewhat emotional.

Lines 13-15

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

The fifth tercet begins with a statement about the immensity of the things that she has lost. It is greater and far more complicated than losing her “mother’s watch” or the “houses.” She has lost two “cities” that that too “lovely” ones. There is a sense of warning when she says “And, vaster,” because her losses just do not end here. They go beyond her owned realms, rivers, and even a continent. Of course, it is practically impossible to lose such things so such losses represent an emotional loss perhaps, one that is more indicative of the overall sentiment. In fact, the enormous nature of the losses makes it seem almost hyperbolic.

The last lines suggest a split in the chain of thoughts, a perfect ricocheting between indifference and sadness. She expresses her grief when she says “I miss them,” but almost immediately the comma divides the sentence creating a split in her thoughts as she claims her second refrain again, “but it wasn’t a disaster.” One half of her mind wants to grieve while the other half wants to deny it.

Lines 16-19

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like ( Write it!) like disaster.

The very first line of the last quatrain starts with emdash, which alludes to a pause that the speaker is taking before speaking further. After the first five tercets, there is a build-up in the intensity of the losses she had to chew. The emdash allows her a breather before she comes to a kind of certainty about what she has to say. The final loss that she lists is this “you” to whom she addresses with a parenthesis. She declares what she misses the most about this person are their “joking voice” and their “gestures.” The parenthesis allows her to retrospect. She reminisces on this important and the only addressee of “One Art.”

In the next line, she goes on to reaffirm her initial claim about how easy it is to lose and that fact is not a lie. It is most “evident.” The poem ends on the note of a repetition of both the refrains; first the declaration that a loss is not that hard to “master” and then a reassurance that a loss is not a “disaster.” However, the other parenthesis before she finally ends the poem creates a chasm in the final line. She, with a commanding tone, exclaims to herself, “ Write it!”, as if she is urging herself to finish the sentence. This acts as a reference to her conflict and the denial of her own feelings. In fact, it denotes that the only person she was instructing throughout the poem was herself all along.

Loss and Survival

Loss as a theme of “One Art” is the one that is stated most explicitly throughout. It also becomes the central idea of the poem. This piece brings out the pervasive nature of loss, and that it is implicit, almost always inevitable. Bishop elucidates this theme with the various illustrations of losses that occur in people’s lives in general along with the illustrations from her personal life. She claims to lose to be an “art” that can be mastered. The apparent strategy is to actually practice losing more and more to be good at it.

As readers progress towards the end of the poem, what comes to light is that the only way in which losses can be half defeated is through their acknowledgment and acceptance. This is illustrated when Bishop forces a kind of acceptance of her losses when she exclaims—( Write it!)—as if she finally believes that she has been in denial. She is finally coming to terms with it. In this way, the art of losing implicitly becomes the art of survival.

Learn and Practice

There is a reinforcement of the act of practicing and learning in “One Art.” Bishop’s emphasis on the fact that losing is an “art” that can be mastered makes it something that can be learned through deliberate practice. Learning to lose is somewhat a positive take in the otherwise remorseful poem. The instructive voice in the first half of the poem is like that of an expert imparting a lesson to their pupils. As the narrative voice shifts from the third person to the first, readers witness the didactic voice of the poet was after all directed towards her own self. This proves to be an objective approach that the poet applies to her situation in order to make sense of it. Thus, the intricate act of teaching and learning is felt almost as strongly as the act of losing, making learning an important theme and aspect of the poem.

Latent Sadness, Retrospection, and Nostalgia

Through “One Art,” Elizabeth Bishop looks at her life in a retrospective manner. She writes of the many losses that she had to endure in her lifetime. She enlists them within a tautly structured framework of a villanelle so as to not allow her emotions to influence her judgment. Thus, she tries to make sense of them although this objective approach only acts as a veneer to her real emotions. In the ending, she breaks the strong frame with emdash and parentheses revealing all that she has denied admitting. Her sadness, although latent, finds its way back to her through a nostalgic reminiscence of her past:

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. – —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied.

Tone & Mood

What is most apparent about “One Art” is that it presents two kinds of tones: an explicit and an implicit undertone. Both of these tones prove impactful for the readers to understand the psychologically complex idea of loss. The seemingly indifferent or casual tone hides the actual chaos that the speaker tries to deny. BIshop uses a strict poetic form to structure her thoughts in order to check her own emotions, making them not spill out and create a lachrymose mess. However, the minute inevitable nuances give away her real intentions. Her emotions bring to the surface the chaotic and complex nature of her mind.

“One Art” chooses its primary subject matter of “loss.” She enlists all that she has lost and connects with the reader through subjective and objective representations of the losses. The schemes applied by Bishop set a kind of happy-go-lucky mood in the poem. She has a steadfast attachment to the idea of winning over her losses, but their acknowledgment and acceptance are rather difficult. This evokes a pitiful and sad mood in readers. Overall, the mood of the poem remains regretful until the end.

Historical Context

“One Art” acts as an elegy to all the losses that Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) witnessed throughout her life. She first lost her father when she was not even a year old and then saw her mother grieve until she was clinically insane and had to be institutionalized. Bishop eventually ended up losing her mother too in her early twenties. She kept relocating as a child and could not call any particular place her home for too long a time.

Bishop had an exceptional love for traveling and through a fellowship, she received from Bryn Mawr College in 1951, she moved to South America on a boat. She was to finally stop in Brazil for a stay of two weeks but she ended up staying fifteen years. There she met Lota de Macedo Soares and stayed with her until Soares committed suicide in 1967.

Bishop then moved back to Massachusetts, where she took up teaching at Harvard University. In 1971, she met Alice Methfessel, who helped and took care of her in her last years. Both of them traveled together. Their relationship was on its high for five years until Bishop’s behavior and alcoholism got in the way of their relationship. In the spring of 1975, Methfessel got married leaving Bishop alone. Bishop made a will for her inheritance in the name of Methfessel.

Bishop’s life was weighed down by losses and “One Art” is an embodiment of the fact, depicting her life in an autobiographical manner. It took her just two weeks to compose this poem after writing seventeen drafts. The poem was first published in The New Yorker on 26 April 1976. Later the same year, it was included in her poetry collection, Geography III , one of her most positively critiqued works. For this collection, Bishop received the Neustadt International Prize making her the first American and the first woman to receive this accolade. She also won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977.

Questions and Answers

In “One Art,” Elizabeth Bishop portrays the universality of loss, making it both perpetual and pervasive. This occurrence is common to all—an experience familiar to both the poet and the audience. The poet not only objectively tries to accept and acknowledge her losses but also educates readers of its inevitability. She claims that there is but one art that anyone must practice and it is to learn to lose. The title of the poem becomes relevant as she makes it abundantly clear that the only important lesson that one should inculcate is the art of losing, establishing its supremacy over everything, making it one art. Another reason for stating the relevance of the title is in the framework of the poem itself. There is a momentum that is built throughout adding to the intensity and importance of the losses that Bishop enlists. After all the survivable losses that she mentions including the loss of the hyperbolic “realms” and “continents” there is but one loss that cracks her core. It is the loss of the only addressee of the poem, this “you.” When everything is lost there is only one that stands out, it is that one loss, under the cover of the structure, that is hard to accept. Hence, again rendering the title relevant.

“One Art” is an autobiographical account of the losses poet Elizabeth Bishop had to suffer throughout her life. As she enlists her losses, they also increase in intensity and importance, but the restrictive fixed form of a villanelle helps her in keeping her own emotions from spilling. This objective approach used by Bishop in “One Art” acts as a medium that helps her make sense of her life after all that had been lost with the purpose of not falling into the emotional trap. In the end, she clearly forces herself to move past this “you.” So, the logical approach and the objectivity in her understanding of loss as an “art” even when losing the addressee, which was almost like a “disaster,” help Bishop survive it. Thus, “One Art” becomes a medium through which she not only meditates on her losses but also learns to accept them.

The central message of “One Art” is to educate the readers on the fact that life is essentially about losing and moving on. Like any art, a loss can be “mastered.” Elizabeth Bishop, through her poetic persona, imparts this message in her autobiographical account of the losses that she had to suffer. She shows how one must practice losing and how one must lose more and more to be good at it. There is a reassuring message that whatever it is we lose, it is certainly no “disaster.” What also becomes an implicit message is not only mastering these losses but also accepting them. It is only towards the end of the poem that the speaker somewhat comes to terms with her losses. She has to force herself to accept the bitter reality. So, the central acknowledgment of the poem is not to simply master the art of losing but to survive it as well.

Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle “One Art” is essentially about losses and how pervasive and unpreventable they are. The poem is also much more than that as it talks about losing as an “art” that can be “mastered” through practice, incorporating a didactic feature to it. The very first line, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” is paradoxical that is carried through the narrative. On the one hand, Bishop believes that one should learn not to pay extra attention to the losses that occur in life, but on the other hand, she suggests readers practice losing. This intention creates a contradiction that is only consolidated through various personal accounts in the poem. “One Art” also takes readers through the autobiographical depiction of Bishop’s life and all that she lost with time, ranging from mere everyday objects like “keys” or “names and places” to more important things like her “mother’s watch” and “loved houses,” and then to vast, hyperbolic ideas like “cities,” “realms,” “rivers,” and even a “continent.” All of this culminates in the most important thing that she lost, her loved one addressed as “you.” Though it was hard to lose these things, they are after all not a “disaster.” This adds an air of regret to an ironic backdrop, leading readers to sympathize with Bishop.

“One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop brings to light two essential ideas: the first one is that losing is an “art” and the second one is accepting losses objectively. The essential emphasis is on the act of losing as an “art,” which makes it a kind of skill that can be “mastered” with practice. Bishop seems to be bringing all her losses on one single plane. For her, losing everyday objects like “keys” is equivalent to losing the most valuable person in her life, the addressee of the poem, “you.” Bishop lost so much throughout her life that losing further was not any harder than the preceding ones. Hence, this commodification of loss as an act that can be learned is crucial with respect to the poem. Another important dimension that Bishop gives the poem is in contrast with the first idea: the act of acceptance. This is where readers can see her acting objectively. The art of losing then becomes the art of survival.

“One Art” is an autobiographical poem that Elizabeth Bishop wrote as she approached the end of her life. This poem is part of her last book of poetry, Geography III (1976). “One Art” is one of the last poems by Bishop and stands symbolic of the fact that it is an account of certain significant losses that she had to witness. It is written in a tightly structured poetic form called villanelle, which gives her a certain kind of aloofness helping her in understanding her own life.

Similar Poems about Loss

“ Easter ” by Jill Alexander Essbaum — This poem is about a speaker who tries to cope with her past losses during Easter.
“ Splendour in the Grass ” by William Wordsworth — This philosophical poem part of Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode imparts the lesson of moving on with the learnings from one’s past.
“ Love in a Life ” by Robert Browning — In this poem, a speaker tries to find the presence of his beloved in their room.
“ I wish I could remember that first day ” by Christina Rossetti — This nostalgic poem is about one speaker’s regrets about her past choices.

Useful Resources

Watch Reaching for the Moon (2013) — This inspirational Brazilian movie is based on Elizabeth Bishop’s relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares.
Check Out The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 — This essential collection of Bishop’s poetry includes all her published poems, previously unpublished works, and translations.
A Reading of “One Art” — Listen to Hrishikesh Hirway reading Bishop’s poem.
Drafts of “One Art” — Explore all the drafts of this poem, starting from the first two-line draft “How to Lose Things” to the final “One Art.”
Documentary on Elizabeth Bishop — Have a peek into Bishop’s personal life.
About Elizabeth Bishop — Learn more about her life and works.

22 “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop (Villanelle)

Elizabeth Bishop was born on February 8, 1911, in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her father was a prosperous building contractor, but he died while Elizabeth was still an infant. He left enough of a legacy so his daughter, when she came of age, would be free to travel widely and pursue her work as a poet. Elizabeth’s mother, devastated by her husband’s death, broke down emotionally and had to be institutionalized.

Elizabeth was sent to live with her mother’s family in Nova Scotia. She was happy there, but her father’s family was wealthy enough to effect Elizabeth’s return to Massachusetts to live with them. She was less happy there, and she was sent off again, this time to live with her mother’s sister, who encouraged her love of reading, her interest in poetry, especially. Her health was never robust; she would suffer from asthma all her life. But she was always a good student, and in 1934, she graduated from Vassar.

She travelled widely—France, Spain, Africa, Italy—then settled for a time in Key West, where she transformed her travel memories into poetry: North & South was published in 1946. Her famous and much anthologized poem “The Fish” is included in this volume. She would return to Florida often throughout her life.

Bishop moved to New York, the best city for networking and for making the contacts a poet needed, where she would live until 1951. The poets Marianne Moore (1887–1972) and Robert Lowell (1917–1977) befriended her, offered her the emotional support she always needed, and helped her promote her work. Her next book, Poems: North & South. A Cold Spring , was published in 1955. It won the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

By then, Bishop was living in Rio de Janeiro. She had left New York in the fall of 1951, planning a world tour. But in Rio, she caught up with Lota de Macedo Soares, whom she had met in New York. They fell in love and lived together until 1967. Lota had an apartment in Rio and an estate near Petropolis, an enclave for wealthy Brazilians. For a time, Elizabeth thrived. Her health improved, and she controlled the heavy drinking that had plagued her all her adult life. Brazil’s natural beauty inspired her. She was never a prolific poet, but her third book, Questions of Travel , was published in 1965.

Lota was a landscape architect from a prominent Brazilian family. In 1961, she was commissioned to oversee the development of the lush gardens and buildings for Rio’s Flamengo Park, a massive project which consumed much of her time. She also became increasingly involved in Brazil’s frenetic politics. The intensity of her work strained her relationship with Elizabeth.

In 1965, Bishop took a teaching position at the University of Washington in Seattle. She returned to Brazil in the summer of 1966, hoping to recover her happy life there. It was not to be. Lota could not cope with the stress of her work, and she was furious to learn of Elizabeth’s relationship in Seattle with a young woman, Roxanne Cummings. Lota had to be hospitalized, as did Elizabeth, for mental exhaustion. In the summer of 1967, Elizabeth returned to New York. Feeling stronger, Lota joined her that autumn, hoping to revive the relationship. But she was still far from healthy. She took an overdose of sleeping pills the night she arrived, and died a few days later in September of 1967.

Elizabeth reunited with Roxanne and moved her—and her two-year-old son—to Brazil, hoping to resume there the semblance of a happy life she had enjoyed there once. But the relationship did not last; Roxanne and her son returned to Seattle. Elizabeth floundered, but was rescued again by Robert Lowell, who got her a teaching position at Harvard, where he was a distinguished professor.

Elizabeth rallied and wrote some of the finest poetry she had ever written, published in Geography III in 1977. At Harvard, she met the third love of her life, Alice Methfessel. They were happy enough together (except for one dramatic temporary breakup) until Elizabeth’s death in October of 1979.

Read “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop online.

“One Art” asserts that, over time, we can recover from the loss of an object or even the loss of a loved one. “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” the poet says; practice by losing small objects, then build up to the loss of homeland, home, and loved ones.

The key question the poem raises is this: Is the poet sincere or disingenuous? Is she deceiving herself to mask the pain of heartache? Has she really recovered from the loss of the woman she loved? Her advice—that we should practice the art of losing to prepare ourselves for a big loss—seems counterintuitive. We do lose things we treasure and people we love, but it is hard to master loss.

On its surface, the theme of “One Art” is that with patience and practice, we can recover from loss. The deeper theme might be the reverse: the loss of love is a disaster for which there is little or no consolation.

“One Art” is a form of regular verse known as a villanelle. It is a complex and challenging genre. It consists of nineteen lines, divided into five tercets (three-line stanzas) and a final quatrain. The rhythm pattern is iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is aba aba aba aba aba abaa. The first line of the poem and the last line of the first tercet are repeated throughout the poem with, at most, slightly altered wording. The first line of the poem serves as the last line of the second and fourth tercets. The last line of the first stanza serves as the last line of the third and the fifth stanza. These repeating lines repeat one last time, forming a rhyming couplet with which the poem ends.

The villanelle is not a form widely used by poets. Its subject is often personal and emotional. The controlled and rigid structure helps poets restrain the emotion that might otherwise become excessive.

Figurative Language

The first phrase of the poem—“The art of losing”—is an oxymoron, a phrase that embeds a deliberate contradiction to achieve a literary effect. The speaker is deceiving herself, pretending she does not care about loss, and so she refers to it as an “art,” pretending to diminish the pain and frustration of loss.

In the fall of 1975, Bishop split up with her girlfriend, Alice Methfessel. They would reunite and remain together until Bishop’s death in 1979, but the split inspired “One Art.” The “you” of the final stanza is a reference to Alice.

The loss of the cities, countries, and even continents she alludes to in the poem remind readers of her extensive travels and long residence in Rio de Janeiro.

Media Attributions

Elizabeth Bishop, 1934 is licensed under a Public Domain license

Share This Book

National Poetry Month
Materials for Teachers
Literary Seminars
American Poets Magazine

Main navigation

Academy of American Poets

User account menu

Find and share the perfect poems.

Page submenu block

literary seminars
materials for teachers
poetry near you

Add to anthology

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

— Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like ( Write it!) like disaster.

From The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Used with permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

More by this poet

In the waiting room.

In Worcester, Massachusetts, I went with Aunt Consuelo to keep her dentist's appointment and sat and waited for her in the dentist's waiting room. It was winter. It got dark early. The waiting room was full of grown-up people, arctics and overcoats,

I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn't fight. He hadn't fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there

Behind Stowe

I heard an elf go whistling by, A whistle sleek as moonlit grass, That drew me like a silver string To where the dusty, pale moths fly, And make a magic as they pass; And there I heard a cricket sing.

Fork with Two Tines Pushed Together

Let me not lose my dream.

Let me not lose my dream, e'en though I scan the veil with eyes unseeing through their glaze of tears, Let me not falter, though the rungs of fortune perish as I fare above the tumult, praying purer air, Let me not lose the vision, gird me, Powers that toss the worlds, I pray!

That is solemn we have ended,— (87)

That is solemn we have ended,— Be it but a play, Or a glee among the garrets, Or a holiday,

Or a leaving home; or later, Parting with a world We have understood, for better Still it be unfurled.

Newsletter Sign Up

Academy of American Poets Newsletter
Academy of American Poets Educator Newsletter
Teach This Poem

26 pages • 52 minutes read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Poem Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Analysis: “One Art”

“One Art” is a villanelle , meaning the poem is a closed form with set rules. Though adhering to most traditional villanelle guidelines, Bishop takes liberty with the form’s refrain at the end. Villanelles contain stanzas comprised of tercets (three-line stanzas) and a finishing quatrain (four-line stanza). There is also a strict rhyme scheme and there are repeating lines (refrains). The tercets, for instance, use an aba rhyming pattern, while the quatrain implements an abaa rhyming pattern (review the Literary Devices section for a comprehensive explanation with examples).

Bishop strikes a humorous tone early in the poem by mentioning losing items as insignificant: “so many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost that their loss is no disaster” (Lines 2-3). With these opening lines, Bishop places the fault on the items themselves and their “intent” in the disappearing. She bolsters her flippant tone with rhyme; “One Art” has a singsong quality juxtaposed with the serious nature of the poem’s subject.

Get access to this full Study Guide and much more!

7,350+ In-Depth Study Guides
4,950+ Quick-Read Plot Summaries
Downloadable PDFs

Don't Miss Out!

Access Study Guide Now

Related Titles

By Elizabeth Bishop

A Miracle for Breakfast

Elizabeth Bishop

Arrival at Santos

Crusoe in England

Exchanging Hats

Five Flights Up

The Armadillo

The Imaginary Iceberg

The Mountain

The Shampoo

Featured Collections

View Collection

Short Poems

Supersummary new releases.

One art : a study of the life and writing of Elizabeth Bishop.

--> Shaw, Fiona (1991) One art : a study of the life and writing of Elizabeth Bishop. PhD thesis, University of York.

Elizabeth Bishop was as powerfully discreet about the facts of her life as she was about the genesis and motives of her writing. Her life was forged from an orphaned and potentially debilitating childhood and her poetry is implicitly constructed out of this history. This thesis is divided into two parts, prefaced by an introduction. The Introduction discusses the difficulties in defining Bishop's situation: her equivocal place within American twentieth-century poetry, her conservative but fiercely independent position as a woman writer, and the ambivalent intimacy between her life and her writing. She never denied the connections, but neither did she make them. Part One, "Life Study", offers a provisional biography. There is still no published biography of Bishop and my study is based on unpublished and archival material as well as published critical works, memoirs and interviews. I have attempted to situate her art within the contours of her life, as I understand them. Part Two, "Writing It", is a critical study in six chapters of the development of Bishop's writing. The first chapter acts as a bridge between Parts One and Two of the thesis. I t is a reading of her s tory "In the Village", which Bishop herself placed between the two parts of her book "Questions of Travel", and it presents the story as a paradigm of central questions that recur throughout her writing life. These might be described as, on the one hand the effort to recompose landscapes and homes which are fraught with anxiety and dissolution; and on the other, to celebrate increasingly the essentially precarious security she discovered in a vantage point which never ran the risk of arrival or fixity. The other five chapters of Part Two are organized chronologically: they explore her development as a poet by looking in turn at a sample of her early work and then the four books of poems published in her lifet~e. In a short afterword I reflect on the relationship between Bishop's art and her biography.

--> Examined Thesis (PDF) -->

Filename: 305014.pdf

Description: 305014.pdf

Embargo Date:

You do not need to contact us to get a copy of this thesis. Please use the 'Download' link(s) above to get a copy. You can contact us about this thesis . If you need to make a general enquiry, please see the Contact us page.

by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother ’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. —Even losing you (the joking voice , a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Meanings of One Art

The poem “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop presents a speaker teaching the art of losing things fast without inviting adverse repercussions. The poem highlights the main idea of developing indifference to losing things to develop resilience to face major disasters.

Meanings of Stanza -1

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

The speaker states that losing is an art, and it is not hard or difficult to become a master in this art. She states that there are several things that intend to lose themselves. Therefore, one must not take their loss as a disaster. The personification of things makes things clear that even if a person does not want to master this art, things make him a master. The stanza contributes to the main idea of losing things and becoming resilient.

Meanings of Stanza -2

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

The speaker presents a piece of good advice. She says that you must lose something every day. Her argument is that it is necessary to perfect this art. It is because if you lose the keys to your door, you feel flustered. Then your time seems to pass very badly. This shows that this is not easy to become perfect in this art. The advice of the speaker is sane that you must accept the frustration after losing something. This shows that becoming perfect in some art requires practice. This stanza shows the main idea of losing things and becoming perfect in losing.

Meanings of Stanza -3

Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

The speaker presents another idea of perfecting the art of losing. She says that you must lose more things and most of them fast. These could include the names and the places that you have visited or that you mean to travel to. None of them will ever bring any disaster. This shows the sanity of the speaker that she advises her interlocutors first to become masters in things that are harmless and do not cause any disaster. This is the first step toward learning the art of losing. This stanza contributes further to the main idea of losing and perfecting this art.

Meanings of Stanza -4

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

The speaker enumerates certain other things she lost in the past. She states that she lost the watch of her mother and three previous houses. All of these are very precious things and not easy to forget. However, she has deduced a lesson from these losses, which is that it is not hard to master the art of losing things. This stanza further highlights the main idea of resilience and evolving the strength to tolerate losses.

Meanings of Stanza -5

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

The speaker states that she has lost two cities that she used to love more than any other place. The city was more vast than the other. She owned a realm that she lost and, with it, two rivers and even a whole continent. Now the situation is that she often misses all of them, but this is not a disaster for her. She can easily tolerate such things. Therefore, her advice is that the readers must learn the art of losing. This stanza contributes to the main idea of losing things and learning to tolerate the losses.

Meanings of Stanza -6

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

The speaker cuts a joke on the readers, saying that she is now a master in the art of losing and that she can lose even her friend. She says that although she is joking, she is serious as she can now lose the interlocutor as well. Therefore, it is clear that this art is very easy to learn. A person only needs practice. Although it seems that it is hard to master it as it seems a disaster, yet it is not that hard. This stanza completes the main idea of losing things and then becoming perfect in this art through practice.

Summary of One Art

Popularity of “One Art ”: Written by Elizabeth Bishop, a famous American poet, and short story writer, “One Art” is a marvelous piece about losing and forgetting important. It was first published in 1976. The poem is about exercising the art of losing to catch up with a healthy pace of life. It also reminds us to cope with the losses we face in life no matter how big or small they are.
“One Art”, As a Representative of Loss: The poem presents an autobiographical glimpse of the speaker’s life about the things and people she has lost in life. The speaker catalogs the things she has lost and explains that the art of losing is not really hard to master. Instead, it is a creative venture that enables her to get over those graves. Therefore, she has mastered this art to spend a healthy life. Also, she has learned these tactics through bitter experiences. However, what enchants the readers is the way she presents the idea of losing.
Major Themes in “One Art ”: Losing, acceptance, and sadness are the major themes found in the poem, incorporated with powerful language and other literary elements. The poet’s message includes that losing something or someone does not bring disaster. She details her own losses to support her idea that the art of losing teaches us how to come out of precarious situations and be happy.

Analysis of Literary Devices in One Art

literary devices are tools that enable writers to present their ideas, emotions, and feelings with the use of these devices. Elizabeth also used some literary elements in this poem. The analysis of some of the literary devices used in this poem is given below.

Alliteration : Alliteration is the repetition of consonant sounds in the same line such as the sound of /l/ and /f/ in “Then practice losing farther, losing faster” and the sound of /l/ in “though it may look like (Write it!) Like disaster.”
Imagery : Imagery is used to make readers perceive things with their five sense. For example, “of lost door keys, the hour badly spent”, “I lost my mother’s watch. And look! My last,” and “next-to-last, of three loved houses went.”
Enjambment : It is defined as a thought or clause that does not come to an end at a line break rather moves over the next line. For example,

“I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went.”

Symbolism : Symbolism means the use of symbols to signify ideas and qualities by giving them symbolic meanings different from their literal meanings. “Lost door keys” and “watch” symbolize the hours misspent in life. “Watch” also symbolizes her relationship with her mother, while “You” is the symbol of her lost love.
Irony : Irony is a figure of speech in which words are used in such a way that their intended meaning is different from the actual meanings of the words . She uses this device in the opening of the last stanza, “ Even losing you.” The speaker has used an ironic tone for her loss, that even losing her love was not hard to master.
Personification : Personification is to give human qualities to non-human things. Poet has personified her lost objects as if they have a purpose. For example,

“so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.”

Assonance : Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds in the same line, such as the sound of /o/ and /a/ in “the art of losing’s not too hard to master”.
Metaphor : It is a figure of speech in which an implied comparison is made between the objects that are different. There is only one metaphor used in this poem. It is used in the final stanza where it is stated as, “—Even losing you” Here, “you” is the metaphor for the speaker’s lost happiness.

Analysis of Poetic Devices in “One Art”

Poetic and literary devices are the same, but a few are used only in poetry. Here is the analysis of some of the poetic devices used in this poem.

Stanza : Stanza is a poetic form of some lines. There are six stanzas in this poem.
Terza Rima : Terza rima is a three-lined stanza borrowed from Italian poetry. There are five three-lined stanzas in the poem.
Quatrain : A quatrain is a four-lined stanza borrowed from Persian poetry. Here, the last stanza is a quatrain.
Rhyme Scheme : The rhyme scheme followed by the entire poem is ABA ABAA.
Iambic Pentameter : It is a type of meter consisting of five iambs . This poem comprises iambic pentameter such as, “The art of los ing is n’t har d to master ”.
Repetition : There is a repetition of the line “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” has created a musical quality in the
Refrain : The lines that are repeated again at some distance in the poems are called a refrain . The line, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” is repeated with the same words. It has become a refrain as it has been repeated in all six stanzas.

Quotes to be Used

The lines stated below can be used when talking about any personal loss and to console someone.

“I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”

Mother to Son
My Last Duchess
She Walks in Beauty
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
O Captain! My Captain!
The Waste Land
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
A Dream within a Dream
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
The New Colossus
Death, Be Not Proud
“Hope” is the Thing with Feathers
Dulce et Decorum Est
When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be
Love’s Philosophy
I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Little Bo-Peep
A Poison Tree
Pied Beauty
God’s Grandeur
My Papa’s Waltz
To His Coy Mistress
Ode to the West Wind
When You Are Old
The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls
Thanatopsis
Home Burial
Mary Had a Little Lamb
Nothing Gold Can Stay
In the Bleak Midwinter
The Chimney Sweeper
Still I Rise
See It Through
The Arrow and the Song
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
To an Athlete Dying Young
Success is Counted Sweetest
Goblin Market
Lady Lazarus
The Twelve Days of Christmas
On Being Brought from Africa to America
Jack and Jill
Much Madness is Divinest Sense
Little Boy Blue
On the Pulse of Morning
From Endymion
O Me! O Life!
Insensibility
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
A Bird, Came Down the Walk
To My Mother
My Life Had Stood – a Loaded Gun
In the Desert
Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now
Neutral Tones
Blackberry-Picking
Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind
Some Keep the Sabbath Going to Church
On My First Son
We Are Seven
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
The Song of Wandering Aengus
Sonnet 55: Not Marble nor the Gilded Monuments
Frost at Midnight
There’s a Certain Slant of Light
To a Skylark
The Haunted Palace
Composed upon Westminster Bridge
Concord Hymn
In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 27
New Year’s Day
Song: To Celia
Love Among The Ruins
An Essay on Man: Epistle I
Carrion Comfort
Que Sera Sera
The Hunting of the Snark
After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes
The Black-Faced Sheep

19 Lines That Turn Anguish Into Art

By Dwight Garner and Parul Sehgal June 18, 2021

Share full article

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like ( Write it!) like disaster.

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. I lost two cities , lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like ( Write it!) like disaster.

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. —Even losing you ( the joking voice, a gesture I love ) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like ( Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop’s 1976 poem “One Art” is, deservedly, among the most revered in the English language.

It’s a poem about loss — about the capacity to endure misfortune and grief.

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” it famously begins.

In the second stanza the speaker encourages us to get used to life’s subtractions.

It’s as if we’re being offered friendly advice. Perhaps this will be a tutorial.

The speaker casually lists some of the things people lose all the time. Small things.

In the third stanza, the losses mount.

And we’re pushed to confront other, heavier types of loss. Places vanish. So do names.

Still, the speaker remains cool and detached.

But a subtle change occurs in the next stanza.

The speaker has begun to draw from personal experience, and the poem begins to warm.

The exclamation — “And look!” — is full of feeling, and brings us closer to the speaker.

As the poem continues, the losses grow larger: a house now …

a pair of cities …

two rivers and a continent.

The final stanza opens with a dash. It’s an unexpected turn.

Suddenly the speaker is addressing someone new: a more specific “you.”

We realize that the speaker is wrestling with the loss of a loved one.

It’s a loss so deep, it can barely be acknowledged. The speaker strains to write the words.

Bishop was in her mid-60s when she wrote “One Art.” She started composing it during a period of separation from her partner Alice Methfessel.

Bishop wasn’t a confessional poet. She was a master at containing and concealing emotion.

So how did this relatively buttoned-up poet come to write such a moving poem — one that still has the power to make many of its readers weep?

Bishop’s life was marked by tragedy. Her father died when she was 8 months old. When Bishop was 5, her mother was confined permanently to a mental asylum.

She was a veritable orphan, living at different times with various members of her family.

Her first great love was Lota de Macedo Soares, a Brazilian landscape designer and architect.

They were together for 17 years, living in Brazil. In 1967, Soares committed suicide, at 57.

Three years later Bishop met Methfessel, who was three decades younger. For Bishop, who was in ill health, it was an obsessive love.

It was a tragedy for Bishop when, in 1975, Methfessel met someone else and left her. (They later reunited.)

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Bishop didn’t often include autobiographical details in her writing.

She did not want to join what she called the “school of anguish.” She valued the distance between life and art.

For her, it was the exquisite compression and technical precision of poetry that appealed. Bishop had enormous verbal ingenuity, and she was a master of focus, diction and tone.

She turned to the villanelle, a highly formal verse structure, for “One Art.” Villanelles are 19 lines long and consist of five three-line stanzas …

followed by one four-line stanza …

with two elements that repeat throughout.

There’s something magical about villanelles. They can’t be made to sound conversational. Because of the repetitions they contain, they have an incantatory quality — at times obsessional and haunted.

Bishop’s poem is among the best-known and most beautiful villanelles in English, but there are others you may know.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night. Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”…

builds the villanelle’s repetitions into a drumbeat against mortality.

The poem’s end rhymes — night / light / right / bright / flight / sight / height — are stark, unwavering and urgent.

Mad Girl’s Love Song by Sylvia Plath I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. (I think I made you up inside my head.) The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, And arbitrary blackness gallops in: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.) God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade: Exit seraphim and Satan’s men: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I fancied you’d return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head.) I should have loved a thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

In “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” Sylvia Plath used the form, beautifully, to explore unrequited love. (What is sometimes said to be the first villanelle — the Renaissance poem “J’ay perdu ma tourterelle” — was also about a lost beloved. It translates to “I have lost my turtledove.”)

Plath’s repetitions are more elegiac than Thomas’s, but they are similarly insistent …

or perhaps even compulsive — the words of a speaker unhinged by love.

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master *though it may look like ( Write it!) like disaster.

It makes sense, then, that for “One Art” — a poem about love and loss — Bishop would turn to this form.

The phrase “the art of losing isn’t hard to master” becomes the poem’s memorable refrain.

But “One Art” departs from tradition in a few notable ways. In an ordinary villanelle, you’d expect each of these lines to be identical.

Instead, Bishop slightly modifies them each time.

And the end rhymes, which in Thomas were so relentlessly perfect, here are sometimes slant — the sounds of words like “fluster” and “gesture” not quite lining up.

All these choices make for a relatively loose, slippery villanelle.

They feel especially pointed in a poem that begins with a claim about mastery. Maybe mastery is not such a simple thing, after all.

“One Art” didn’t start as a villanelle. In Bishop’s drafts, we can see the poem take shape.

It was written over two weeks, which was quick for her. It began with a prose-heavy first draft, which had several possible titles.

It came to her easily, like writing a letter, and made clear references to Methfessel — an “average-sized” person with “blue eyes” and “fine hands.”

Over more than a dozen drafts, we can see how Bishop transmuted the personal into something larger. As she revises, Methfessel’s presence flickers.

In Draft Two, Bishop has found her first line …

but there is scant mention of Methfessel.

By Draft 10 …

there are cities, a cape and a continent …

and Methfessel’s blue eyes have reappeared.

In Draft 11 …

the “aster” eyes remain.

And it is the loss of those eyes that makes a liar of the speaker.

The speaker has boasted of the ability to master any loss; this one, we’re told, will prove the exception.

By Draft 14, the line has changed:

“These are not lies,” the speaker claims.

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. — Even losing you ( the joking voice, a gesture I love ) I sha n’t have lied. I t’s evident the art of losin g’s not too hard to master though it may look like ( Write it !) like disaster.

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys , the hour badly spent . The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places , and names , and where it was you meant to travel . None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother’s watch . And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. I lost two cities , lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers , a continent . I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like ( Write it!) like disaster.

In the finished poem, the blue eyes are gone.

Methfessel remains only as a “joking voice, a gesture I love.”

The speaker anticipates losing these, but tells us this loss can be mastered too.

But while the speaker tells us one thing, the poem shows us how hard this will be.

The strictures of the villanelle suggest what the speaker cannot or will not explicitly say: that mastery and disaster are woven together and can’t easily be disentangled.

In the last stanza, the steady refrain, “the art of losing isn’t hard to master,” changes slightly, but crucially.

That “too” is new — a small concession, a sign of uncertainty.

The structure is breaking, and so is the poetic voice. A storm is blowing through.

The composure of the preceding stanzas is lost in a rush of parentheticals and contractions.

“Shan’t,” a formal word, almost feels desperate here — a paltry attempt at keeping up appearances, holding things together.

The italicized imperative feels like a final crack in the facade …

as those repeated, stuttering “likes” reduce the speaker to a kind of faltering inarticulacy.

It’s almost as if we are watching the poem being written in real time, the speaker forcing the final word, “disaster,” onto the page.

“One Art” is the only villanelle that Bishop ever published. “I’m afraid it’s a sort of tear-jerker,” she admitted to a friend in a letter.

Over 19 lines, the speaker has made an inventory of losses — concrete and abstract, large and small.

But the experience of reading it exceeds their simple accounting.

Bishop considered many titles: “How to Lose Things,” “The Gift of Losing Things,” “The Art of Losing Things” —

A gift or a loss? Mastery or disaster? Which is it?

Perhaps both, perhaps neither.

Perhaps all one.

Produced by Erica Ackerberg, Alicia DeSantis, Nick Donofrio, Gabriel Gianordoli, Tala Safie and John Williams.

ONE ART: a journal of poetry

(Write it!)

ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of March 2024

~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of March 2024 ~

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Donna Hilbert
Terri Kirby Erickson
Nancy Huggett
Meredith Stewart Kirkwood
Timothy Green
Wendy Kagan
Andrea Potos
Robert Nordstrom

Published by ONE ART

View all posts by ONE ART

UTSA ITC, San Antonio’s Mexican Consulate partner on National Poetry Month exhibit

APRIL 1, 2024 — In observance of National Poetry Month, the UTSA Institute of Texan Cultures (ITC), the UTSA Libraries Art Collection and the Mexican Consulate in San Antonio will host an exhibit by acclaimed former San Antonio Poet Laureate Octavio Quintanilla . The exhibit will be on display at the Mexican Cultural Institute ’s Diego Rivera Gallery throughout the month of April.

The exhibit will showcase Quintanilla's "Frontextos," a collection of visual poems blending text and imagery on canvas. Curated by UTSA Art Specialist Arturo Infante Almeida , the selection of works presents a journey into Quintanilla's childhood memories expressed in vibrant colors and intricate mark-making.

Almeida, who has long admired Quintanilla’s artwork, saw a synergy between the poet’s creations and the spirit of National Poetry Month.

“Octavio combines paint, canvas and language in his work ,” Almeida said. “With this fusion of poetry and painting, he breaks free from the usual rules of art and storytelling.”

Quintanilla conceptualized “Frontextos” in 2018.

“The only thing I can say is that these ‘Frontextos’ want to be seen, they want to be read and they want to be heard,” said Quintanilla about the collection.

An artist's reception is scheduled for 6 to 9 p.m. on Wednesday, April 17, at the Mexican Cultural Institute that is free and open to the public. Attendees will have the opportunity to delve deeper into Quintanilla's world through readings and discussions led by the poet.

“The collaboration between our institutions is a testament to the power of art in fostering cross-cultural understanding and appreciation,” said Monica Perales , ITC associate vice provost. “By showcasing Quintanilla's multidimensional contributions to the literary and visual arts, this exhibition will honor his Texan and Mexican heritage and will spark dialogue and inspiration for generations to come.”

The mission of the UTSA Institute of Texan Cultures is to give voice to the experiences of people from across the globe who call Texas home, providing insight into our past, present, and future.

— James Benavides

UTSA Today is produced by University Communications and Marketing , the official news source of The University of Texas at San Antonio. Send your feedback to [email protected] . Keep up-to-date on UTSA news by visiting UTSA Today . Connect with UTSA online at Facebook , Twitter , Youtube and Instagram .

Automate Your Citations With EndNote

Learn to use the simple but powerful features of EndNote®, a citation management tool. In this hands-on workshop, participants will learn to setup an EndNote library, save references and PDFs, and automatically create and edit a bibliography.

Simplifying Citations With Zotero

Learn to use Zotero®, a citation manager that can help you store and organize citations you find during your research. Zotero can generate bibliographies in various styles, insert in-text citations and allow you to share sources with collaborators.

Graduate Student Appreciation Week Poster Competition

Our GSAW Research Symposium begins with lunch and a Poster Presentation Competition. Faculty, staff, and graduate students are welcome to attend and review the exceptional research from UTSA's best and brightest.

Graduate Student Appreciation Week Keynote and Scholarship Exhibition

Hear from UTSA doctoral candidate in environmental science, Andre Felton, as he discusses best practices to discuss scholarly research in non-academic settings. Our 2023 Three Minute Thesis (3MT) winners will also share their winning presentations.

Career-a-PALUTSA

Join this fun event if you want resume and interview resources, a job or internship, a snow cone from Kona Ice and to socialize.

Public Health Journeys: Empowering Communities, Changing Lives

In partnership with San Antonio Metro Health, join us for a special lecture series during Public Health week! An esteemed panel will discuss the job market’s impact on public health departments in Texas municipalities.

Campus Forum: Shaping UTSA's Future in AI, Cyber, Computing, and Data Science

The Task Force for the Shaping the Future of Artificial Intelligence, Cyber, Computing, and Data Science at UTSA initiative will hold a virtual Campus Forum to discuss their findings in Phase I (data gathering). UTSA faculty, staff and students will have an opportunity to ask questions and share ideas before the Task Force moves into Phase II.

Submit an Event

University of Texas at San Antonio receives ‘transformational’ $40M gift

Utsa’s mission.

The University of Texas at San Antonio is dedicated to the advancement of knowledge through research and discovery, teaching and learning, community engagement and public service. As an institution of access and excellence, UTSA embraces multicultural traditions and serves as a center for intellectual and creative resources as well as a catalyst for socioeconomic development and the commercialization of intellectual property - for Texas, the nation and the world.

UTSA’s Vision

To be a premier public research university, providing access to educational excellence and preparing citizen leaders for the global environment.

UTSA’s Core Values

We encourage an environment of dialogue and discovery, where integrity, excellence, inclusiveness, respect, collaboration and innovation are fostered.

UTSA’S Destinations

UTSA will be a model for student success
UTSA will be a great public research university
UTSA will be an innovative place to work, learn and discover

UTSA is a proud Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) as designated by the U.S. Department of Education .

Our Commitment to Inclusivity

The University of Texas at San Antonio, a Hispanic Serving Institution situated in a global city that has been a crossroads of peoples and cultures for centuries, values diversity and inclusion in all aspects of university life. As an institution expressly founded to advance the education of Mexican Americans and other underserved communities, our university is committed to promoting access for all. UTSA, a premier public research university, fosters academic excellence through a community of dialogue, discovery and innovation that embraces the uniqueness of each voice.

Featured Topics

Featured series.

A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts.

Explore the Gazette

Read the latest.

Eunice Chon, Kelsey Biddle, Selena Gonzalez, and Landon Hollingsworth.

Navigating Harvard with a non-apparent disability

John Harvard statue wearing eclipse glasses.

Yes, it’s exciting. Just don’t look at the sun.

College accepts 1,937 to Class of 2028

The stories behind the theses.

Collage featuring Madeline Ranalli, Francisco Marquez, Cindy Tian, Rivers Sheehan, Isabel Haro, and Audrey “Rey” Chin.

Photo illustration by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff

Eileen O’Grady, Christy DeSmith, Anne Manning

Harvard Staff Writers

Six students share their inspirations and outcomes

From African baobabs to virtual reality, here is a closer look at six thesis projects Harvard students undertook this year.

In the suburbs

Madeline Ranalli is pictured alongside a mural promoting Nonantum, one of 13 villages within her hometown of Newton, Massachusetts.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

In leafy suburbs across the U.S., residents have rallied to block affordable housing from their neighborhoods.

“A lot of the resistance comes in the form of people saying, ‘Look what this development is going to do to the trees,’” noted Madeline Ranalli ’23.

The government concentrator (with a secondary in energy and environment ) used her senior thesis to examine how these communities wield environmentalism in opposition to multifamily residential developments.

“There’s this misconception that the more green you see, the more environmentally friendly a place is,” Ranalli explained. “But the way a community is designed can actually undermine the environmental benefits of those natural resources.”

The thesis analyzes four car-centric suburbs in California’s Bay Area, where the shortage of affordable housing is especially stark. The region is the birthplace of mainstream American environmentalism and has a history of resistance to multifamily housing. But it’s also a place where lawmakers are passing leading-edge legislation to bolster affordability and density.

Ranalli conducted dozens of in-person interviews, and worked with the Harvard Digital Lab for the Social Sciences to survey the nationwide frequency of using environmentalism to oppose land use that would actually reduce carbon footprints.

“This is by no means unique to California,” said Ranalli, who grew up observing similar rhetoric in her hometown of Newton, Massachusetts. “It’s very much a phenomenon in affluent, Democratic suburbs.”

While conducting research, Ranalli, now a legislative intern with the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, discovered “The Environmental Protection Hustle” (1979) by the late MIT urban planning professor Bernard J. Frieden , which helped inform her argument that environmentalism is more than an ideology about the importance of protecting natural resources.

“It’s also a very legitimate political strategy that can be employed very successfully to achieve certain ends,” Ranalli said.

Across the savannas

Audrey “Rey” Chin in Mozambique studying baobab trees.

Courtesy photo

Last summer, Audrey “Rey” Chin ’24 hiked 125 miles across dense savanna in Mozambique, painstakingly collecting data from more than 100 trees that make up a delicate, changing ecosystem.

An Environmental Science and Public Policy program concentrator, Chin wrote her senior thesis on the distribution and vulnerability of African baobabs, the largest fruit-bearing trees on the planet, which carry both ecological and cultural significance for the region. Elephants use these iconic trees as nutrient sources, stripping their bark, extracting water, and eating them. In doing so, they spread the seeds to help the trees reproduce.

Chin wrote her senior thesis on the distribution and vulnerability of African baobabs.

Chin’s thesis integrates her field study with remote sensing data to evaluate the extent to which landscape variables, including elephants, affect the health of baobabs. Chin is conducting the research in the lab of Andrew Davies , assistant professor of organismic and evolutionary biology.

“I think [the project] is ultimately about trying to find a way to balance the conservation priorities of the two species, and understand the interaction that’s happening,” she said.

The remote Karingani Game Reserve in southern Mozambique, where Chin and classmate/labmate Hannah Adler ’25 conducted the field work, is a test bed for understanding the current level of elephant utilization of the trees, and how that relationship could inform stewardship and conservation practices for years to come. The area came under official protection in 2017. Since then, migration from nearby Kruger National Park as well as anti-poaching and landscape restoration measures have led to a surge in the elephant population.

“The opportunity to witness the biodiversity and interconnectivity of different species was probably the most awe-inspiring part of the project,” Chin said.

In the workshop

Francisco Marquez alongside a prototype bike.

Francisco Marquez with his prototype bicycle.

Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Francisco Marquez ’24 had always ridden bicycles, but it was pandemic-fueled restlessness during his freshman year that led the mechanical engineering concentrator to learn how to build them.

Now the de facto bike mechanic of his friend group, Marquez pursued a senior capstone project that tackled a perennial problem for two-wheeled enthusiasts like him: size.

“Because I’m a fairly large person, most bikes don’t fit me,” said Marquez, who is 6 foot 4. “I also have a bunch of friends who are very small, and they also can’t find a bike that really fits them. I decided to try to make a bike that could fit everybody.”

Marquez designed and built a modular bicycle frame with a shape and size that can be adjusted to fit very short people, very tall people, and everyone in between. It also allows children to grow into their wheels.

“It could even be something that you buy for a teenager, that they can then use as they grow into adulthood,” he said.

Simplifying the frame into standard components such as top tube, down tube, and fork, Marquez redesigned each piece with unlocking mechanisms using joints and pins, allowing for rotating, loosening, and retightening. Manufacturing was no simple task; it took a year’s worth of testing to find the right materials and configuration for a bike that could be adjusted easily yet remain reliably rigid during use. He settled upon a retrofit of a vintage steel-framed bicycle and created his own custom parts. Throughout the process, Marquez picked up skills like welding and spent many hours in the Science and Engineering Complex machine shop , working with tools like a lathe and a mill.

Testing it for the first time in its tallest configuration, Marquez smiled when it fit like a glove. He said it was gratifying to be able to see his own design come to life.

“I’ve never ridden a bike that feels like this,” he said.

In the gardens

Rivers Sheehan ’24 is pictured in the studio space on Linden Street.

Rivers Sheehan in her studio space on Linden Street.

In the southern colonies of 18th-century America, the science of botany was used for economic purposes but also for aesthetics, using beautiful gardens and cultivated landscapes to mask a brutal plantation economy.

Rivers Sheehan ’23, a joint concentrator in art, film, and visual studies and history of science , completed a thesis project that combined historical research with an art exhibit, examining how botany, considered a gentlemanly European science in the 18th century, found new roots in the U.S.

“I looked at how that epistemology got applied in the South, in the frontier lands where people were both setting up really profitable and violent plantations using botanical knowledge and also setting up estate gardens that were inspired by French and English landscape design, often on the same properties,” said Sheehan, who wrote a 90-page paper detailing her findings.

For the art element, the December 2023 graduate created a multimedia exhibit of paintings, photographs, prints, and drawings inspired by her research at the plantations and also her own relationship to the natural world. Some of the pieces use paper dyed with natural indigo, birch bark, rabbit skin glue, leaves, and wild mushrooms. Sheehan worked in a variety of media, each representative of a different modality she learned during her time at Harvard.

“The studio project is a way of bringing this niche research into the contemporary moment and offering another way for an audience to come into it who isn’t necessarily an academic historian of science, which is the audience for the written part of it,” Sheehan explained.

Stepping back in time

Cindy Tian ’23 (computer science and anthropology) made a virtual reality program that showed museum visitors how to knap a stone tool,

Cindy Tian created a virtual reality program.

Virtual reality can facilitate all manner of educational experiences — like bringing visitors inside the Pyramids of Giza . Cindy Tian ’23, a joint concentrator in computer science and archaeology , wondered how the technology would fare with more complicated lessons.

“I wanted to see if VR can show archaeological processes that are harder for the general public to understand,” she said. “Would the technology improve the transfer of information from archaeologists and museum staff?”

Her thesis took the form of an exhibit for the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography , still on view near the third-floor stairwell. Tian first created a display featuring artifacts that illuminate flintknapping — or fashioning blades, points, and other tools from a stone core. On view are everything from hammerstones to chipping tools.

Tian, a December grad, also created a virtual reality program that allowed visitors to simulate making their own tools with objects like the ones on display.

“Flintknapping is a reductive process where you basically remove pieces of rock,” said Tian, who will soon start a full-time role with a music analytics startup. “It’s just one of the things where it’s better to learn by doing rather than reading or hearing someone talk about it.”

Finally, Tian tested who learned best about flintknapping — those who took in the exhibit, those who used the VR program, or those who encountered both.

“Are we integrating VR because it’s cool? Or is it actually helpful ?” she wondered.

Those who experienced both the exhibit and the VR scored highest on Tian’s post-visit content quiz. The same group emerged with more positive opinions of the flintknapping lesson.

“They essentially got to do it without doing it,” Tian said. “I found that the virtual reality is definitely beneficial for helping people learn about archaeological processes.”

Working in the studio

Five large abstract paintings are included in Isabel Haro’s thesis, which is titled “Taking Refuge.”

Abstract art has long served as a vessel for artists — think Hilma af Klint or Wassily Kandinsky — to explore religion and spirituality.

Isabel Haro ’24, a concentrator in art, film, and visual studies with a secondary in music , was inspired to pursue a thesis that explored this topic after taking the course “Spiritual Paths to Abstract Art” with Professor Ann Braude at Harvard Divinity School . Haro, who practices Buddhism, wanted to create a collection of work inspired by her own experiences.

“It’s very hard to talk about spirituality in the contemporary art world. It’s something that a lot of people are not interested in, or actively shy away from,” said Haro. “My intention was to be really diligent and responsible with how I was bringing Buddhism into the art conversation.”

To prepare, she studied other artists and paintings, read Buddhist scripture and poetry, meditated, and sketched. Inspired by color field style and the techniques of abstract painter Morris Louis, Haro played with gravity, standing on a stool to pour ink down the canvas, and laid canvas on the floor to let the paint move in rivulets.

The thesis, titled “Taking Refuge,” includes five large abstract paintings done in paint on muslin and canvas. One is painted with black Sumi ink — the kind used for Zen calligraphy — and uses salt and soap to create textures.

“I spent so much time preparing for this final set of paintings and all of that work prepared me to let these paintings emerge in a natural way,” Haro said. “I learned how valuable it is to work on a project over an extended period of time.”

Share this article

You might like

4 students with conditions ranging from diabetes to narcolepsy describe daily challenges that may not be obvious to their classmates and professors

Lab, telescope specialist details Harvard eclipse-viewing party, offers safety tips

Students represent 94 countries, all 50 states

Pushing back on DEI ‘orthodoxy’

Panelists support diversity efforts but worry that current model is too narrow, denying institutions the benefit of other voices, ideas

So what exactly makes Taylor Swift so great?

Experts weigh in on pop superstar's cultural and financial impact as her tours and albums continue to break records.

IMAGES

Poem: "One Art"
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop Poem Iconic Poetry on Distressed Canvas
One Art
Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" Poem Analysis
One Art
Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" Poem Analysis

VIDEO

[Dokicore] johnraizhen
MFA Painting Thesis 2024 || College of Art and Design || Punjab university
One Art poem written by Elizabeth Bishop BA part 2 lecture by Usman Ali Attari
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop Summary in Urdu/Hindi

COMMENTS

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop's 'One Art' is a poem whose apparent detached simplicity is undermined by its rigid villanelle structure and mounting emotional tension. Perhaps her most well-known poem, it centers around the theme of loss and the way in which the speaker - and, by extension, the reader - deals with it. Here, Bishop converts losing into an art form and explores how, by potentially ...
One Art Poem Summary and Analysis
Get LitCharts A +. "One Art" was written by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. The poem is a villanelle, a traditional form that involves a fixed number of lines and stanzas and an intricate pattern of repetition and rhyme. Through this form, the poem explores loss as an inevitable part of life. The speaker considers what it means to ...
A Short Analysis of Elizabeth Bishop's 'One Art'
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) 'One Art' is a poem by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79), first published in the New Yorker in 1976 and included in her collection Geography III the following year. The poem, which is one of the most famous examples of the villanelle form, is titled 'One Art' because the poem is about Bishop's attempts to make loss and poetry ...
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop Summary, Analysis, & Themes
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop. "One Art" is written by one of the pioneer American poets, Elizabeth Bishop. It was first published in the magazine, The New Yorker in 1976, and later included in Bishop's final collection, Geography III (1976). This poem is considered one of the most brilliant villanelles ever written in the English language.
Elusive Mastery: The Drafts of Elizabeth Bishop's 'One Art'
"One Art" is an exercise in the art of losing, a rehearsal of the things we tell our-selves in order to keep going, a speech in a brave voice that cracks once in the final version and cracked even more in the early drafts. The finished poem may be the best modern example of a villanelle, and shares with its nearest competitor, Theodore
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
By Elizabeth Bishop. The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent. to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster. of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
Analysis of Poem 'One Art' by Elizabeth Bishop
In her mature years, she lost her partner to suicide. 'One Art' carefully, if casually, records these events, beginning innocently enough with an ironic play on 'the art' before moving on to more serious losses. It culminates in the personal loss of a loved one and the admission that, yes, this may look like a disaster. A poem about lost things.
The Poetry of Loss: An Analysis of "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop
Learn more about Elizabeth Bishop. . . . . . . . . . In "One Art," Bishop attempts to reject the severity of loss. The poem begins with her intentionally flimsy argument: "The art of losing isn't hard to master.". Throughout the poem she speaks directly to the reader; as if to say, "Look, if I can lose, you can lose just as well.".
I need help creating a thesis statement for a critical essay on
Here are three possible ways you could phrase a thesis statement for a critical essay encompassing the main ideas from the poem and the complex relationship between art and loss: In the poem "One ...
"One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop (Villanelle)
Read "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop online. Analysis Theme "One Art" asserts that, over time, we can recover from the loss of an object or even the loss of a loved one. "The art of losing isn't hard to master," the poet says; practice by losing small objects, then build up to the loss of homeland, home, and loved ones.
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
And look! my last, or. next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. — Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture. I love) I shan't have lied.
One Art Themes
The main themes in "One Art" are loss and acceptance, the pain of loving, and self-delusion. Loss and acceptance: The poem encourages an acceptance of life's great and small losses, framing ...
One Art Summary
Introduction. "One Art" is a villanelle (a nineteen-line poem comprising five tercets and a quatrain) written by Elizabeth Bishop and first published in 1976. Frequently included in collections of ...
One Art Poem Analysis
"One Art" is a villanelle, meaning the poem is a closed form with set rules.Though adhering to most traditional villanelle guidelines, Bishop takes liberty with the form's refrain at the end. Villanelles contain stanzas comprised of tercets (three-line stanzas) and a finishing quatrain (four-line stanza). There is also a strict rhyme scheme and there are repeating lines (refrains).
One art : a study of the life and writing of Elizabeth Bishop
This thesis is divided into two parts, prefaced by an introduction. The Introduction discusses the difficulties in defining Bishop's situation: her equivocal place within American twentieth-century poetry, her conservative but fiercely independent position as a woman writer, and the ambivalent intimacy between her life and her writing.
One Art Analysis
Popularity of "One Art": Written by Elizabeth Bishop, a famous American poet, and short story writer, "One Art" is a marvelous piece about losing and forgetting important. It was first published in 1976. The poem is about exercising the art of losing to catch up with a healthy pace of life. It also reminds us to cope with the losses we face in life no matter how big or small they are.
19 Lines That Turn Anguish Into Art
One Art. by Elizabeth Bishop. The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent. to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the ...
(PDF) Elizabeth Bishop and the Villanelle: One Art, an ...
Abstract. The genesis of this study lies in Elizabeth Bishop's famous poem, "One Art.". A villanelle, it stands out luminously against the background of contemporary poetics, the lingering ...
One Art
Signature "One Art" is a poem by American poet Elizabeth Bishop, originally published in The New Yorker in 1976. Later that same year, Bishop included the poem in her book Geography III, which includes other works such as "In the Waiting Room" and "The Moose". It is considered to be one of the best villanelles in the English language, and is compared to the works of W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas ...
An Analysis of Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art"
The poem "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop uses simple and elegant verse as a poetic device to help it achieve its purpose and to convey its theme. Bishop's poem is about the way in which people feel about losing things within their lives and how this can affect them. Bishop's argument, through her poem, is that in order for people to learn ...
"One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop Free Essay Example
The speaker in the poem "One Art" provides this concern and supplies a response. ... The last stanza, particularly the last sentence of the poem, shows the paradox between the thesis and the connotative meaning--humans cannot prepare for the loss of a person. "--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. ...
ONE ART: a journal of poetry
Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and author of two novels as well as eight poetry collections. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She was three times nominated for a 'Pushcart' and once for 'Best of Net'.
One Art Questions and Answers
How do literary devices in "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop enhance the poem's depth? I need help creating a thesis statement for a critical essay on Elizabeth Bishop's poem "One Art."
ONE ART's Top 10 Most-Read Poets of March 2024
~ ONE ART's Top 10 Most-Read Poets of March 2024 ~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer Donna Hilbert Terri Kirby Erickson Betsy Mars Nancy Huggett Meredith Stewart Kirkwood Timothy Green Wendy Kagan Andrea Potos Robert Nordstrom. ... Discover more from ONE ART: a journal of poetry. Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.
UTSA ITC, San Antonio's Mexican Consulate partner on National Poetry
APRIL 1, 2024 — In observance of National Poetry Month, the UTSA Institute of Texan Cultures (ITC), the UTSA Libraries Art Collection and the Mexican Consulate in San Antonio will host an exhibit by acclaimed former San Antonio Poet Laureate Octavio Quintanilla.The exhibit will be on display at the Mexican Cultural Institute's Diego Rivera Gallery throughout the month of April.
The stories behind the theses
Isabel Haro '24, a concentrator in art, film, and visual studies with a secondary in music, was inspired to pursue a thesis that explored this topic after taking the course "Spiritual Paths to Abstract Art" with Professor Anne Braude at Harvard Divinity School. Haro, who practices Buddhism, wanted to create a collection of work inspired ...

One Art Summary & Analysis by Elizabeth Bishop

The Full Text of “One Art”

The Inevitability and Pain of Loss

Lines 10-12

Lines 13-15

Lines 16-17

Lines 17-19

“One Art” Symbols

“One Art” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

End-Stopped Line

Alliteration

“One Art” Vocabulary

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “One Art”

LitCharts on Other Poems by Elizabeth Bishop

Everything you need for every book you read.

A Short Analysis of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art’

2 thoughts on “A Short Analysis of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art’”

Discover more from Interesting Literature

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop

Structure & Form

Rhyme Scheme

Meter & Scansion

Literary Devices & Figurative Language

Alliteration & Assonance

Line-by-Line Analysis & Explanation

Lines 10-12

Lines 13-15

Lines 16-19

Loss and Survival

Learn and Practice

Latent Sadness, Retrospection, and Nostalgia

Tone & Mood

Historical Context

Questions and Answers

Similar Poems about Loss

Useful Resources

Share this:

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

22 “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop (Villanelle)

Figurative Language

Related Activities and Questions for Study and Discussion

Media Attributions

Share This Book

Main navigation

User account menu

Page submenu block

Add to anthology

More by this poet

Behind Stowe

Fork with Two Tines Pushed Together

That is solemn we have ended,— (87)

Newsletter Sign Up

Poem Analysis

Analysis: “One Art”

Related Titles

Featured Collections

Short Poems

One art : a study of the life and writing of Elizabeth Bishop.

--> Examined Thesis (PDF) -->

Meanings of One Art

Meanings of Stanza -1

Meanings of Stanza -2

Meanings of Stanza -3

Meanings of Stanza -4

Meanings of Stanza -5

Meanings of Stanza -6

Summary of One Art

Analysis of Literary Devices in One Art

Analysis of Poetic Devices in “One Art”

Quotes to be Used

Related posts:

Post navigation

19 Lines That Turn Anguish Into Art

ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of March 2024

Share this:

Published by ONE ART

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

UTSA ITC, San Antonio’s Mexican Consulate partner on National Poetry Month exhibit

Automate Your Citations With EndNote

Simplifying Citations With Zotero