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One Art Analysis Essay

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In Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, One Art, it displays the acceptance Bishop has for losing things. Each stanza the losses get more significant, until she finally displays the one thing she can’t accept losing. Elizabeth Bishop uses techniques such as verse form and repetition to display her feelings toward those losses. The poem starts off with Bishop stating that “losing isn’t hard to master.” Bishop, in this stanza, is being half hearted about losing items. She does this to allow the reader to believe that losing things is natural and doesn’t hold any significance. She starts off with items that have been commonly lost, like keys or time. The use of these items creates this sense of relatability, allowing the reader to feel that losing these …show more content…

The losses again in the beginning are basic, like names or places. However, Bishop begins to start becoming more personal in her next losses. She states that she “lost [her] mother’s watch.” This statement is personal because first it is her mother. No longer is it keys or names, but it is someone that she had relations to. Also, the fact that she owns her mother’s watch indicates it does have importance to her. The second to last stanza is now becoming more grand in terms of losses. Bishop claims that she “lost two cities, lovely ones. And vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.” Bishop’s use of hyperboles in this statement is to again outline the fact that she doesn’t care about losing them, that “it wasn’t a disaster.” The last stanza almost repeats the same line regarding about mastering loss, but only this time she can’t.Bishop uses a stair-like approach to the loss of different items in terms of importance to show the one thing that she couldn’t master: the loss of a loved one. The use of continents and cities in the previous stanza shows that Bishop doesn’t care about them as much as her lost loved one. She uses the word “too” to state that she can try to master this loss, but it may ultimately end in a disaster. Bishop can master the art of losing keys or names or continents, but none of those could prepare her to lose someone she

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