One Art Flashcards
One Art
Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop
1911-19
Dad died at 8 months
Mum became mentally ill and move to asylum
Ill as a child so missed out on a lot of school
Speaker
Very experienced speaker
Caught in a pensive moment which reminds her of the things that she’s lost
Tries to keep herself positive by telling herself none of it is as bad as it seems
Can still feel her bitterness through the facade
Disorientation of the Speaker
Places very small and insignificant things next to huge ones in her mind, overall the effect contributes to the overwhelming build up of lost objects
Themes
Loss
Love
Mourning
Memories and time
Language
Simple, familiar
Colloquial
Material Objects
Starts of losing very small unimportant material possessions
We see by the end that the loss of simple objects, like a key or a watch, becomes an extended metaphor for the loss of other things the poet loves, and she portrays them as losing practice
“Seem filled with the intent to be lost”
Personifies the possessions claiming they want to be lost
“Lost door keys, the hour badly spent”
Here the speaker first draws a link between the material possessions anymore abstract things like time
Proves she views time and possessions as one and the same
“I lost my mother’s watch”
Although still a material possession, this is the introduction of emotional connections to objects
We can be sure the watch is a symbol of the relationship between her and her mother
Homes and places
Loss of homes and places ups the ante leading into the most powerful final stanza
Size of loss increases
All of a sudden, we’re not just talking about misplaced material goods. Now we’re thinking more abstractly about the things of emotional value that we lose.
“My last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went”
Introduces greater loss
Very hard to physically loss houses, so suggest the emotional attachment
“I lost two cities”
Again it’s impossible to lose cities so the speaker is thinking about her emotional connection with them
While she may have lived in them and moved, there is a strong suggestion she using them to symbolise, memories and perhaps relationships she held in different locations
“The art of losing”
Throughout the poem losing is portrayed as an Art
Suggests practice makes perfect
However never truly an art we can master as despite her practice, she’s still not a master despite what she thinks
“Lose something every day”
The speakers ironic command suggests that we should practice losing small things to make the bigger losses easier
If we lose enough small things, it will be easy to lose the smaller things
“Though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster”
Makes us very aware of the poem being written by a poet who’s telling us of her experiences
Shows us she still has difficulty admitting the pain of her lose even to herself
“Realms” “Rivers” “Continents”
While she’s asserting herself “it wasn’t a disaster”
However these suggest the scale of her loss
Structure
Villanelle, a poem with 19 lines, 5 tercets and 1 final quatrain,
Only two rhymes (a) or (b), (master) or (intent)
Meant to be 2 refrains (lines repeated several times) However Bishop only uses one (the art of losing isn’t hard to master) which is only slightly modified in line 18 showing the pain she suffers
Loosely in iambic pentameter however occasionally has 11 syllables a line
What does the structure show?
Even though the villanelle form is very strict, Bishop manages to keep a colloquial flow
By choosing a form of poetry which must follow strict rules, while writing about very raw and powerful emotion, Bishop is trying to show her mastery of the emotion of loss - the subject matter of the poem.
