no disaster

Another surprise - this time, that this poem did not make it to this blog any earlier. I've always loved it.


Here's a comment I adapted from the Wondering Minstrels site.

"I think loss works pretty darn well in verse. And I'm also certain Elizabeth Bishop understood all this. Perhaps better than she might have cared to. There is a courageous pretense built into this poem that I like. Bishop is wry, funny and flippant and very determined not to sound weepy-eyed. The fierce repetition of the line "the art of losing's not hard to master" makes you wonder how far and fast she's had to lose. To me Bishop is valiantly attempting to make believe for a while that the experience of loss may be impersonalised into perfection by practising it as an art, in the form of a villanelle, no less. That she succeeds in convincing neither herself nor her reader, hurts her verse not the least."

- Pavithra Krishnan


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One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.


(Elizabeth Bishop)
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