Literature
The form of 'One Art' is a version of the villanelle, which depends on limited rhymes - just two throughout the poem - and repeating final lines in the stanzas. Bishop stretches the strictures of the form by using half rhymes and changing the words of the repeated 'disaster' line. It could be argued that her difficulty in maintaining the form is mimetic of her difficulty in maintaining, her stance that 'loss is no disaster'. This interpretation could be confirmed by the final line, where the form and control of the poem is broken by the italicized parenthesis 'Write it'!
The ending is quite different from the poems's early stages, where the tone is almost flippant but as it moves from the loss of small things, like 'door keys', to more significant items like 'my mother's watch', the tone becomes less certain. In the personal last stanza, addressed to the lost loved one and introduced by a hesitant hyphen, the voice of the poem has lost its conviction.
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Literature
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop Summary
One Art
Born in 1911, Elizabeth Bishop had a turbulent childhood, her father dying in her first year of life, while her mother suffered from mental illness and was committed to an institution when Elizabeth was five. She was never to see her mother again, and lived first with her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia, then her paternal grandparents in Massachusetts. After graduating from Vassar College, she traveled widely and influences from her travels can often be found in her poetry. Although her output of poetry was relatively small, she was a perfectionist who spent a long time revising and perfecting her poems. The qualities of her work were recognized by the award of the Pulitzer Prize and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She died in 1979.The form of 'One Art' is a version of the villanelle, which depends on limited rhymes - just two throughout the poem - and repeating final lines in the stanzas. Bishop stretches the strictures of the form by using half rhymes and changing the words of the repeated 'disaster' line. It could be argued that her difficulty in maintaining the form is mimetic of her difficulty in maintaining, her stance that 'loss is no disaster'. This interpretation could be confirmed by the final line, where the form and control of the poem is broken by the italicized parenthesis 'Write it'!
The ending is quite different from the poems's early stages, where the tone is almost flippant but as it moves from the loss of small things, like 'door keys', to more significant items like 'my mother's watch', the tone becomes less certain. In the personal last stanza, addressed to the lost loved one and introduced by a hesitant hyphen, the voice of the poem has lost its conviction.
by Elizabeth Bishop
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