One Art, A Poem About Loss

A detailed Summary of One Art, A Poem About Loss

Elizabeth Bishop's poem "One Art" is clearly about loss. She tells the reader that in the first line: "The art of losing isn't hard to master...". She might have called the poem "One Lesson" instead of "One Art," because on the surface she pretends to be telling other that loss is a natural part of life, something we have to accept and learn to live with. She suggests a sort of Zen-like approach to loss: instead of letting it bother us, we should embrace loss. She then lists losses she has experience in her life. She has gotten past them; losing things does not "bring disaster."

Her first example is trivial aE" misplacing one's keys. She suggests that individuals are not so important that they should be upset over looking for a set of keys for an hour. The reader knows already that she is not being realistic: looking for one's keys for 5 minutes is a minor nuisance, but searching for them for an hour is a significant aggravation.

Then she finally tells the reader about the greatest and most recent loss, the loss of someone very important to her. She says this look looks like a disaster but that it is not, even though this loss is greater to her than the loss of entire continents.

of the poem, this poem is not really about just any loss. It's about the loss of her soul mate, someone she loved with all her heart and soul. All the things she lists serve as a comparison for that last, great, disastrous loss for her. She doesn't come out and tell the reader how her heart is broken. Instead, she compares it to other losses in her life.

Letting go of transient daydreams may be good advice, but the narrator of this poem gives a sense of time grinding on, bringing loss after loss, each harder to bear than the other. She is speaking to herself, pleading with herself to find a way to let go of this most devastating loss of all, a person who made her laugh.

She uses time as an image throughout the

Some common words found in the essay are:
Elizabeth Bishop's, loss loss, one's keys, narrator poem, poem sense, throughout poem, tells reader,

Approximate Word count = 654
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English

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One Art, A Poem About Loss

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