"One Art": her finger and her thumb in the shape of an "L" on her forehead

In her poem “One Art,” Elizabeth Bishop conveys a personal crisis through a classic villanelle form. She does so gradually; she does not reveal the true nature of her crisis until the last stanza of the poem. Before then, the poem is a catalogue of the things the speaker (essentially, Bishop herself) has lost. Though she constantly insists that all of these losses are “no disaster” nor is the loss of such things “hard to master,” the final stanza reveals quite a different attitude. And Bishop attempts to clarify any potential ambiguity by using syntactical and grammatical devices including parentheses, italics, exclamation points, and inverted syntax. In this way, the reader becomes painfully aware of the true emotional state of the speaker.

In order to fully comprehend “One Art” and the message behind it, the reader must first understand the background of both the author and the poetic form she uses. The poem is in the form of a villanelle. Such a poetic form has only two rhyme sounds. The first and third lines of the poem rhyme, and these two words alternate as the final line of each successive stanza. The pattern continues until the final stanza, where the two rhymes form a couplet at the end. Villanelles are composed of nineteen lines, organized into five tercets and one quatrain. Elizabeth Bishop herself suffered from tremendous loss early in her life, when both of her parents died when she was still very young. Just before she wrote the poem, two of her lovers died as well, including one by suicide.

In the beginning of the poem, the speaker evidently is trying to convince herself that the losses she has experienced are bearable and conquerable, an argument she ultimately loses to herself (how’s that for irony?). The poem reads almost as a twelve-step program to overcome great loss. She tries to rise above her loss by even encouraging others to try it, too when she says, “Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys…” (4-5). Then the speaker urges the reader or listener to take their practice to a higher level, by “losing farther, losing faster” (7). In the fourth stanza, she tries to convince herself that loss is a part of everyday life. She goes through the laundry list of items, places and people she has lost: her mother’s watch, her house, two cities, some realms, two rivers, a continent (?). Yet all of these (even the continent) are not the real issue for the speaker.

“One Art” is quite remarkable in that the crux of the poem is not revealed, not even partially understood, until the very last stanza. The final stanza is the speaker’s true problem, the one thing she lost that is a disaster, that is hard to master: “you.” Presumably, the speaker is referring to a significant other who has recently passed away. After she thinks about her lover, she even admits to having lied earlier in the poem when she says, “I shan’t have lied” (17). The reader can envision the speaker literally forcing herself to confess to her true emotional state; when she says “Write it!” (19), one can tell that the physical one of writing the poem is a difficult process for the speaker. It is also in the last stanza that the reader can infer that the speaker and the author are one and the same. When the speaker says, “Write it,” she gives away her true identity; the speaker herself is the author of the poem, Elizabeth Bishop.