One Art

Elizabeth Bishop expresses the immense anguish she feels over losing her lover through a dichotomy between lines 1-15 and lines 16-19. By doing so, she shows how much more pain she felt over losing this important person in her life as compared to the trivial things that people seem to lose every day. For example, in lines 1-5, Bishop says, “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.” Here, Bishop shows that she is never fazed by losing insignificant things such as door keys or time. She continues on by saying that losing things becomes a part of one’s daily life, whether they are losing places, names, or their memory in general. Each of these “lost” items serves as a comparison to the speaker losing her beloved.
Later on in the poem, Bishop begins to mention the loss of more important things in life. In line 10, she speaks of losing her mother’s watch, and in line 11, she says that she has lost three houses. Further on, she parallels the idea of moving with losing. The reader can tell from lines 13-15 that the speaker has moved often in her life, as she discusses losing two cities, two rivers, and a continent. By speaking in these vast terms, one can understand that the speaker losing her lover must have been quite a disaster, as she states in line 15. If losing this significant other has been more detrimental to her being than losing a continent, as she says, the speaker must be in dire anguish over the circumstances. These comparisons help to exaggerate her argument.
In the final stanza of the poem, the speaker finally admits to the reason that she has mastered the “art” of losing. She says that although all losing may seem like disaster, it is only that way in certain forms. However, she says “I shan’t have lied,” in line 17. Through this phrase, it is evident that although she says that losing is not hard to master, losing her lover has been particularly difficult. She has been able to endure the loss of many other things, but this absence in her life is seemingly impossible to recover from.