One Art Poem Analysis

Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” addresses the feelings one may have toward loss. The speaker begins with a declaration that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master” (1), and repeats it several more times throughout the poem. She speaks in a casual and easy to understand tone, despite its perplexing verse form (known as the villanelle). The speaker starts with the loss of ordinary, everyday things and gradually moves to the bigger things, such as the loss of her significant other. While the speaker claims that losing is something she has long since mastered, by the end of the poem, we can see that losing her sweetheart did affect her, regardless of her statement that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master”. At this point, one may realize that the art of losing cannot be mastered.
The poem has a total of nineteen lines (divided into five tercets and one quatrain) and consists of two repeating rhymes with the addition of two refrains. The first line, “the art of losing isn’t hard to master;” (1) and the third line “to be lost that their loss is no disaster” (3) are repeated throughout the poem. The refrain makes up the last two lines of the quatrain. The rhyme scheme is as follows (with capital letters as refrains and lowercase for the rhymes) A1bA2 abA1 abA2 abA1 abA2 abA1A2. The poem does not have a fixed meter and instead roughly follows the iambic pentameter (every other syllable stressed). Each line is kept at ten or eleven syllables. With each stanza, the speaker loses something more significant. The poem appears to be an attempt for the speaker to get over her greatest loss- the loss of her loved one. In the first stanzas, the speaker boasts that she has mastered coping with the loss of little things, but when she reaches the last stanza, she finds herself still unable to completely ignore the loss of her