One Art Elizabeth Bishop

As each stanza goes on, the objects she loses is more and more significant. she is convincing herself it\'s ok to lose things. in the last stanza \"losing you\" in a joking way, obviously she is not ok, but is deeply hurt and upset that things are gone. though she is trying really hard to think it\'s ok, but not the pain in her heart. This poem trains to develop the spirit of resignation on the loss of persons, places and things however valuable they may be. It arouses casual relationship with the material things failing which people usually get abnormal on the loss of their cherished objects. You can see the example of the poetess\' mother who had been mentally retarted and spent her life in asylum. The poem is simple but the message is everlasting. Look with Muslims, they are religiously bound to say Inna Lillahe Wa Inna Eleihe Rajeoon (Everything is for Allah and we have to retire to Him in the end). This makes them face loss of anything in an acceptable way and hence they don\'t face set back of any mental disorder even in the state sheer loss. In this way, we can rightly say that Elizabeth\'s views about the art of losing to master are benovelent to the manking and they bear permanant value in all the ages. Abid Hayat Khokhar Pretty sure that she was a lesbian and it greatly influenced her writing. Not just in this poem but others as well. She must have lost something dearly to her, but she is telling herself it will be okay. Bishop wrote this poem at a difficult time in her life when she thought she was going to lose her lover, Alice Methfessel. Alice was considering marrying a man. The poem helped the two to reconcile and Alice stayed with Elizabeth, taking care of her, until she died in 1979. The number of syllables follows a fixed structure of 11-10-11 in the first 3 stanzas, however, as the poem progresses and the rhythm accelerates due to the heightened speed and wave of emotions that are starting to overcome her rationality, the number of syllables start to vary and fluctuate indirectly. The increase in caesuras as the poem reaches the quatrain also shows her interrupted thoughts and pauses in speech (due to the outburst of feelings she can no longer contain). The punctuations also produce a staccato effect to speed up and quicken the rhythm and pace of the poem. Reflects her inner feelings and how she feels a greater sense of disorder as she continues penning down her thoughts. The interjectionary imperatives/orders such as "write it!" And "look!" Shows how bishop wants to control the readers as she is unable to control death. Therefore, the ostensible nonchalance which she portrays at the start of the poem slowly unwraps itself and reveal it's nature as a facade - she is terribly affected by the This is absolutely my favorite poem because it is so powerful. I studied this at college from a master poet and excellent scholar/instructor. According to the instructor, Bishop was a lesbian and found her lover hanging in the backyard one day. I do not know when she wrote the poem, but it was some time after that. I don't know anything about a husband, if she had one. In the poem by Bishop she clearly talks about the struggles and lost hopes she has gone through by explaining over and over that the art of losing isn't hard to master. Face it, its true because everybody has mastered the way of losing through their life. You cannot just hope for the goods all the time, one must lose to know the feeling and become more relentless instead of letting it consume you... Elizabeth is referring to the lost continent as the places she left behind in her travels around the world. She did not literally lose a continent but she left North America behind for Brazil.

The losses in her life have n umbed her starting from losing her parents, to losing a house when she is moved around by her relatives. Truth. This is a great poem. I thinks Bishop is trying to say that due to the fact that so many things seem filled with the intent of being lost, simple lost material things should not be a diaster, yet somehow they are. Having the intent of being lost means that everything has the natural ability to be lost. As the poem progresses there is an increase in value for the items being lostfrom doors keys and names to a watch, cities, and a continent, and ultimately a person. Bishop is trying to prove that by making losses in life less diastrous, the death of a loved one will not affect others greatly. The point of this poem is to accept rather than regret. Bishop,at the end of her life, between 1978 and 1980 had a horrible problem with crabs. This possibly explains the bitterness felt in relation to her lover. The dashes in the last stanza show her remeniscing over the itching that she is left with from him Bishop was joking in the end, saying she is over it...but she says it in a joking manner. She says "write it" trying to force herself to say she is over it, even though she isn't. Loss is in fact a big deal for her. She says it is not hard to master, but we later find out that is a lie because it is hard for her to master, it's a disaster. She changed the way that she had the last line, adding another "like," to make herself seem more hesitant or afraid to admit her feelings. The use of parenthesis in the final quatrain; (Write it!) is Bishops way of dealing with the loss of her lover. She feels if she writes out her emotion in poetry it will somehow help her deal with the pain of losing her lover. She hopes by mastering or simply finishing the villanelle she will have contained her emotion which will give her some relief from grieving. The stuttering repeat of "like" in the final quatrain is the poets voice literally breaking in the last few words of the poem as she understands the greatness and importance of her loss. This is what I thought Elizabeth is trying to portray through this poem. Of course nobody would ever want to embrace something negative.. such as losing something. Car keys, names, etc. are all just small losses.. She keeps convincing herself that these losses are not a bad thing, but something to master; Something that you can eventually accept and brush off as though the lost item or name is not a big deal. The items lost throughout the poem get bigger and more important. She continues to brush the losses off as a lesson learned.. As though it's really not that big of a deal because the items being lost really don't have all that much importance to her. Near the end, she loses an entire continent and still brushes it off; it's still not a disaster. It's when she loses what seems to be a person very dear to her, that we see a variant form within the poem. She is trying to convince herself that losing this person is not a big deal by justifying all of her other losses. But she still cannot brush off this loss of someone that she thinks she loved/loves. It is not ok to lose EVERYTHING and she does really does miss the person that she lost. I actually compared her actual loss to memory loss, like Alzheimer's. The progressive nature of Alzheimer's is reflective of the increasing value of the lost items. I also thought that the narrator "forgot" the refrains that ended in "disaster" which somewhat contributed to the forgetful nature of the villanelle. Also, the first refrain "the art...master" is somewhat like a mother reminding her child to not be so forgetful. In the end, the narrator forgot his/her loved ones, place of residence, and family keepsakes. Just the gist of my paper for English! Also remarkable about the Villanelle form is that its original intent of two different Refrains is broken becaus of the ... disaster lines whitch are not fixed exept for the ending in disaster. This break with the traditional form and the breaks in rhyme scheme and rhyme that increase throughout the poem seem also to indicate that she loses the form more and more till the end,

thus referring to the loss of her initial thought (that a loss is no disaster). I think Elizabeth is trying to say, from only "loss" can you actually master it. No body likes loss, but she's trying to say, that from only loss can you actually endure loss as not a "disaster" I think that in this poem Elizabeth Bishop is communicating her feelings about loss by saying that in many senses, it is easier not to care when things get lost (as things so often do) and teach herself the art of being nonchalent and accepting loss as no great disaster. I think that the poet goes on to express how after being good at losing small things she loses more significant objects or memories and still she does not care because she had numbed herself to the pain which is usually felt when one loses something important to themselves or loved ones. I think that she has worked hard to stop caring about what she has lost in preperation for the loss of something fundemental but in the end when she loses a loved one she feels the pain and misses that person but doesn't allow herself to admit it. This poem is both meaningful and is able to simply relate to today. Losing or loss is something that people are faced with daily. Whether its "door keys' or "the hour badly spent" is is all loss. She focuses on the fact that things are often lost and it isnt hard to master. In this why she shows her lack of care or concern. In the end, she says she has lost a continent and although is is a tremendous loss, it isn't a disaster. She soon finds that the loss of a loved one is a lot harder to cope with than the loss of various objects or even a continent. Loss is something that can be mastered but this type of loss is one that has to be delt with. Yes, this poem is a villanelle. The villanelle is a form of poetry governed by its strict form (which does include the tendancy to repeat lines). The lines are repeated over and over to reinforce the point, gaining a deeper understanding through the poems repetition. The rhyme scheme of the villanelle is not at all wierd. It is a traditional aba scheme. What seems wierd are the different kinds of rhymes that are present within the poem, and yes, there is more than just one type of rhyme. (Google it, you might learn something new. Or, if you are feeling really studious, you can check out the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics by Preminger). And yes, the poem is incomplete at the end. It does say (Write it!) Like disaster. umm, this poem is incomplete at the end. It should saw "though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. However, the poem is a very complicated story of a women trying to convince herself that loosing things - such as car keys, names, places, etc. are not that big of a deal. She says "so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost - that their loss is no disaster." Except, notic how that the things she is loosing slowly gain in value. In the end she loose a whole continent. Except the last 3 lines of the poem (the lines on this poems site are messed up) she (the author) is reffering to a person, whom I presume is her love/ husband. She is constantly telling herself throughout the poem that loosing something isn't a loss, however, when she starts discussing the lost of this person, she can hardly write that it is not a big deal, becuase to her it really is. The last part of the poem should say "though it may look like (write it!) like disaster. She finally gives into her feelings and says that it was a disaster to loose this person. The style of this peom was written in a villanelle a poem with a very wierd ryme schme that tends to repeate the same lines over and over. By using this format, the poet is trying to convince herself that it is ok to loose things, however she comes to the final conclusion that it is not ok to loose everything, and that she does miss the person that she lost.