How do we deal with loss? In One Art, Elizabeth Bishop explores grief and coping, revealing her own personal journey with loss and making the reader think about their own. She purposely creates a weak argument that “the act of losing isn’t hard to master”, using specific examples and second person point of view to address the reader, emphasizing the point that anyone can experience loss. Although the poem has a rhyme scheme, the repeating lines gradually add to the sense of disarray that Bishop conveys. The transition from the third stanza to the fourth is particularly jarring: she goes from addressing the reader directly to discussing her own experiences. Repetition of the phrases “hard to master” and “no disaster” creates a buildup of emotional tension as more things are lost. Bishop starts with“lost door keys”. After advising the reader to “[lose] further [and] faster”, she begins to lose more important things: her mother’s watch, then more abstract things like names and cities she has lived in.
At the first line of stanza four, the detached tone of the short, clipped statements changes to a more flustered tone, suggesting a disorganized mental state. The interjection “And look!” in line 10 and the second “like” in the poem’s last line are meant to sound disorderly and confused. Despite this, Bishop continues to assert that the losses, growing exponentially bigger each time, are not a disaster. Her use of repetition and frenetic tone causes her argument to crumble: the poem suggests that loss is actually a big deal, and the chaos seen towards the end shows how difficult it is for Bishop to cope. The aforementioned repeated phrases, which seemed like emphasized advice to the reader, now seem like mantras she repeats to convince herself that loss is not a disaster. The cracks start to form in her argument: instead of her terse statements from before, Bishop says this time that “the act of losing’s not too hard to master”. She is acknowledging the effort required to keep her emotions under control, refuting her claim that loss is masterable.
The final stanza of the poem reveals Bishop’s greatest, hardest loss: not an object, but a loved one. The parenthetical asides imply that the grief is truly unbearable – a loss this catastrophical does feel like a disaster. Bishop’s earlier declaration that she has mastered loss turns into a clear indication of how much mental work she is putting into recovery. Here, Bishop makes her final assertion. Through the loss of smaller things and healthy coping mechanisms, we can train ourselves to bear the pain of bigger losses. By furthering the statement “the art of loss isn’t hard to master”, she argues just the opposite: coping with loss is a never-ending process that requires effort and mindfulness. In One Art, Elizabeth Bishop claims that loss is a natural force of life, and being aware of this prevents us from losing ourselves to the pain associated with it.
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