What Is the Theme of Elizabeth Bishops One Art Poem
Coming to Terms With Loss in Elizabeth Bishop'south 'One Art'
Editor's Note: This article previously appeared in a unlike format as part of The Atlantic'south Notes section, retired in 2021.
"One Art" is the merely poem I've always lost. My high-school English teacher gave me a wallet-sized re-create that I misplaced, forth with the wallet, the next twelvemonth. The wallet I replaced, twice; the verse form I did non. Still, a year walking around with it in my pocket was enough to learn the opening lines:
The art of losing isn't difficult to primary;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
But the poem is only almost the loss of commonplace items on its surface. As the verse form implies, Bishop's life was full of losses of all sizes: "my mother'due south watch," "three loved houses," "a continent." And though matching art to autobiography tin can ofttimes miss the point, here it illuminates. Every bit she wrote "I Fine art," writes Megan Marshall, Bishop stripped draft later on draft of references to a pair of "blue eyes" belonging to her lover Alice Methfessel, whose rejection—forth with the suicide of Bishop's previous partner, Lota de Macendo Soares—is believed to accept inspired the poem. Meanwhile, the poem's recurring kickoff line "The art of losing isn't difficult to main," remained the aforementioned in all 17 drafts. (This all might audio a bit depressing, just Methfessel and Bishop would later get back together.)
Still, there's much more than to see here beyond coded insights into Bishop's life (you tin can read our latest issue for that).
The repeating lines of the poem's villanelle form capture the obsessive nature of rejection and loss, trying once again and over again to make sense of an absence through a kind of rewinding. It'due south frenetic, it's rhythmic, just it'southward not all that convincing: It strikes the tone of bad and bragging advice given by someone attempting to hide their own problems. ("I lost iii houses—I GOT THIS.")
The rhymes—"master," "faster," "disaster"—e'er give me the sense of edifice momentum, a force gaining speed. At the same time, each line is tightly bound inside the poem'south structure, creating a sense of restraint reflected in the verse form's concluding lines:
—Even losing yous (the joking vocalization, a gesture
I dearest) I shan't have lied. It'southward axiomatic
the art of losing's not likewise hard to master
though information technology may look similar (Write it!) similar disaster.
Bishop's speaker tries to convince herself that loss is a level playing field: House keys and wasted time are on par with ex-lovers and lost childhood homes. All losses, she insists, are equal and bearable; the feelings of abandonment bound upward in grief should curlicue off a person's dorsum every bit easily every bit a misplaced pen. The idea is clearly false, only there'southward a deeply homo desire that it should be truthful.
This is what makes "I Fine art" a poem worth returning to afterward a death, a breakup, or whatsoever one of the many losses that lack their own established fine art or ritual: losses of time, of opportunity, and countless others wrought by change and adventure. The poem invites the question of how to respond to these events, to brainstorm to understand them. Where, between a cardinal and a continent, practice nosotros place a forgotten friendship? Or the loss—as Kathryn Schulz writes—of an imagined future, individual or national?
And, similar nigh good poems, "I Art" doesn't fake an easy answer. Instead it shows an argument building and undoing itself, as certain lines repeat throughout the verse form like an intrusive thought that can fade but never fully be put away.
Information technology's a compelling, gutting tug-of-war beneath a veneer of sometimes overly elegant restraint, the effort to control and calm an untamable grief, until the pain finds an escape valve in the two-give-and-take control: "Write it!" And ironically, the call to deny the weight of her loss—to write that it is "no disaster"—affirms that, survivable as the disaster may be, it is one.
riordanthenstuthe.blogspot.com
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2017/04/coming-to-terms-with-loss-in-elizabeth-bishops-one-art/622451/