One Art
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
I’ve been studying this poem for the past few weeks as a perfect example of a villanelle and its circularity. My god, look at this poem. Look at the beauty of these nineteen lines. The first and third lines are refrains, repeating at lines six, twelve, and eighteen (first refrain), and nine, fifteen, and nineteen (second refrain). The rhyme scheme is aba (except for the last line). The fact that this poem repeats its first and third line so many times means that every time the reader thinks she’s making progress, that we’re going to learn about the speaker’s loss, we circle back around to how losing “isn’t hard to master”—or, what’s more, the loss is no “disaster.” This poem, as in all villanelles, has lines that “circle around and around, refusing to go forward in any linear development” (according to Mark Strand and Eavan Boland in The Making of a Poem). It’s both incredibly frustrating and incredibly liberating to see that the speaker will admit she’s losing things increasingly more important (keys, “the hour badly spent,” her mother’s watch, three houses, two rivers, and even a continent), but she never says why she’s writing the poem, or what the biggest loss is. The reader suspects there’s a loss of a person, a loss so deep that the speaker can’t talk about it (she says, “(Write it!)” instead). The reader wants to know. But when the speaker finally addresses the “you,” she circles back around to the beginning refrains and the poem ends. We never know for sure. The writer never has to say it.
Sometimes you so badly want to talk about something, but you can’t. Sometimes—and I do this often—you write in second person. For Elizabeth Bishop, the thing she most badly wants to talk about is losing “things” and yet she can’t. (I’m giving myself license to equate the writer with the speaker. So what?) But Elizabeth Bishop doesn’t need to use second person because she has a villanelle. She doesn’t have to name the loss or deflect it by pointing the finger at “you” the reader, because any time she gets close to putting her finger on her problem, she circles back around to the beginning.
This poem is an interesting study in diversion, in being honest but keeping the biggest secret for yourself. I just wrote an essay in the shape of a villanelle, and I circled around and around the truth, but that’s the only way I could write. Sometimes it’s not true to say “No way out but through” (sorry, Jandy Nelson). Sometimes you can go around. Elizabeth Bishop did in “One Art,” and I’m doing it, too.
-R
