Literary Analysis Of Villanelle In One Art By Elizabeth Bishop

In the poem as seen throughout much of it the speaker uses sound and repetition heavily through the length of the poem. The poem itself is a mirror into the author, Elizabeth Bishop's, life and losses she's collected throughout her lifetime. Upon research into Bishop the poem can easily be seen as a autobiographical piece.In the poem the speaker confesses to losing “two cities, lovely ones” Bishop lost her husband to suicide some years prior to having written the poem. Many of the losses described in the poem are personal anecdotes straight from Bishops life. The poem casually denotes the losses experienced in Bishops life creating a casual and ironic tone throughout the length of the poem.

The main characters, Day and June have no reason to cross paths, until the day June's brother, Metias, is killed. Day becomes the most suspected killer. While Day is trying to make sure his family survives, June wants to kill whoever ended her brother,Metias's, death. As the story unravels its dizzying twist and turns, the two realize the reason they came together in the first place.

The spanish ballad, or romancero, is a form of poetry which, closely linked to the medieval epic, is passed down by word of mouth and open to interpretation by the performers and audience. The ballad “Romance de Moraima” (or yo me era mora Moraima) is a romancero fronterizo which is relatively brief, and follows the standard octosyllabic structure. The ballad contains the key feature of assonating units, yet does not strictly rhyme with one vowel, i.e. ‘a’ but varies between ‘a’, ‘o’, and a paragogic ‘e’.

Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, ‘Sonnet’ bears little resemblance to its namesake at first glance. Bishop plays with our expectations, molding the well-known sonnet form into something new. She transforms the meter and rhyme scheme of the sonnet to the point of metamorphosis, but she retains the skeletal structure of the form; fourteen lines broken down into the customary octave and sestet. Her invocation and subsequent subversion of the anticipated poetic form provide her with a baseline to branch off from and without that context, the structure would not have the same effect on the poem’s meaning.

This allusion plays an important role in helping reveal the theme of time and love. In addition, the poem has some rhyme and meter that add to the style in the poem. Firstly, there is a basic end rhymes with the AABB rhyme scheme. The lines are also made up of trochees and their are four sets of them. Trochaic tetrameter is the meter of the poem as well.

At this point in the poem, the speaker’s attitude toward loss is rather blasé due to the fact that the items she has misplaced holds no emotional attachment and can be replaced.

Elizabeth Bishop was born on February 9th, 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. When Bishop was an infant, her father died from kidney disease, which provoked her mother’s mental breakdown and removal to a Canadian asylum. After her mother’s admission, Bishop moved in with her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia, which became the setting for some of her future poems. Bishop was then taken back to live in Worcester with her father’s parents so that she could attend school in the United States. Bishop’s final move was in 1918, with her aunt and uncle outside Boston, where she lived until 1930, when she enrolled in Vassar College (Lombardi 6).

Elizabeth Bishop’s writings were influenced by the Post War era in which she lived. Post War America was a period directly after the end of World War II. A time when America was going through great economic expansions. This era focused on inventive and industrial expansion which greatly helped improve Middle America. Politically, socially and economically the Post War era changed the lives of many Americans.

Furthermore, the poem is a villanelle, meaning it consist 19 lines with five tercets and a final quatrain. The decasyllabic rhythm maintains the steady beat of a joint chant and a prayer. It also includes intricate rhythm scheme and two refrain lines that gets repeated over and over again throughout the poem. The echo in the refrain: “do not go gentle into that good night” magnifies the theme of the poem, which is courage and strength in the face of death (1). The repetition of the line also shows the poet’s imploring tone, as he earnestly pleads his father to live and fight as long as possible. From stanza two to stanza five, the speaker describes the valiant and praiseworthy behavior of many types of exemplary men— “wise men/ good men/ wild

Many people often live day to day by the saying, “fake it ‘til you make it,” due to lack of confidence in a forthcoming outcome. Having learned from past experiences, these individuals will repeat the phrase over and over, until they have subconsciously compelled themselves to believe that everything will indeed turn out all right. In the villanelle “One Art,” Elizabeth Bishop poses the notion of coping with loss as less complex than most make it out to be. Amidst her ironic explanation to the “art of losing,” the poet struggles with an internal conflict, deliberately suppressing her true emotions on the matter, in efforts to genuinely believe what she is claiming. Bishop delivers her “solution” through repetition, ambiguous diction, an anaphora,

In these short verses, Plath encloses the concept of life and death—in an alternation between sensory and visual perception—expressing the eternal dilemma that sees in contraposition what is visible through the physical eyes (somehow mechanical) and what can only be perceived at the sensorial level. Hence, the intangible or not visible represents a mere figment of one’s imagination. The scenario portrayed in the first stanza brings to mind that typical feeling of incredulity one perceives when awakening from a vivid dream realizes it was an illusory perception, a mere trick of one’s mind. Moreover, the author expresses the desires to exert a sort of control over the outer world by closing her eyes as if to reject a reality that appears to be overly alienating and constraining. The sense of confinement is also emphasized by the parenthesis of the second refrain, which reinforces the concept of doubt that pervades the narrator’s imaginary world where just torment and obsession lie. Indeed, for its rigid and repetitive formula, the poetic form of the villanelle finds a perfect application in Plath’s work, by recalling a

American poet and short story writer Elizabeth Bishop lived between February 8, 1911- October 6, 1979. She won many awards such as The Pulitzer Prize, The National Book award, and The Neustadt International Prize for literature in 1976. Bishop was said to work obsessively on her poems and would spend years perfecting them. Two out of the many poems she wrote were “One Art”( a poem about a woman who says we can master the art of losing), and “The Waiting Room” (A speaker describing her experience as a young girl reading the National Geographic magazine, taking place on February 1918). Elizabeth implicitly used the two poems to demonstrate how people are connected through their own vulnerability.

Her diction is strong, confident, and unweathering. In the second stanza, the speaker introduces the first item that isn’t difficult to lose and reminds readers of the daily life hassles of finding lost keys. This is the first example of something in life that is easily lost for her. She further backs it up her original statement by saying that their intent is “to be lost” (3), saying that things are meant to be lost, no matter what happens. She instructs the audience to “lose” and “accept” (4), which suggests that she has gone through loss before and it would be better to accept losing things since it would not hurt as much. She then instructs the audience to “practice” (7) losing, so her heart will not be crushed when the audience is accustomed to losing. By line 6, the speaker gets frantic. Her words become careless and the words take a sort of rhythm. She says “losing farther, losing faster”. The alliteration in this line emphasizes how much and how fast she has lost that it is in a place so unreachable at this point. She then loses “places, and names, and where it was [she] meant / to travel” (8-9). She lost more important things, but they were bearable.

Elizabeth Bishop, a dramatically different and thought provoking poet, brought into being a fresh and new style of poetry. Her poetry covered certain parts of her life in addition to giving the world chastised looks. In particular, “Sestina” aptly named for the stanza the poem takes form in, presents us with a haunting and austere outer look to a scene with a grandmother and her grandchild. Bishop employs imagery like tears and the theme of time to illustrate her own loss and despair by depicting two seemingly flat characters.

ANGUSTIAS: I find him distracted. He always talks to me as if his mind is on something else. If I ask him what’s wrong, he says: ‘We men have our own problems.’