One Art

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.

About Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop (1911 -1979), regarded as one of the greatest modern American poet whose work often express themes of loss and the struggle to find one’s place in the world. Not a prolific poet, Bishop wrote only 110 poems but took great care in conceiving each one, often rewriting and revising them many times before publishing them. “One Art” is perhaps her best-known poem, one of the modern “classics” in any poetry anthology. Bishop received many awards for her work, including the Pulitzer Prize. In his 2015 book, On Elizabeth Bishop, Irish author, Colm Toibin introduced her work thus:

“Writing, for Elizabeth Bishop, was not self-expression, but there was a self somewhere, and it was insistent in its presence yet tactful and watchful. Bishops writing bore the marks, many of them deliberate, of much re-writing, of things that had been said, but had now been erased, or moved into the shadows. Things measured and found too simple and obvious, or too loose in their emotional contours, or too philosophical, were removed. Words not true enough were cut away. What remained was then of value, but mildly so; it was as much as could be said, given the constraints. This great modesty was also, in its way, a restrained but serious ambition … In the poetics of her uncertainty … there was something hurt and solitary.”