William George Butcher ENG 150 February 12, 2015 Journal Entry ­ One Art Discuss the use of repetition in any of this week’s poems Elizabeth Bishop was an award­winning American poet, whose life spanned from 1911 to 1979. During her life she received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the honor of being named Poet Laureate of the United States. She wrote in a time that was heavily influenced by the Great Depression as well as two world wars and it shows in her work as she’s able to very clearly express the idea of loss in several of her pieces of works. “One Art” is no exception as Bishop is able to relate quite eloquently to her audience, how it feels to go through great loss. This allows readers of current day to travel back and gain perspective and feeling similar to that of this post­world war time period. Bishop is able to capture the reader’s attention and hold their focus by her consistent and bountiful use of repetition as it relates to meter, rhyme and parallel structure. The structure of “One Art” is quite interesting and complex, even though when read allowed has a conversational feel to it. It takes the form of a Villanelle, which is a specific poem structure composed of nineteen lines divided up into six stanzas. The first five stanzas have three lines while the sixth has four, allowing for emphasis on the final line as it is the first time in the work that the pattern is broken, naturally giving it significance and drawing attention to it. She also is writing nearly in iambic pentameter, with some variance between lines going from ten to eleven syllables and vice versa.

This Villanelle structure also provides a rigorous rhyme scheme with each triplet stanza having the structure ABA. So the first and third lines of all stanzas rhymed with “master” with the word “master” appearing four separate times. The repetition of this word specifically is significant because of how it advances the overall idea of getting over loss. To master something is to gain control of it or overcome it, and Bishop repeats thoroughly that the act of losing is easy to master. There are other words and ideas that are emphasized simply due to their position as the rhyming word in a line. Fluster, faster and disaster are all seemingly negative descriptors, however, in this context they become disclaimers dismissing the idea that the loss can really be that bad. The word “disaster” itself is present as the final word of three different stanzas. The fact that the two most repeated words are disaster and master conveys her theme of getting over disaster, even though all the examples she provides seem quite easy to overcome. The word disaster is present as to allow the reader to imagine more dire situations while the word master allows the same reader to associate those dire situations with a confidence to overcome due to their previous mental training with the less dire situations. The ideas as well as the severity of loss build throughout the poem and comes to a peak when the parallel structure is abandoned. It is quite interesting how Bishop writes “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” in the first line of the first stanza, then again in the third line of second and fourth stanzas, but in the sixth stanza she alters it to “the art of losing’s not too hard to master”. This places further emphasis on the phrase as it is altered just slightly and will stick out in the mind of the reader. This change is one of many that takes place in the sixth and final stanza where in this villanelle, the number of lines has increased by one. The stanza starts out with a pause represented by “­­” which emphasizes what follows “Even losing you”. This is the first real struggle that is truly consistent with the losses people are dealing with.

Bishop doesn’t spend much time in terms of number of lines discussing this dire situation, however, the change in structure places enough emphasis on this idea that it pulls it away from everything else and it becomes evident that this is the real heart of what Bishop is discussing in terms of loss. Overall this poem by Elizabeth Bishop speaks simply and truly of overcoming loss. It can be seen as encouragement for those who struggle to overcome loss, which is especially relevant in the time Bishop was writing, as there was so much loss in the world both financially due to the depression and physically due to illness and the world wars which just took place. Bishop seeks to provide advice and purely good vibes to help people get through tough times and realizing that everything will still be ok even though they have lost.