Disaster In One Art

“One Art” is a villanelle filled with sad sentiments of encouragement towards accepting loss. Elizabeth Bishop uses her tone to pull emotions from the reader that could be confusion and disagreement. Her tone deeply impacts the reader in such a way that it causes him/her to seriously think of accepting her opinion and advice. The capturing way she uses her tone in her word choice shows the reader her natural inflexion when she speaks. The tone of her work even affects her characterization. In “One Art,” Elizabeth Bishop uses tone to convey a character of false casualty, while also using it to emphasize the very heavy impact of her diction.

In the story, the painter loves his art more than he loves his wife, and while the wife feels that art is a rival that she will never be able to beat, she agrees to let her beloved portray her but the painter is unaware that with each brushstroke he makes, he gives life to the painting and takes away life from his wife and upon placing the painting on the canvas, his wife dies. The irony of the story is that the painter loves his art so much that he doesn’t realize that his wife slowly slips away into oblivion while he makes his masterpiece. This story is "saturated with elements which refer to the sensorial world . . . . [and] nonverbal signs . . ."(Anspach, Silvia Simone. "Poe's Pictoric Writing." Estudos Anglo-Americanos 9-11 1985-1987: 17-28.)

In literature, themes shape and characterize an author’s writing making each work unique as different points of view are expressed within a writing’s words and sentences. This is the case, for example, of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee” and Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not stop for Death.” Both poems focus on the same theme of death, but while Poe’s poem reflects that death is an atrocious event because of the suffering and struggle that it provokes, Dickinson’s poem reflects that death is humane and that it should not be feared as it is inevitable. The two poems have both similarities and differences, and the themes and characteristics of each poem can be explained by the author’s influences and lives.

Unlike other forms of literature, poetry can be so complex that everyone who reads it may see something different. Two poets who are world renowned for their ability to transform reader’s perceptions with the mere use of words, are TS Eliot and Walt Whitman. “The love song of J Alfred Prufrock” by TS Eliot, tells the story of a man who is in love and contemplating confessing his emotions, but his debilitating fear of rejection stops him from going through with it. This poem skews the reader’s expectations of a love song and takes a critical perspective of love while showing all the damaging emotions that come with it. “Song of myself”, by Walt Whitman provokes a different emotion, one of joy and self-discovery. This poem focuses more on the soul and how it relates to the body. “Song of myself” and “The love song of J Alfred Prufrock” both explore the common theme of how the different perceptions of the soul and body can affect the way the speaker views themselves, others, and the world around them.

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop is a poem that explores loss in comparison to an art; however, this art is not one to be envied or sought after to succeed at. Everyone has experienced loss as the art of losing is presented as inevitably simple to master. The speaker’s attitude toward loss becomes gradually more serious as the poem progresses.

However, the poem has fluidity despite its apparent scarcity of rhyme. After examining the alteration of syllables in each line, a pattern is revealed in this poem concerning darkness. The first nine lines alternate between 8 and 6 syllables. These lines are concerned, as any narrative is, with exposition. These lines set up darkness as an internal conflict to come. The conflict intensifies in lines 10 and 11 as we are bombarded by an explosion of 8 syllables in each line. These lines present the conflict within one's own mind at its most desperate. After this climax, the syllables in the last nine lines resolve the conflict presented. In these lines, Dickinson presents us with an archetypal figure that is faced with a conflict: the “bravest” hero. These lines present the resolution in lines that alternate between 6 and 7 syllables. Just as the syllables decrease, the falling action presents us with a final insight. This insight discusses how darkness is an insurmountable entity that, like the hero, we must face to continue “straight” through “Life” (line 20).

Losing things is a part of life. It happens no matter how big or small you are. It happens and people accept it and move on, The poem, “One Art,” by Elizabeth Bishop is a very famous Villanelle poem that talks about all of that. It is about how losing things is simple, even if it seems to be a disaster. Villanelle is a very unique form of poetry that was created during the renaissance. Throughout the years it has developed into a more complicated form of poetry. Many poets use it to for rustic or pastoral themes, but bishop uses it for a whole different type of theme.

Poetry has a role in society, not only to serve as part of the aesthetics or of the arts. It also gives us a view of what the society is in the context of when it was written and what the author is trying to express through words. The words as a tool in poetry may seem ordinary when used in ordinary circumstance. Yet, these words can hold more emotion and thought, however brief it was presented.

Michael Ryan’s villanelle, Self-Help, follows the typical villanelle style with 19 lines, including five terrets and a quatrain. The main storyline follows the speaker who is reprimanding a woman for blindly falling for a man, only seeing the good in him and being naive with her marriage. With the first and third lines stating, “What kind of delusion are you under?” (1) and “You see the lightning but not the thunder” (3) repeating, it emphases an obsessive thought, as if a haunting motif is spread throughout, where the author doesn’t understand the protagonist’s thoughts or actions. Through the use of assonance and consonance, such as “hath” (4) and rat (5), “crown them” (11) and “baseball bat” (11), the author uses repetition to set the mood of the poem in a negative light— setting a certain tone. Even the title Self-Help is the author’s way of communication they’re done trying to help the protagonist and it’s time for that person to reflect themselves and take care of their situation.

Throughout history writers, poets, and artists often observe the world and communicate what they see through their works. This is especially true in the apocalyptic narratives. Apocalyptic texts are often written from a context of oppression and despair, and reveal a hidden message to the reader that is obscured through symbolism and imagery. This is true for the poems “London” by William Blake and “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats. “London” was written during the French Revolution and “The Second Coming” was written during the aftermath of World War I.

In the beginning of the poem “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop; she takes a lighter tone in the loss of a loved one as she exclaims “the art of losing isn’t hard to master.” (Bishop, 6) Our lives are filled with things that are lost but don’t cause disaster, for example, the “lost of door keys, the hour badly spent.” (Bishop 5) The poem has great reputation rhyme with six stanzas. Bishop used villanelle form as every line rhymes with either master or intent, and within each stanza the word ‘master” or “disaster” is in it. As you read the poem the tone of the poem gets more intense as she states “I lost two cities, lovely ones” (Bishop 13) “but is wasn’t a disaster” (Bishop 15) in the fifth stanza. Then later in the final stanza

“Without thinking at all/I was my foolish aunt.”(48-49) , In “One Art” Elizabeth compares herself to her aunt. When her aunt cried out from the dentist office she felt her as a fullish women, but because she is reacting In a similar way to the magazine, she compares her aunts foolishness to her own. It was an unexpected realization that her reactions connected her to her aunt in a way she never felt before in her six years. “Lose something everyday. Accept the fluster/of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.”(48-49), The speaker wants to show us that theres nothing you can do but to accept you will lose things and to not let it get to you. In the poem her losses begin as insignificant objects that can be replaced but then she escalates her poem by significant losses like people, places, and homes. Its as if shes telling you to accept it, but she implicitly is showing us that shes not over her losses. She wants everyone to believe shes fine but we as the readers are not buying it.

The most prominent quality of Elizabeth Bishop’s, “One Art,” remains the concise organization and rhyme scheme of the poem, which amazingly keeps the audience informed at all times what the theme. Her choice of a villanelle constantly reminds the audience that “the art of losing” always seem easy until one loses something so much more than an inanimate object and at the point, it does become a “disaster.” Written in 1976, the poem is very modern and uses an impeccable rhyme scheme, diction, and imagery to convey the hints of misery and frantic the speaker feels.

Another work, Death in Venice, written in 1912 by Thomas Mann, is ironic in its storytelling regarding how death and beauty are, at times, linked. Much of the story revolves around the main character’s association between art, beauty, and death. It is interesting to note that the main character views the young boy he falls in love with as an exquisite work of art. He sees the boy as exuding youth and perfection, yet the reality is that the main character is weak and sickly. The belief the main character holds that youth, art, and beauty are the divine keys to life are ironic in that, again, the reality is that humans are mortal and death is inevitable, regardless of the beliefs an individual holds.

Stevens makes this fact apparent from the beginning of the poem, when he notes not only “human revery” but also “the sexual myth” and the “poem of death” (1). Therefore, these defined formulations are only categories of a greater whole, which remains unmentioned in the poem. In deliberating on Stevens’s poems, we can come to understand this encompassing whole as the imagination, which impels an individual to make “eccentric propositions” about his or her life and fate (4-5, 10).