'One Art' Analysis Essay

The Villanelle ‘One art’ written by Elizabeth Bishop includes many stylistic elements and has deeper meanings than first noticed. Elizabeth Bishop had a harsh life when she was young. She lost her father when she was 8 months old and her mother was mentally ill in 1916. Bishop’s mother died in 1934 and Elizabeth Bishop used to write many writings about the time of her mother’s struggles. During her life as an American poet, she wrote many poems and short stories and ‘One Art’ is one of them. There are many parts of the poem to analyze and they are the purpose, language/format, and the meaning of the poem.

When someone writes any form of writing, there is always a meaning to it. So, there would be a meaning to ‘One Art’ written by Elizabeth Bishop. In one’s opinion, I think that this poem has two meanings to it. First of all, the first meaning might be that the speaker is trying to tell the audience of the poem how much she loves the ‘you’ in the poem. The line “Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love)” shows that. In addition in most poems, the first stanza and the last stanza are the places where the writer in makes his/her point. This fact shows that one of the points she wanted to make is to show how much she loves the ‘you’ the poem. Furthermore, the writer could have been trying to say if somebody loses something, that person might lose a bigger thing and wouldn’t be aware of it. The two lines “The art of losing isn’t hard to master;” and “to be lost that their loss is no disaster” shows the point which I think the writer made.

Not only does the meaning of the poem take great part in analyzing poetry but also the use of language is very important. The poem ‘One Art’ has a very unique tone. The poem is not a happy or a funny poem but it is a depressive and a negative poem. However, the tone that the writer used is a sarcastic tone. The poem doesn’t sound serious or depressing but it is more sarcastic. As said before, ‘One Art’ is a villanelle. A villanelle is a poem which consists 19 lines and it has 6 stanzas in total; the first 5 stanzas have 3 lines and the last stanza has 4 lines. The rhymes are repeated according to the refrains. The first line of the first stanza is repeated as the last line of the second and fourth stanzas. Like any other poems, this poem has also used poetic language such as enjambment, simile, image, and metaphors. Enjambment is used throughout the whole poem. Both image and metaphor are used at the same time. For example, on the second last stanza, it said “I lost two cities…” We don’t lose cities or continents it is a metaphor for something and also it is an image as we can picture the writer losing all these objects.

It was said that when someone writes any form of writing, there is a meaning to it. Similar to that line above, when someone writes any form of writing, there has to be an audience, the writer, and a purpose of writing. So, in the poem ‘One Art’ written by Bishop, there has to be an audience, the speaker and a purpose. In one’s opinion, I think the speaker is Bishop herself and the audience is her dead mother. Bishop’s mother died in 1934 when she was young so she used to write a lot of pieces about her mother. I think that this poem is also one of those pieces. The purpose of this poem could be that she is missing her mother and wants her back. In addition, Bishop showed in the poem how much she loved her mother saying even though I lose these (door keys, mother’s watch, three loved houses, two cities, two rivers and a continent), I can’t lose you.

In conclusion, there are in a poem, there are three parts to analyze and they are the purpose, writer and audience, the meaning of the poem and the language and the format of the poem. In this villanelle ‘One Art’ written by Elizabeth Bishop, one’s opinion was that this could be showing love to somebody and that somebody could be Bishop’s mother and that this poem made lots of use of image, enjambment, rhyme, simile and metaphors.