One Art

For my money, I'll take Elizabeth Bishop over Sylvia Plath any day. What Bishop recognizes (and, in my opinion, Plath misses) is that the most powerful emotions can't be unleashed - they'd tear us apart. We hold them back, best we can, because we have to. (Joss Whedon recognizes this too - if you want to show the intensity of an emotion, show a character trying not to feel it; it's always more powerful to see a person trying not to cry than to see a person crying).

That is what One Art is about: Bishop is anticipating a great loss - the loss of her partner - and she's desperately trying to convince herself she can master loss. Everything about the poem is an attempt at restraint - even the form, the villanelle, is highly restrained. Bishop starts out confident: "The art of losing isn't hard to master." The losses start out insignificant - keys, the hour badly spent - and they build until she writes: "- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love)." That line kills me! I choke up every time I read it. What a subtle and perfect way to express the intimacy of the relationship; this is how we know it's a lover she's going to lose - "(the joking voice, a gesture I love)" - these are the type of tiny, but intensely personal details that only a partner appreciates.

And here in the final stanza, the grief is bursting through. It bursts through her attempts to hold it together and it bursts through the form itself. As she's breaking down and losing her resolve, she qualifies the opening line - the original, confident "losing isn't hard to master," gives way to "losing's not too hard to master," a telling concession. And, as J.D. McClatchy points out, in the last line her "voice literally cracks" (like when a person fights back tears). At this point, Bishop has to step outside of the poem - a kind of poetic breaking of the fourth wall - to order herself to finish the line (Write it!):

The real moral force of her stanza comes – and this is true in many other Bishop poems – from her adverbs:even losing you; not too hard to master. These shades of emphasis are so carefully composed, so lightly sketched in, that their true dramatic power is missed by some readers. . . . 

And then that theatrical last line – how severely, how knowingly and helplessly qualified! . . . The whole stanza is in danger of breaking apart, and breaking down. In this last line the poet’s voice literally cracks. The villanelle – that strictest and most intractable of verse forms – can barely control the grief, yet helps the poet keep her balance. …

I think that's exactly right. The emotion is breaking through the form, but, in the end, once the last word of the first stanza is chosen, the form dictates the last word of the poem. And so Bishop writes "disaster" - not because she's mastered loss, but because there's no choice.

And that's real grief. It's not over-wrought. Rather, terrible, devastating loss happens and ultimately, we go on not because loss can be mastered, but because we don't have a choice.

So, here it is, Elizabeth Bishop, 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.