Elizabeth Bishop's Poem "One Art" Is Clearly Term Paper

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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 -- 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.

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As the reader finds out at the end 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.

From that framework, she is right: searching for keys for an hour is nothing compared to losing a great love. However, each loss mentioned is greater than the one before it. The second one is a loss of dreams: she meant to travel, but can't remember where she meant to go now. She suggests that it was not a terribly compelling desire if it was so easily forgotten, or lost. But at the same time, she….....

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