One Art: Dealing with loss through self-expression

We have all lost someone or little mundane things like keys and we get heartbroken or angry but we must learn to deal with it and let it go as Bishop states, “the art of losing isn't hard to master.” But its easier said than done as losing a key can be replaced but losing someone whom we love can be a nightmare, in Bishop terms a “disaster.” Losing tangible and intangible possession we carry is part of life, but furthermore it is important to realize that coping with such a loss is the part of our existence that is necessary.

In “One Art,” Bishop is rationalizing and adopting to her actual losses. She uses poetry has a medium to self-express and reflect her own personal loss and her endurance to cope with it. As Kristy states, “ One Art builds from Bishop's personal experience with loss to become a monument to one of the most fundamental of human experiences, resulting in a poem that is universal in its applicability and masterful in its execution.”

Bishop intentionally mentions her losses in the poem in a fictitious mode to comfort herself and ensure that she can defeat her feelings of grief, as Miller states, “the losses in the poem are real.” Miller She recites, “I lost my mother watch,” her mother's watch is the only possession that she owns and losing it signifies that she has lost what remained of her mother. She is able to cope with the loss as she restates, “the art of losing isn't hard to master.” She believes she can cope with the loss, as her mother's watch isn't significant to her as she did only have a blur memory of her. In the end, the author is referring the 'you', to what appears to be her lover. She attempts to act nonchalant in regards to the death of her lover; however she acknowledges her grief in the last stanza.We can decode at the end that she can't hold her feelings inside her heart anymore and she has come to a point where she wants to pour it all out, and in One Art, she draws her feelings, her true emotion and grief is portrayed.

In the first stanza, Bishop makes us believe that she is confident to cope with the loss and to lose is a part of life, but we all know that losses are hard to cope with as she sounds unreasonable and all losses are not irreplaceable. But she wants us to know that she is able to cope with those losses and those loses are not worth anything. We know, she isn't bluffing to us, as she mentions her losses, her mother's watch, houses, cities, rivers and even a continent and how she could easily cope with it as such disaster wasn't hard for her to master. As each stanza goes on, the objects she loses is more and more significant and she is convincing herself it's ok to lose things. In the end, she is lying to us, as she adds two words, 'too' and 'like' to master and disaster respectively. The word too implies that she is still finding it hard to cope with the loss, the loss of losing her lover and the like which she repeats twice to end it with disaster, is her acceptance, that it is indeed a disaster.

Bishop was doomed with loses. Poor Bishop was deprived of parental care before she could mature into a woman as her father had died when she was eight months old and her mother had been hospitalize in a public sanatorium when she was five. She shifts from one place(cities/continents) to another and with each shift she loses her connection with those places. She was accustomed to those loses, but tragic fell upon her as she lost her lover and the pain of that loss was unbearable. She was always strong when it came to parting with things or people, but parting with her soulmate was the hardest blow, a Sandy hurricane, as she named it a disaster.

Bishop purpose of drafting the poem was to convince us that losing is not a disaster, starting form the first stanza, as she states, so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.” But she fails to convince us, and we all know that loses are for real a disaster. As Jonathon states, “ The poem’s first line is an expression of what Bishop desperately wants to be true; the remaining eighteen lines document Bishop’s painful admission, through both content and form, that such a claim is dishonest.” The author self-expresses the loss she has incurred brilliantly but she fails to prove her point, “the art of losing isn't hard to master” as she herself is still devastated by the loss she suffers.