One Art

            Loss: an acquired skill or a haunting realization?.
             "One Art," by Elizabeth Bishop, is an emotional elegy in which losing isn't just an art, but a mastered skill. We learn this, at first, from a series of losing trivial items and leading up to an intimate loss; becoming personal and therefore something she can not master. Although it may seem that "One Art" conveys the simplistic idea that losing items is a disaster, in fact, Bishop uses irony to express her thoughts: articulating her losses as insignificant matters, but admitting in the end to the uncontrollable affects of doubt the losses have on her and the self-knowledge and control she has gained from it. .
             Bishop starts off the poem with such light-heartedness and playfulness, that the reader automatically starts to view loss as a natural and unimportant ritual. The first stanza gives the poem an instructional structure to it, where the reader is the student and Bishop the teacher. She considers losing, a lesson that has to be taught, learned, and finally to be mastered by her pupils (the reader). Her lost items begin very vague ("so many things") and continue to more concrete items "lost door keys, the hour badly spent" and culminate in the final lines of the poem. She continues into the second stanza urging readers to make it into a valuable habit: "Lose something everyday." These minor loses are insignificant and are not extremely devastating to her. In the stanzas following, there is the loss of places, names of people, untraveld destinations, houses, two rivers, a continent and finally an intimate friend. Here Bishop breaks the pattern of inanimate objects and dedicates a full stanza to focus on her final and most personal loss. .
             The poems irony comes out through Bishops use of rhyming, rhythm, syntax, tone, and structure. The poem is separated into five stanzas of three lines and then a final stanza of four lines all written in iambic pentameter, but alternating between ten and eleven syllables per line.