One Art Analysis

Elizabeth Bishop was born on February 8, 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. Bishop barely knew her parents because her father died of Bright’s disease only eight months after she was born. Her mother was never able to cope with the death of her husband, and had a nervous breakdown, eventually going insane. She was removed to a sanatorium when Bishop was just five years old (David).
Most of her early years were spent with relatives, who she said took care of her because they felt sorry for her. Later on, she was removed from her carefree childhood home where she lived with her grandparents in the town of Great Village, Nova Scotia. Bishop did not like living at the wealthy Bishop residence in Worcester, and wanted to move to Canada, a place
The word “One”, suggests a singular entity and the word “Art”, adds to the feeling of beauty. A reader would expect a poem entitled “One Art” to be about the wholesomeness of life, and in this case the reader’s expectations would be met with surprise.
The poem tells the story of Elizabeth Bishop’s life. Each stanza in the poem represents something she lost. She tries to say that things are meant to be lost, and there is no disaster in losing things,but when she loses her home, parents, and lover, she realized losing loved ones results in disaster.
Bishop has created a tone of sadness through the use of specific words and phrases. “Loss” implies the uncertainty of what to do next. The word “art” is used multiple times to say that losing is an art that is not hard to master.
The tone of inevitability is maintained throughout the poem until the last stanza when it shifts to a feeling of true loss. At that point, the reader begins to see a different attitude toward losing. She started off thinking that losing was just an art until she started losing things closer to her, and realized losing was not an art, but a