Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
"One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop (1976)
I am currently 7 days into a 10-day language intensive that takes place at a holiday camp in Drenthe. We have 3 hours and 45 minutes of lessons each morning, followed by lunch (in Dutch) and then 2-3 hours of homework (mostly videos on grammar), and then an evening event (you guessed it, in Dutch). My mind is soep. As I type I find myself moving words around, swapping out Nederlandse woorden, making inversies. And singsonging this line from Elizabeth Bishop (1911 - 1979), because more often than I’d like, the word I memorized doesn’t come back to me when needed:
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
ACCEPT THE FLUSTER.1
This line is the pivot of a villanelle on loss that was first published in the New Yorker in 1976. Bishop included this poem in the collection Geography III (1977), which includes the other crowd favorite, “In the Waiting Room.” These poems were written toward the end of her exceptional career, laden with awards and titles.“One Art” has a happy rhythm and a confident tone — and it has a refrain that sounds like a running gag on the many meanings of the verb “to lose.” (verliezen) But you should know before you start that this poem is a heartbreaker.
The villanelle is like a complex weaving, with lines and rhymes that repeat in a strict order. This poetic form draws its inspiration from songs, and so, like many songs that tell stories, it has a refrain and repeated lines and rhythms. Another villanelle you might have heard before is “Do not go gentle into that good night” by Dylan Thomas: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” If you only know these two villanelles (and they are both about grief) then you are well provisioned.
Here’s how they work:
You get 5 stanzas, each 3 lines long (aka tercets), and a closer consisting of 4 lines (quatrain) for a total of 19 lines.
From here, the villanelle is all about repetition. The first line (in yellow highlighter) repeats as the ending line of stanzas 2 & 4, and in the 3rd line of the closer. The third line (in green) repeats as the ending of stanzas 1, 3, and 5 and in the closing position of the poem. The green line, the one about disaster, develops and takes different forms in Bishop’s poem.
Here is the first stanza:
The art of losing isn’t hard to master; (REPEATING LINE # 1)
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster. (REPEATING LINE #2)
Since these 2 (yellow/green) lines are all repeating at least once in each stanza, the rhyme scheme also repeats. Master—disaster turns into all the rhymes that are marked in green highlighter. The last quatrain ends in this key couplet. The ones that are a bit slant rhym-ey “fluster” “last, or” I’ve marked in blue.
Okay, to keep things complex — the center line of all the tercets must also rhyme (in pink.)
This is the form of an experienced poet on a closed course. Do not attempt.
Even though “One Art” is written in a mathematical, understated, and formal style, it uses causal diction, advice lingo, second person address and imperatives, and even jokes — “my last, or next-to-last, home.” It was Bishop’s first and only villanelle and, I might as well come right out and say it: it is one of the best that was ever written.
Many villanelles use a key line as a title, but not this one. Instead, we get “One Art” which I have always read as a key, one that unlocks the whole concept. Like one of her hero poets, Emily Dickinson, this poem aims to make an interior, individual and subjective experience, into an objective one. Here the key concept is loss: first lost things and keys give us the idea of losing exterior things. Then lost time, then lost places, names — we are starting to get more interior, more like forgetting than losing — and then lost heirlooms, precious things, homes. The poem takes us from the exterior (keys, things) to the mind (forgotten places, names) to the emotions (missing treasures, former homes) and finally, the quatrain: losing the person we love—the loss that all this practice has been for.
The closing quatrain has both the key lines and the center rhymes, so it invites a sense of closure to the poem, and Bishop asks us to consider turning the key when we get there. One art. Losing is losing is losing.
So what is the art of losing? Can we try to learn how to do it? The poet gives us an imperative to practice it:
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.
Start out on the small things, so that you learn, through practice, that it isn’t the end of the world to lose tangible things. And it isn’t the end of the world to forget things, either. Then, she seems to say, when the bigger things come to be lost, as they always are, then, perhaps, you will remember: ONE ART. Loss is no disaster. Is it true?
The poem cracks open at the end.
—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.
First, there is the dash— a pause, a consideration — something that requires offsetting in type: the loss of her beloved person. What the speaker says next is impossible to parse. It could mean:
It is taboo to say it out loud, and it might not be true: It may look like disaster, but even losing you, it turns out, is not too hard.
To read it this way, look at the end, where the poet appears to hand control of the poem over to the villanelle. According to the form, her poem must end with the word “disaster.” The parenthetical (Write it!) imperative says she has to do it — she has to say this lie aloud, even though she doesn’t want to. We are in the same timezone as the poet for a moment. She has written her way all the way to the end, and now has to say: even that loss was not really a disaster — it just looks that way.
I call Bullshit.
Because we can also read this quatrain as: I have mastered the art of losing, as evidenced by the fact that I have lost you. I miss you more than continents.
I have mastered the art of losing, and yet, I still lost you.
Bishop didn’t write confessionally, as many other poets of her generation did (and the next, and the next). She aims for more universal stuff made up of the personal details. Scholarship has analyzed the 17 extant drafts of this poem (held at her alma mater Vassar College), against the biographical information that we have from the letters, released in 2009. (Megan Marshall wrote a biography based on this material in 2017, you can also see an interactive selection of the drafts in this close reading by The New York Times).
The drafts of “One Art” start out prose-y and dedicated to the blue-eyed Alice, from whom she was then separated. Each subsequent draft is more constrained than the last; they all contain the line: “the art of losing isn’t difficult to master.” The letter that accompanies them includes the word “disaster.” All the drafts are composed in two weeks. Here is the first draft of the ending:
That said, we see in the earlier drafts that this poem comes from someone well acquainted with loss. She lost her first wife to suicide — and she was separated from her partner Alice when the poem was written. She lost her mother to mental illness. She was losing ground to alcoholism. Knowing the biography makes the poem more devastating, right? Mucking about in Bishop’s personal life does not reduce the universality of the poem, but it does help us to decide if the self-assured tone of the poem is for reals.
No, she was writing from inside a disaster, and the form contains it, like a storm in a teacup.
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the verb fluisteren does not mean fluster. It means whisper, which is its own kind of poem, don’t you think?