The Shed Notebook: One Art

Moving from childhood into puberty, then on to adulthood frames a timeline of losses. A loss of a first tooth, a bicycle key, or the first dollar earned. Between the bookends of puberty is the loss of first love, which may seem like the end of the world. Growing older loss may include a favorite sweater, a much needed assignment, a faded photograph. Pets fill in painful spaces of loss. In this timeline of loss there are people. Young children, a childhood friend, an elderly family friend, grandma, then parents. 

Until my mother died, I read this poem with a whole different meaning. For me, the art of losing is very hard to master.

One Art

BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” from The Complete Poems 1926-1979. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC.

Source: The Complete Poems 1926-1979 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983)