Elizabeth Bishop's One Art and The Waiting Room Essays

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.

Realized or not, it is in the innate nature of humans to fear something that they are unfamiliar with. A surgeon fears his first time in the operating room. An expecting mother is apprehensive of her first delivery. A new student is trepid about his first day at a new school. The fear of the unknown has for long defined and constrained the boundaries of societies and the actions of man, and has been, is, and will continue to shape and affect our decisions. Fear of the unknown creates, promotes, and maintains paranoia and disunity in a community in times of crisis.

She describes their movement as aimless, and careless because of their lack of motivation to struggle on, seeing life as “ought” or nothing compared to what it once was before the loss. The reader can imagine being in the position of the sufferer; very stagnant, and lifeless almost like a corpse which is what makes this form of diction so evoking.

Fear of the unknown, and fear of what is to come in our lives, has generations of people wondering what will our lives be like tomorrow or the next day. Death is always there and we cannot escape it. Death is a scary thing. Our own mortality or the mortality of our loved ones scares us to the point that we sometime cannot control how we are dealing with such a thing as the thought of death. Why do we fear such a thing as death? We don’t know what happens after we don’t how it feels. The fear of death is different for most but it is most certain to come and we cannot hide from it. For death is just around the corner and maybe it’s will come tomorrow or the next day! We fear not death but the unknown that comes from death, that is the scariest thing about death.

Published in 1997, Marie Howe’s anthology of poems, What the Living Do was written as an elegy to her brother, John, who passed away due to AIDS. Howe’s anthology is written without metaphor to document the loss she felt after her brother’s death. Although What the Living Do is written as an anthology, this collection allows for individual poems to stand alone but also to work together to tell an overarching story. Using the poetic devices of alliteration, enjambment, repetition and couplets, Howe furthers her themes of gender and loss throughout her poems in her anthology.

Amy Olson and Anne Sexton use their skills to create a sense of lose to the readers. I found that the symbolism in both poems helps to reinforce the key ideas of loss and grief. Both the Knitting and the Abortion is slightly different from the idea that the Knitting, the narrator attempts to create the idea that a woman did not mean to kill the child, while in the Abortion, the woman feels guilty that chose to kill the child. However, they both are encouraged by the elements of depth of emotion, a deep sadness and sense of loss. Furthermore, The readers are led to understand that in real life can be loosing to end on, hopelessness, and sadness. Even though I found the themes and the symbols of the poems are difficult to understand but it was

Author H. P. Lovecraft once told, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” It is human nature to seek and discover the unknown, to claim it and tame it as to our liking. We look past the dangers and warning signs, forget about fear and logic, until we have been able to reestablish control. Only then are we able to feel safe and secure – only when we have every single, useless to life changing, aspect of our lives under our control – but once this control is lost, it is a fight to the death to once again restore the order and peace.

The poem,“In the Waiting Room” shown within Elizabeth Bishop’s book The Complete Poems 1927-1979 is an engaging and descriptive poem about a child’s self-coming into adulthood. Elizabeth, the child, narrates the story from her point of view, reading the National Geographic while waiting for Aunt Consuelo to be finished with her appointment. The National Geographic however, is a gateway which portrays Elizabeth’s adult side, showing her as a child what is to come as she grows older. Aunt Consuelo and those within the waiting room during the time when Elizabeth looks around adds on to this point, making her ask more questions about her own name, as well as her becoming like her Aunt. Which started with her picking up and flipping through, the yellow margins of the National Geographic.

In contrast with Bishop’s poem “One Art, ” the author does a perfect job negating the impact the feeling of loss has in a person. All throughout the poem Bishop tries to convince herself that losing is part of life. Her argumentations are irrational in some sense, with her tone she is trying to be indifferent to what she is feeling deep inside. In the last stanza, she changes her tone and admits that losing the beloved has a profound effect and brings disaster to her soul.

There are a lot of talented poets, especially Elizabeth Bishop. Elizabeth was born in Worchester, Massachusetts on 1911. Bishop family died when she was young. Later on she died in 1979. Bishop wrote a poem called Filling Station. In this poem it talks about a woman, who might had been the writer, entered into a filling station in a small town. As she was waiting she describes how filthy the place was. In this essay I’m talking about the description of the station, describes how a family was living there, and literary elements that were used.

To begin with, the ghastly diction in the poem “One Art” reveals the author's purpose of a sense of atrophy towards social communication. In the first stanza, Elizabeth Bishop introduces the dejection faced when one is left abandoned and through the repetitive disregard of things a person is able to detach the feelings for human sympathy. “The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seemed filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster”. Universal ties to heartfelt memories and experiences enhance difficult periods of necessary closure, especially when some view attachment as ignorance simply considering the eventual outcome.

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.

Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath explore the dangers of losing their individual-self in their poems I felt a funeral in my brain and The arrival of the bee box. They portray that lack of power makes them feel helpless to a point where they cannot control their minds. Both Dickinson and Plath use poetry as an emotional release for their troubled minds, demonstrating their descend into madness. Dickinson repeats certain words in a rhythmic pacing to highlight what she feels. She constructs images of a funeral with “mourners to and fro.”

In simpler terms, one may have the fear that one day their new lover may end up leaving them. As every relationship grows, the bond between the two people grows, as well. This makes it harder for them to drift apart. However, in simplest terms, everyone eventually dies. Therefore, in the end, one partner will eventually be alone after their significant other has passed on. Along with the fear of death, there is the fear that a new partner may eventually leave. This can be shown in a real life example from an interview with my grandmother’s ex-husband, who left her and her three kids nearly thirty years ago. Even though she will not admit that it still affects her, I’ve personally seen that it does. As for my grandmother, this example of abandonment from her ex-husband has a substantial impact on why she has no desire in starting a new relationship since she has the fear that abandonment could occur once again. Therefore, existential fears such as the death of a partner or the possibility of abandonment, play a major role and can cause

of fear is fear of the unknown. Therefore, it makes sense that if mortals cannot bear the